Centering Jugaad, Challenging Construction Historiography
I was interviewing Professor Suresh Banker, an elderly engineer and retired professor of building technology, who had been involved in the construction of some of Ahmedabad’s iconic architectural works from the 1960s and 1970s. These projects extensively employed exposed or fair-faced concrete, which had been introduced into architecture in the Indian subcontinent in the 1950s and remains one of the hallmarks of Indian architectural modernity. Describing the ways in which exposed concrete was cast, Professor Banker mentioned that the concrete mix required a very specific proportion of sand-cement-aggregate and water, to ensure that the cement slurry formed a film on the surface to produce the smooth finish we associate with exposed concrete. Since precise measurements were not always possible and the vagaries of climate affected the hydration of the concrete mix, each batch of concrete had to be closely supervised to ensure workability. If the concrete mix appeared too dry, the supervisors would add some water or slurry to the mix. Concrete vibrators were rare, and so they resorted to tapping the surface of the concrete or the formwork with strips of bamboo. The formwork too was modified with each successive round of concrete pouring. The timber planks used in the formwork absorbed moisture. After three or four rounds of pouring, carpenters would shave off the cement-encrusted top layer, allowing the planks to be used again. These micro-adjustments filled the crucial gap between the architectural specifications that came from architects’ offices and the exigencies of the construction site. These practices are what, in Hindi and some other Indian languages, would be described as jugaad. Professor Banker recollected a wide range of jugaad that occurred on construction sites at the time. From placing bicycle tire tubes between metal formwork plates to prevent leakage of cement slurry, applying cement slurry directly on the formwork to ensure a smooth surface, to recycling railway sleepers for use as timber formwork. These were clearly unacknowledged processes which were nevertheless central to the materialization of the architectural work.
Figure 1. Laborers tying reinforcements on an early concrete footbridge constructed under the supervision of Major E. Stokes-Roberts. Source: Marsh and Dunn, Reinforced Concrete, 604.
While the term has multiple, simultaneously vague and familiar connotations, jugaad broadly refers to practices of “workaround, hack, trick, or make do” and is generally used in the sense of “tweaking” something “till it works.”[i] Through the interview with Professor Banker and in the course of my larger research on the histories of making buildings in South Asia, I tried to make sense of these anecdotes by framing them as improvisations, as “informal rationality,” or occasionally, even as aberrations in what was otherwise the best of construction practices.[ii] For Suresh Banker and other engineers I interviewed, however, these categories and formulations did not seem to matter. The distinctions between the prescribed and the tinkering/ making-do/ adjusting/ improvising dissolved into the continuum of building work. This was simply the nature of construction practice itself. It was what they did in order to get the work done.
The historiographic blind spot in positioning jugaad on the construction site within the discourse of architectural production resides in the paradigm of design as “a (relatively) autonomous field” where construction plays second fiddle to the aspirations of architecture “proper.”[iii] This extends particularly to jugaad, which as Amit Rai argues, fundamentally draws from practice and knowledge systems that are “subjugated and subalternized” and thus remain an unacknowledged part of architectural production.
Figure 2. Details of reinforcement in brick walls of water tanks by Major Stokes-Roberts. Source: Stokes-Roberts, A New System of Reinforced Brickwork, Plate IV.
Improvisations and adjustments have been central to construction sites across time and geography. Reinforced concrete, however, was a distinctly different material. As Sergio Ferro argues, it “required calculation, precise technical details, exact quantification of components” and “did not entail any historically accumulated know-how” or depend on the “the approximate methods of masons and carpenters.”[iv] While this is conceptually true, anecdotes of early use of reinforced concrete in colonial South Asia suggest a far more variegated landscape of practice. In the early 1900s, the British colonial administration in the Madras Presidency in south India claimed the first use of reinforced concrete in South Asia. They reported that “ferro-cement,” as reinforced concrete was described, was employed in the construction of culverts, bridges, sheet piles, and the roofs of some housing units.[v] Some of these efforts were unusual, such as the use of expanded metal sheets to reinforce surkhi concrete, which used brick dust as a supplementary binder along with lime or cement. The report noted that these were “trials” and that “the success or otherwise of such construction can only be gauged after a considerable time has elapsed.”[vi] While the principles of reinforced construction were known to the engineering team, construction on ground was a matter of trial and error, and remained a site for unanticipated developments.
