The affect of Jugaad: Frugal innovation and postcolonial practice in India’s mobile phone ecology

Abstract

Previous studies have identified affect as constitutive of and woven into everyday life. Less work has focused on how affect is designed and produced through consumer services and goods to modulate human-technical assemblages for commercial and economic ends. In this paper, I draw on social geography, affect studies, and postcolonial media studies to analyse value creation in the Indian mobile phone market, specifically in the deployment of an Indian form of workaround called 'jugaad'. Following nonrepresentational analyses of digital practices, I identify this market as a collection of human-technical assemblages that are marketed through a rhetoric of frugal innovation or jugaad. Moving through examples from fieldnotes, case studies, and reports, the analysis of the affective atmospheres of Indian mobile phone marketing communications appraises televised Bharti Airtel adverts. Findings of this analysis suggest affect has spatial, temporal, and economic dimensions, as well as being embedded in everyday experiences of a newly distributed subaltern agency.

Smartphones, youth and moral panics: Exploring print and online media narratives in India

“…The Indian state plays an important role in the smartphone media panic, negotiating between the need to preserve hegemonic structures on one hand and the interests of global techno-capitalism on the other. The vitality of the IT sector is integral to India’s positioning as a modern developing economy and links the nation to globalized capitalism (Rai, 2015). The current Indian government is invested in propagating an IT-fueled national economy, exemplified by the “Digital India” promise to achieve universal internet access by 2020 (The Economic Times, 2019).…”

“…Ingraham and Reeves (2016) make the case that social media platforms and online connectivity only provide the illusion of effective free speech to digital citizens, who ultimately remain politically powerless. Additionally, even while youth attempt to intervene in their own subordination and subvert smartphone technology, techno-capitalist corporations repackage these subversions as a marketable feature of the next generation of commodities while continuously extracting value through surveillance and data harvesting (Rai, 2015; Zuboff, 2019).…”

“…However, technology also provides the opportunity for the subordinated to intervene in their own subordination (Rai, 2015). Mainstream media do not reflect that smartphones provide space for crucial individual development for young people, as they form and strengthen friendships online and explore multiple emerging identities.…”

The contradiction of Indian innovation: an epistemological explanation

“…It is therefore seen by some scholars as nonserious about systematic production of scientific knowledge or IPR (Kaur, 2016; Krishnan, 2010). Jugaad literature implicitly recognizes knowledge as a public good or commons through its disregard of IPR and practice of piracy (Gupta, 2002; Rai, 2015). This perspective deploys knowledge in the creation of other functional artifacts of everyday and immediate use rather than the production of knowledge in and of itself as artifacts, thereby disengaging from contribution to IPR making it partially similar to SI (Gupta, 2002; Prasad, 2008; Rai, 2015).…”

“…Jugaad literature implicitly recognizes knowledge as a public good or commons through its disregard of IPR and practice of piracy (Gupta, 2002; Rai, 2015). This perspective deploys knowledge in the creation of other functional artifacts of everyday and immediate use rather than the production of knowledge in and of itself as artifacts, thereby disengaging from contribution to IPR making it partially similar to SI (Gupta, 2002; Prasad, 2008; Rai, 2015). To some, this approach contradicts rent seeking IPR and is therefore inferior (Krishnan, 2010).…”