MEDIA & THE ARTS
Jugaad
Urbanism
India’s great art of making do
BY MEERA SUBRAMANIAN
foR cloSE To A DEcADE I worked on
a forty-acre land trust called Aprovecho at
the end of a dirt road in Oregon. We grew
our own food, raised goats, built straw-bale houses, drank water from a gravity-fed spring, and were fairly sure we were
onto a transformative way of living based
on voluntary simplicity. It was isolated in
some ways, but our work developing efficient, wood-burning cookstoves reached
far out into the world, finding its way to
distant locales in Central America, Africa,
and even India, where my father was born
and I would go to visit every few years. To
make a rocket stove, in its most elemental
form, all you needed was two large co=ee
cans, a couple small soup cans, and a pair
of tin snips. We would test for e;ciency by
metering out ounces of wood until a simmering pound of beans was soft.
Like half of humanity today, I left my
rural outpost for the city, but Aprovecho
remains. Its name derives from a Spanish
word we translated as “I make best use of.”
There is no real equivalent in the English
language. “To take advantage of” is the closest we gringos get, and that phrase has a decidedly negative connotation. What about
the good and creative ways to make do?
My father’s people know how to make
do. If necessity is the mother of inven-
tion, then Indians are her midwives. Their
Hindi word is jugaad, a brilliant adjective
that fills the mouth for the first half and
softens in the second until the nearly im-
perceptible d. It is a slippery untranslat-
able word that means something akin to
resourceful or innovative, makeshift or
jury-rigged. It’s a noun, too, the name of
the haphazard vehicles that ply India’s
rutted roads, Mad Max mobiles pieced to-
gether with a motley collection of boards,
machine parts, and jeep fragments, pow-
ered by hand-crank engines that likely had
prior lives as irrigation pumps.