Major E. Stokes-Roberts, a military engineer with the Madras Presidency, is one of the individuals credited with introducing reinforced concrete construction in the subcontinent. He built culverts, which followed what we consider as standard practice: his team put together a timber formwork, placed rods along the surface, and poured the concrete mixture to form the arch of a bridge (Figure 1).[vii] Simultaneously, however, Stokes-Roberts experimented with reinforcing brick walls. He added small hoops of iron and telegraph wire to add reinforcement to brick walls of a cylindrical water tank (Figure 2). The was an “outcome of an idea to avoid the expense of centering, which forms a somewhat large item in the cost of tanks built of reinforced concrete.”[viii] He described this as a new “system,” and gave detailed specifications and calculations of structural load and behavior. It was common practice for engineers to share details of their work through lectures and publications, which then circulated across the ranks of colonial engineering and occasionally even made it to British engineering discourses.
Figure 3. Removing cow dung plaster layer once the concrete has set [video]. Video by Samarth Puri.
The scientific discussions and reportage gave these works, and Indian engineering more widely, the veneer of a systematic enterprise. But in reality, no two construction processes were identical. Roughly a decade after his initial works in reinforced concrete, Stokes-Roberts authored another volume titled Some Practical Points in the Design and Construction of Military Buildings in India. Under a section on reinforced concrete construction, he laid out the spectrum of raw materials, mixes and processes. Sand used on the concrete ranged from fine, coarse, sharp, to mixed grains, and each of these impacted the strength and water tightness of the final concrete.[ix] Proportions too, varied. While cement, sand, and aggregate mixed in the proportion of 1:2:4 was considered a standard mix, it was common for a building team on site to measure out sand and aggregate together, and use this mix and cement in proportions ranging from 6:1 to 9:1.[x] Considering these circumstances, Stokes-Roberts eventually recommended that the site team should decide on the minimum amount of cement or lime mortar required to cover all the other material and proceed to prepare concrete with this basic rule in mind. This left the key decisions regarding the quantity, mix, and process of mixing the concrete almost entirely in the hands of the team on site.
Such adjustments and improvisations are extensively recorded in engineers’ reports and publications, but historiographically glossed over as inherent conditions to be tackled in the resource-, skill-, and knowledge-constrained context of colonial construction sites. Alternatively, they were described as “practical contributions” to the growing knowledge repository of colonial engineering. In either case, the improvisations, were not in themselves, what Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie would describe as unique “events” that represent particular realities of construction in the colonial world. They were “digested” by the meta-narrative of colonial technocratic competence and superiority, and of the colonial regime as the harbinger of technological modernity.[xi]
How might we position improvisations within genealogies of technological development? Stokes-Roberts’ work presents a threshold moment within the genesis and growth of reinforced concrete use in India. Yet, his was a dispersed body of practice, one that was extensively shaped by material circumstance rather than by an effort to deploy technology in systematically incremental ways. In writing a history of concrete as a material, we bind heterogeneous building sites, practices, and knowledge into a connected narrative. But if we are to pay attention to construction sites as particular centers of improvisational practice, rather than as interconnected conduits of technological development, it will require rethinking our analytic frameworks.
“How might we position improvisations within genealogies of technological development?”
Figure 4. Centering for the dome of a reinforced brick water tank made with “blue-gum rods” and “mud plaster,” which is similar to the technique used by local building contractors in central India today. Source: Stokes-Roberts, A New System of Reinforced Brickwork, Plate V.
