Spotlight on PACS PhD Fellows: Shantanu Nevrekar

At Stanford PACS, we believe that rigorous, interdisciplinary research is essential to understanding and shaping the evolving role of civil society. Through our PhD Fellowship Program, we support outstanding young scholars at Stanford who are pursuing research that pushes the boundaries of knowledge in philanthropy, social impact, democracy, digital society, and beyond.

Each year, we welcome a cohort of students from diverse disciplines, providing them with funding, mentorship, and an intellectual community where they can refine their research and contribute to critical conversations. Over the years, PACS Fellows have gone on to produce groundbreaking work, shaping academic and public discourse on some of today’s most pressing societal challenges.

Through this monthly series, we highlight the incredible work of our PhD Fellows—sharing their insights, research journeys, and the impact they hope to make. By investing in these scholars, PACS aims to strengthen the pipeline of researchers committed to understanding and improving civil society. We invite you to learn more about their work and join us in celebrating the next generation of thought leaders driving meaningful change.

This month, we asked Shantanu Nevrekar, PhD candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at Stanford, to share insights into his research on credit cooperatives and the intersection of caste and the economy in India, his fieldwork experiences, and the broader implications of his work for civil society and economic structures.

Could you tell us about your research project and what motivated you to pursue this research topic? 

I am broadly interested in the intersecting lives of caste and the economy in India. Towards this, I conducted an ethnography of credit cooperatives in the state of Maharashtra in India. Equivalent to credit unions in the United States, they are institutions that are exclusively governed and used by their members/shareholders. In India, they have historically been integral to projects of upliftment and development initiated not only by the state but also by various castes. My research inquires into how credit cooperatives negotiate caste, occupation, and identity in contemporary India.

I grew up in India at a time of immense transformation—a growing economy amidst rising economic inequality, intensifying Hindu majoritarianism, and a political shift towards an increasingly illiberal democracy. At a time when a growing economy was taken as a sign of India’s arrival as a global power, state as well as elite urban discourse on caste had written it off as a premodern remnant, something that “happens only in the villages,” and which was not so significant to the story of a new India anymore. However, unlike what these big narratives say, caste continues to shape the social worlds and life chances of people across the Indian subcontinent. Speaking to this, I wanted to emphasize the continuing significance of caste to the economy in India. It was this aim that ultimately led me to my current research topic. 

How does your research help address real-world challenges related to civil society or philanthropy and contribute to advancements in your field?

Credit cooperatives have been extremely vibrant and dynamic components of Indian civil society. They have been instrumental in weakening the monopolistic hold of moneylenders on credit in many parts of rural India, while also offering people in urban India an alternative to banks. However, they are widely looked down upon as corrupt and failed, apparently due to the use of ‘improper’ economic practices. But they are not alone in doing this; much of India’s economy at all levels operates outside the scope of formal rules and organizations. However, it is also true that there are real problems with cooperatives, particularly in how they reinforce the power of a male social elite in India. In conducting an honest analysis of these cooperatives within the broader political economy, I hope to emphasize their importance while also not undermining the real problems with the way they operate. 

Amongst some scholars, and in many popular conversations too, civil society in India has been criticized as being dominated by upper caste elites. This is often seen in opposition to a state that has increasingly become more representative of the non-upper caste majority of India. While it is true that civil society continues to be dominated by elites, the binaries made between the political character of the state and civil society are reductive, and I want to use caste as an analytical framework to bridge this divide. In anthropology, caste has been primarily understood through its religious basis. Scholarship in the past few decades has sought to move beyond that to examine how politics and state practices are formative of caste. However, there has not been a sufficient study of the economic practices and inequalities that consolidate caste. In my project, I want to propose new understandings of state, civil society, and caste.

What is one unique or important thing you want others to know about your research?

For my research, I conducted 15 months of long-term ethnographic fieldwork between October 2022 and December 2023 in a town in Western India called Ahmednagar. Data from this fieldwork includes 66 interviews, alongside conversations, notes on observations, textual data like reports and legal documents, as well as photos and videos. While a major part of my fieldwork was conducted with four credit cooperatives in Ahmednagar, a part of it happened in an agricultural market centrally situated in the town, where farmers and traders from neighboring villages would come to trade. Two of the credit cooperatives I worked with were situated in this market. One was used by the merchants who had shops in this market, while the other was utilized by workers who did much of the manual labor necessary to run the market. While fieldwork was a satisfying and transformatory experience, doing it in the middle of a record heatwave was a particularly demanding phase of my fieldwork.

Tell us a little about your interests outside of graduate school. If you weren’t in graduate school, what would you be doing? 

I like going on hikes as well as long walks in the city! I am also an avid cook, so in addition to everyday cooking, I occasionally like to experiment with food and try making new but simple dishes. I occasionally read sci-fi and love the genre (when I am able to do some light reading outside of reading for my PhD, of course). I also take an active interest in community organizing around issues that mean a lot to me. Most recently, I was a member of the bargaining committee and the interim grievance committee at the Stanford Graduate Workers’ Union.

If I were not in grad school or academia, I would have been a journalist. I see similarities in form between ethnographic writing and long-form journalism. But there are also other similarities—both academia and journalism sound fun, but involve difficult work for low pay, have steep career pyramids, and require immense motivation. The degrees of difficulty and danger, though, are far more for journalists. I am forever in awe of what good journalism is capable of doing!

Learn more about Shantanu and his work.