Ashoka University

Shantanu Nevrekar is a sociocultural anthropologist with research interests spanning across economic and political anthropology, histories of capitalism and the economy, colonialism and postcolonialism, and caste studies. His prospective book project, Capitalism and the Spirit of Caste: Community, Value, and Hierarchy in India, explores the processes through which hierarchies and deeply stratified worlds constitute value and capital in contemporary India. For this, the book draws on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork with urban credit cooperatives in the town of Ahmednagar in the Indian state of Maharashtra. Cooperatives are associations based on the principles of membership and collective ownership. In urban India, especially in Maharashtra, credit cooperatives have been central to the consolidation of caste-based merchant capitalism. The book explores cooperatives as an ethnographic site to examine the moral and economic processes through which caste becomes the basis of capital accumulation, and the implications that this has for our understanding of both capitalism and community. His research has been supported by the institutions like the Social Science Research Council and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Shantanu has received a PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University in 2026.