iii. Jugaad: Queering Technology

Jugaad: Queering Technology

With this un-privileging of origin stories, notions of progress and modernity that govern the Capitalocene are rejected. By building things through diverse engineering, without contemplation of what “it should be,” the scavengers follow the principles of Jugaad- an Indian concept with the closest translation being “making do” or “frugal innovation.” As Nandita Badami mentions in her article Informality as Fix: Repurposing Jugaad in a Post-Crisis Economy—”The materiality of jugaad is rooted, first and foremost, in practices of undisciplined consumption.” 113 This undisciplined consumption coupled with limited resources develops into innovative solutions that are developed solely to fix the problem at hand, without considerations of the “progressive” notions of developing it further. This gives rise to ingenious solutions like making buttermilk in rejigged, semi-automatic washing machines, converting pressure cookers into portable espresso machines and plastic water bottles flattened into slippers. This lack of obeying normatives suggests new ways of living where these scavengers would be de-centered as humans and without any reference of their place in the world, humankind would exist in the precarious World without concepts of modernity or progress. As Anna Tsing puts it, “…we learn over and over that humans are different from the rest of the living world because we look forward—while other species which live day to day, are thus dependent on us. As long as we imagine that humans are made through progress, nonhumans are stuck within this imaginative framework too.” 114 With the normative narrative of progress removed and binary essentialist boundaries blurred, the humans would achieve what Donna Haraway calls “Sympoiesis”— worlding-with— implying a plurality of narratives and multiple temporalities. 115 Accordingly, the scavengers in this World are not concerned with establishing hierarchies in search of the meaning of their existence. They provide the reader a lens into a society that has inherited sophisticated technology, but without access to the narratives of progress and technological instrumentality within which they were originally situated. This scenario is not intended to generate sympathy, but rather to clear a space for the development of multiple alternative narratives and to examine the way this diversity of narratives informs the structure of this society’s life around the interpreted meanings of the abandoned objects.

113. Nandita Badami, “Informality as Fix,” Third Text 32, no. 1 (February 2018): pp. 46-54, https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2018.1442190. 114. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). 115. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 33.

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