THE AFFECT OF JUGAAD

"Frugal Innovation" and the Workaround Ecologies of Postcolonial Practice

The event in the strong sense of the word is therefore always a surprise, something which takes possession of us in an unforeseen manner, without warning, and which brings us towards an unanticipated future. — F. DASTUR, Phenomenology of the Event

Jugaad innovators ... constantly employ flexible thinking and action in response to the seemingly insurmountable problems they face in their economies: they are constantly experimenting and improvising solutions for the obstacles they face, and adapting their strategies to new contingencies as they arise. ... The sheer diversity, volatility, and unpredictability of economic life in emerging markets demands flexibility on the part of jugaad innovators. It demands that they think outside of the box, experiment, and improvise: they must either adapt or die. — N. RADJOU, J. PRABHU, and S. AHUJA, Jugaad Innovation

Introduction: Improvisation and Contingency, or the Affect of Jugaad

This chapter engages the ongoing conversation around piracy in postcolonial media studies and social geography across three areas. First, focusing on the ecological processes of the social practice of jugaad (workaround), I show how its strategic deployment, production of time-spaces, and digital media assemblages habituate heterogeneous populations in India toward innovation. Developing work in postphenomenology and nonrepresentational analyses, I draw out what researchers have called the technicity of affect (following Ash 2010, 2013; Clough 2010, 2018; Heidegger 1962, 1977; Mackenzie 2001; Massumi 2002, 2011, 2015a; Stiegler 1998; Thrift 2005, 2006). The social practice of jugaad allows human-technical assemblages to intervene specifically in the material contexts of (in)subordination through various forms of technology. Second, to understand both the event and the ecology of jugaad, I turn to an important concept in postcolonial criticism, that of translation, to understand how the affects of jugaad are translated as both habit and its modulation. The relevance of postcolonial media studies for postphenomenal affect studies will also be argued for throughout this chapter through a consideration of the materiality of subaltern agency itself, translated through an "ethological" or ecological frame (Ash 2013, ; Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Manning 2013). Human agency is shown to be distributed across material, technical, and intensive objects and processes (Shaviro 2014). Finally, by developing strategic feedbacks between postcolonial media studies and affect studies, I draw out the political and methodological implications of this analysis for nonrepresentational and postphenomenological methods of affective ethnography.

This chapter articulates affect with the everyday practice of jugaad, or frugal innovation, in India. From a marginal practice of subaltern communities (and marginal to the normal legal subject before the law) jugaad has become an important affective atmosphere ("a term that refers to the circulation of perturbations to produce space times local to technical objects" [Ash 2013, 20; Michels and Steyaert 2017) in India's postliberalization sensorium [i.e., roughly post-1991]). Its extralegal connotations translated into "disruptive innovation," jugaad is enthusiastically celebrated as frugal creativity in contemporary Indian management and marketing discourses and practices, as well as across the representational strategies of "digital cool" circulated in the old and new media (Mankekar 2015; Nayar 2012; Sundaram 2009). This capture aims to incorporate jugaad into the intensification of work in neoliberal India: use what you have to innovate; don't rely on patronage from the Ma-Baap (parental) state (Guha 1983); take inspiration from the entrepreneurial aura of the acche din (good days) of an India Shining (for upper caste Hindus) (Boddy et al. 2015). In everyday practice, jugaad is performed when conditions of work or life come up against obstacles. In this sense, the affect of jugaad is the capacity to move from a state of relative inaction or blockage to an improvisational situation.

While the reigning popular discourse on jugaad is a moral-individual one (see Kumar 2009), in which the ideology of agency in the jugaad lies firmly in the moral decisions of the individualized, impoverished, debilitated, and/or frugal tinkerer, this chapter draws out the distributed nature of jugaad across its associated contexts and shifting human and nonhuman time-spaces. As such, jugaad is understood as an event in the affective processes of an ecological assemblage of carbon- and silicon-based life. The importance of jugaad as a focus for postphenomenal geography and affective ethnography lies in the way the practice articulates the interstices between elite and subaltern life, postcolonial studies and affect studies, subaltern workaround cultures and neoliberal strategies of frugal innovation. Indeed, the term jugaad comes out of subaltern, or "nonelite," strategies of negotiating conditions characterized by extreme poverty, discrimination, and violence, which, rather than competing or winning, are experiments in getting over the next hurdle confronting socially and economically disadvantaged communities. In this chapter, I elaborate forms of jugaad practice that Elizabeth Povinelli, following Michel Foucault, calls "subjugated knowledges" which are "mixtures of rituals and makeshifts (bricolages), manipulations of spaces, operators of networks" (Benjamin 2011; Chatterjee 1995; de Certeau 1984, xiv–xvi; Foucault 2003, 2008; Gupta 2012; Marx 2010; Pandey 1990; Povinelli 2016; Prakash 1990); the event of a jugaad emerges from social microcosms that are structured by intersecting wills to power, properties, relations, and processes in which actions are governed by often nonstandard logic and organized according to practical life without having any official rule boundaries (Bourdieu 1996, 226–227). The affect of jugaad translates power differentials across capitalist innovation and subaltern practices of everyday life in India today (Cohn 1987; Guha 1983; Larkin 2008; Scott 1985). Focusing on the deployment of jugaad in both mobile phone marketing and everyday practice, this chapter argues that the "controlled contingency" of marketing discourse is constantly being exceeded by the changing capacities and habituations of mobile phone users. However, contemporary business discourse positions the practice of jugaad as what innovation must become in the new global economy after the 2008 financial...