ANIMA: Critical Rave Studies Otherwise. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. xviii, 208 pp. (B&W photos.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-0146-1.
In recent years, the colloquial Indian word “jugaad” has emerged as a postcolonial concept in management, information technology, and culture studies. A 2012 essay on innovation in the Harvard Business Review (Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu, and Simone Ahuja, “The CEO’s Frugal Innovation Agenda, Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2012/10/the-ceos-frugal-innovation-age) defined the term loosely as “frugal innovation” or “bottom-up innovation.” The information technology community has equated the term with hacking or workaround for software. The word jugaad comes from the root word yukta in Sanskrit and its vernacularized morphology in words like jugt and jugat. The root words mean a workaround plan based on finding new hidden connections (yukta) that are not obvious. In Sanskrit this usage is in the context of finding a workaround plan, upaay (practical solution), especially when it is not possible to follow all the steps laid out for a Vedic ritual because of either lack of resources or time. For example, Hindu weddings are known for tediously long rituals that at times may run not only into hours but days. A shortened version of rituals is crafted by the priest when people performing ask the priest to apply a jugat and find an upaay. The genealogy of jugaad in Indian tradition is rooted in the praxis of resistance in the form of “provisional agency” (Beatrice Jauregui, “Provisional agency in India: Jugaad and legimation of corruption,” American Ethnologist 41, no. 1 [2014]).
The underlying subversive connotation of jugaad suggests an interplay between resistance and hegemony, which Marxist scholars trace to Antonio Gramsci. In the canonical essay “Mentality of Subalternity: Kantnama and Rajdharma,” Ranajit Guha, one of the founders of the Subaltern Studies Group, describes evocatively the complex interaction between resistance and submissiveness found in underprivileged communities in caste hierarchy. This interplay of resistance and hegemony is a conceptual handle in Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India. Author Amit S. Rai explores this complex interplay in quotidian resistance and intersectionality of subaltern—urban underclasses, women breaking patriarchal norms in career choices, feminist, domestic servants, etc.—social groups and political media ecology.
Through case studies relying on ethnographic observations and interviews, Rai shows how ordinary people from underprivileged social classes working in cities and small towns of India practice jugaad in their creative use of new media technologies—mobile phones, smartphones, value-added services (or mobile apps), cable television, etc.—in routine work. The core idea driving the narrative in the book is jugaad as subaltern resistance. One of Rai’s subaltern informants, a domestic servant in Delhi, gives a compelling interpretation of jugaad as a life hack. She says jugaad is what helps to get a problem solved (woh baat safal ho jaye), and does not denote wrongdoing (ghalat kaam) (143–144). She explains how she deploys jugaad in her daily work in the kitchen, to cover costs incurred in a wedding, and that even her son uses jugaad in his work as a caterer.
Such case studies come from a variety of social contexts including young single women working in metros, students, domestic servants working in upper-class urban homes, and aspirational youth working in the back office operations (BOP) of global corporations (call centres) that are plugged into global capital. Rai connects jugaad consumption practices of subaltern Indians—consumption of new meida technologies, gadgets, other commodities made available through capitalist global supply chain—with a wider phenomenon of résistance against the global empire of multinational corporations, which Antonino Negri and Michael Hardt had theorized from a neo-Marxist perspective in their book Empire (2000). Additionally, Rai uses the idea of difference as developed by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his book Difference and Repetition (1968) to interpret jugaad as a praxis of resistance. Rai shows how in seemingly disparate acts of jugaad, the resistance gets repeated again and again across space and time.
Deleuze’s theorization of social change over time, drawing inspiration from empirical sciences, is often difficult to comprehend. According to Deleuze, social and technological changes happen slowly through minute differences that manifest in seemingly routine repetitions of production and reproduction in quotidian praxis. With every repetition, change happens minutely, and understanding of social meanings or representations come from recognizing that how difference is an offshoot of repetition, which makes repetition not same as resemblance or generalization in acts across space and time. Deleuze, who was theorizing during the social mobilization of the 1960s, sees a likelihood of new possibilities out of difference inherent in repetition. Rai apples the Deleuzian way of thinking about change and new possibilities as a conceptual lens to understand how jugaad as a praxis embedded in the repetition of new media consumption of his informants fosters difference and emancipatory possibilities. And hopefully even a radical conception of freedom.
In its methodological approach is inspired by the works of Deleuze and Félix Guattari, especially Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) and Molecular Revolution (1984), Rai writes: “Clearly, through this paratactic network of rhizomes, the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari will also form crucial nodes in this construction. Their work on ‘affect’ and ecology is mobilized in an affirmation of jugaad as the expression of a subaltern and autonomous sensibility besieged, maimed, imprisoned, and controlled by mutually ramifying and contradictory (it doesn’t add up!) forms of domination, exploitation, dispossession, commodification, monopoly, and habituation” (xi).
Deleuze and Guattari developed their method from the idea of a diagram put forward by Charles Sanders Pierce, one of the founders of pragmatism. Pierce described the diagram as an icon describing one-to-one relations between reality (signified) and representation (signifier). Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the diagram, rather than one-to-one correspondence, is more a web of power relations and meanings—like interconnected links among nodes of the rhizome. Inspired by the diagrammatic method, Rai presents his arguments and data as nodes of experience (affects) in a non-hierarchical pattern. Each case study is mapped with other cases by uncovering subterranean interconnections like that of the rhizome colonies in roots of majestic trees rising over the ground.
Rai has opened a new way to think about new media consumption and social change. His highly dense theoretical discussion and impressionistic analysis of empirical data explore how “jugaad contribute to the ongoing struggles for noncapitalist, anticapitalist economic equality and democratic social emancipation in India and indeed globally?” (154). One would have hoped that Rai had given more space to the discussion of fascinating case studies that compellingly show the core ideas driving a conceptual framework to understand the culture and political ecology of jugaad.
The core arguments of the book are sometimes difficult to grasp because of the dense discussion of theoretical literature in which the study is grounded. For the uninitiated in poststructuralist and postmodernist literature and ways of thinking it is a difficult book to read. Rai does not help his readers by discussing the concepts and ideas in a more approachable manner. His discussion of neo-Marxists and poststructuralist literature in all the chapters, sometimes repetitively, leaves little room for more thick descriptions of complex engagement with jugaad as praxis. That said, the contribution of Jugaad Time to the study of media ecologies, media consumption, intersectionality, and résistance is refreshing.
Anup Kumar
Cleveland State University, Cleveland