In the article “The affect of Jugaad: Frugal innovation and postcolonial practice in India’s mobile phone ecology“, which appears in the current issue of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space and is free to access until 16 January 2016, Amit S. Rai examines the Indian form of workaround called ‘jugaad’ to explore how affect is produced through consumer services and goods to modulate human–technical assemblages for commercial and economic ends. The text below is offered as a supplement to the article by Rai as well as Anisha Saigal and Shiva Thorat, two other researchers working on the project from which the article stems.
The social practice of everyday hacking, digital and mobile workarounds, information piracy, illegal copying and sharing—in a word, jugaad culture—is an increasing feature of post-liberalisation India. But it has a history that must be understood as always involving repeatedly forgotten experiments in techno-perceptual assemblages. This history is marked by regimes of surplus accumulation that over time have effected a seemingly permanent separation of the body from what it can do. Our research into jugaad returns to this question of affect by situating social practices that remain untimely to the regimes of neoliberal development, enforced austerity and perpetual debt. What makes the contemporary moment jugaad time? This is as much a question of the growing Hindu chauvinism vitiating political and social life under Modi (but begun long before him)— what are Modi’s jugaads?—as it is a question of untimely politics. The social practice of jugaad traverses traditional class, caste, gender, and ablist norms of identity, yet while many people practice jugaad, not everyone can openly lay claim to it as some sort of heroic script of emergent power. Indeed, jugaad’s history has been and tactically must remain hidden; for the millions of jugaadu, visibility is a trap.
The reflections on the developing research practice of jugaad highlight several aspects of the social phenomenon in India; the photos present another kind of problem. Partly this problem has to do with representation. How, through what fetishes, codes, contrasts, and analogies, have images of jugaad proliferated in Digital India? Indeed, what images of jugaad in urban contexts point to is a heterogeneous mix of politics, rhythms, resources, infrastructures, and temporalities. The images themselves present contrasts, new connections, makeshift infrastructures that strike the eye at first as a hallucination: that doesn’t belong with that. This tactic of novel conjunctures allows jugaadus to develop improvised responses to material conditions of inequality.
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