It is useful to note here that jugaad in concrete technology was not a function of an earlier stage of technological development. In fact, even today, concrete is cast in myriad ways, shaped by the contingencies of available labor and resources. Building contractors in the Bundelkhand region in Madhya Pradesh in central India, faced with the shortage of timber planks for concrete formwork, have developed a novel technique. They employ local adivasi (indigenous) laborers who are skilled in working with cow dung plaster. To make formwork, they use rough timber logs, irrespective of their profile, and employ the laborers to cover the formwork with a layer of cow dung. Once the concrete is cast, the dung is washed off, leaving a smooth flat surface (Figure 3).[xii] While this is reminiscent of the history of “earth-centering” or the use of mud to produce forms in concrete, the contractors’ practice is a locally innovated response rather than a historically informed mode of work (Figure 4).[xiii] More importantly, the process of producing concrete incorporates indigenous and other local knowledges.
Construction sites consist of heterogeneous building systems, multiple forms of labor and knowledge. Since built environment discourses have privileged the centralization of knowledge, the historiographic imperative of such discourses has been to assume that built environments are produced through singular and authoritative prescription, though all evidence, historically and present-day, suggests otherwise. This is particularly significant for architectural histories in the Global South where acts of improvisation are framed within narratives of technological backwardness. Improvisations are in fact acts of innovation—crucial plug-ins, where local, artisanal, or indigenous knowledge and practice entangle with the prescribed forms of knowledge in order to realize an architectural work.
Citation
Gauri Bharat, “Centering Jugaad, Challenging Construction Historiography,” PLATFORM, October 14, 2024.
Notes
[i] Amit Rai, Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019) x, 4.
[ii] Feenberg uses the term informal rationality to describe a way of thinking that accounts for ‘meaning and evaluative dimensions’ alongside ‘techno-scientific rationality’. Andrew Feenberg, “Modernity, Technology and the Forms of Rationality,” Philosophy Compass 6, no. 12 (2011), 867.
[iii] Silke Kapp, Katie Lloyd Thomas, Joao Marcos de Almeida Lopes, "Introduction: How to Look at Architecture from ‘Below’," in Sergio Ferro, “Concrete as Weapon,” Harvard Design Magazine, no. 46 (2018), iii.
[iv] Sérgio Ferro, “Concrete as Weapon,” Harvard Design Magazine, no. 46 (2018) 19.
[v] Administration Report of the Public Works Department (Generals, Buildings and Roads) (Madras: The Superintendent, Government Press, 1902-02, 1903-04, and 1905-06).
[vi] Administration Report of the Public Works Department (Generals, Buildings and Roads) (Madras: The Superintendent, Government Press, 1905-06) 14.
[vii] Charles F. Marsh and William Dunn. Reinforced Concrete (New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1904).
[viii] E. Stokes-Robert, “A New System of Reinforced Brickwork as Applied to above Ground Cylindrical Water Tanks” in Professional Papers of The Corps of Royal Engineers XXX (1904), 172.
[ix] E. Stokes-Roberts, Some Practical Points in the Design and Construction of Military Buildings in India (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, India, 1910), 86.
[x] Stokes-Roberts, Some Practical Points, 87.
[xi] Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “The ‘Event’ and the ‘Long Term’ in Social History: The Case of the Chouan Uprising,” in The Territory of the Historian, trans. by Ben and Sian Reynolds (Chicago: The Harvester Press and University of Chicago, 1979), 113.
[xii] Personal communication with Samarth Puri, self-taught builder who work with local laborers and used this technique in the construction of his farm house in Pipariya, Madhya Pradesh, on 8 September 2024.
[xiii] See for instance, Thomas Ker. “Concrete Quarters for Native Clerks, Guards and Menial Staff on Indian Railways, & c. (Includes Plates),” Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers 101, (1890): 186–88. Stokes-Roberts (“A New System of Reinforced Brickwork,” Plate V), also suggests the use of earth-entering for the dome of the reinforced brick water tanks.
