Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India
Authors: Robin Jeffrey
CELL PHONE NATION
How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business,
Politics and Ordinary Life in India
ROBIN JEFFREY and ASSA DORON
‘A comprehensive chronicle of how mobile phones changed Indian lives and in the process India’s economy. Capitalists, ministers, boatmen, farmers, advertising geniuses, porn peddlers, political workers and tireless salesmen populate this story. Jeffrey and Doron’s sociological take on the mobile phone as a great leveller is rich and riveting.’ – Sevanti Ninan, editor of The Hoot and author of
Headlines from the Heartland
‘Jeffrey and Doron’s landmark study of how the humble mobile phone is changing the culture of Indian democracy in everyday life has no competitors. Their interdisciplinary analysis of popular aspirations and anxieties surrounding mobile telephones will invite and inspire comparative studies set in other emerging economies. A remarkable achievement.’ – Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago
‘A marvellous book, briskly written and combining a panoptical overview of the broader media landscape with deeply insightful ethnographic vignettes. It has a journalistic brio which makes it highly accessible to a very wide range of readers and a pleasingly part-novelistic, part-filmic, literary style that makes it a rewarding and gripping read.’ – Chris Pinney, Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture, University College, London
‘A fascinating, smart and erudite volume on how the Indian cell phone industry developed, and what its extraordinary growth has meant for the country. It can serve as a kind of vade mecum for many thousands of interested readers seeking to learn about the subject whether as amateurs or as specialists entering a new domain.’ – Arvind Rajagopal, Professor of Media Studies, New York University
First published in 2013 by Hachette India
(Registered name: Hachette Book Publishing India Pvt. Ltd)
An Hachette UK company
This ebook published in 2013
© Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron 2013
Published in the United Kingdom by C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd as
The Great Indian Phone Book: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India
Published in the United States by Harvard University Press as
The Great Indian Phone Book: How the Cheap Cell Phone Changes Business, Politics, and Daily Life
(Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey, 2013)
Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work
All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be copied, reproduced, downloaded, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover or digital format other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Print HB edition ISBN 978-93-5009-354-2
Ebook edition ISBN 978-93-5009-531-7
For sale in the Indian Subcontinent only
The views and opinions expressed in this book are the authors’ own and the facts are as reported by them and have been verified to the extent possible. The publisher is not in any way liable for the same.
Hachette Book Publishing India Pvt. Ltd
4th/5th Floors, Corporate Centre
Plot No. 94, Sector 44, Gurgaon 122009, India
Front cover photograph courtesy Getty Images
Cover design by Saffron Design
CONTENTS
List of Maps, Illustrations, Figures and Tables
Radio Frequency and Mobile Phones
Introduction: ‘So Uncanny and Out of Place’
In India
In the world
In conclusion
Horses, runners and rulers
Untying communication
Act I: ‘… Within a fortnight …’
Act II: Sidelining the referee
Act III: Bread, clothing, shelter—and a mobile
Act IV: Schools for scandal
Man’s best friend
Talk time—small, medium, large
The art of retail
People
Factory workers
Tower walas
Mistriis
Trainers and trainees
Process
The Care Centre
On the sea …
Around the globe …
At the bank …
On the river …
On the farm …
Empowering, ensnaring or just chatting …?
‘Smart mobs’ in the world
‘Smart organisations’ in India
Limits, lessons and possibilities
Who will guard the mobile?
The household mobile
Ownership and property
Romance, marriage and the mobile
8: For ‘Wrongdoing’: ‘Waywardness’ to Terror
‘Waywardness’
Pornography
Crime
Scandal and surveillance
Espionage and terror
Conclusion: ‘It’s the autonomy, stupid’
Health
Mobile waste
Social networks
Language and media
Politics and governance
‘Who did you write
this book for?’ a publisher asked us. ‘Ourselves’, we replied with as close to one voice as possible, given that Doron was in Australia and Jeffrey in Singapore. But it was true: this is the book we both were looking for in 2008 when the puzzle—the miracle, the in-your-faced-ness—of Indian mobile telephony began to strike us every day.
Each of us was teased by memorable first encounters with Indian telephones. For Jeffrey, it was the marriage of two Canadians in New Delhi on a sunny Saturday afternoon in December 1967. After the ceremony, a reception was held in the grounds of a grand old New Delhi bungalow, then occupied by a senior member of the Canadian High Commission. From mid-afternoon, attempts were made to telephone the parents of the bride and groom in Toronto. The project came to resemble a disaster-rescue saga. Occasionally, the person placing the call—we took it in shifts—would break into the conviviality with an announcement: ‘We nearly got through that time. I think I heard someone pick up … but it may have been another operator … Our operator says perhaps in an hour’. Darkness fell, eventually the party broke up, and the call was never completed. That experience was one of the few times Jeffrey had any connection with a telephone during two years in India between 1967 and 1969. The school where he taught in Chandigarh was believed to have a phone, rumoured to be in the principal’s office, but no teacher had ever heard it ring or heard that it had been used. No one Jeffrey knew had a phone or thought of using one. What, after all, were bicycles, social visits and Indian Post and Telegraphs (IP&T) for?
For Doron,
arriving in India twenty-five years later, an encounter with a telephone was steeped in anxiety and anticipation. As a backpacker in the early 1990s, he soon realised he had to have a plan prior to entering one of the yellow-painted STD booths—the ‘PCOs’ or Public Call Offices—on the street. Preparation involved making sure that all important information was communicated to those at the other end of the line in the most succinct and powerful manner. This was vital because the line was often cut and costs were high: a day’s sustenance—Rs 300—was the cost of a minimum three-minute call.
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Doron anxiously watched the red-digits displaying the mounting seconds on the electronic clock as he screamed into the mouthpiece in the hope that his voice would carry over the radiowaves to faraway lands. One could easily blow a whole day’s budget on a single botched call. Unfortunately, all too often the phone conversations in those bright yellow booths ended with an argument over the price and quality of the call. The experience could be unpleasant. For Doron, visiting the local post office to send postcards and sift leisurely through the post-restante mail was the preferred way to communicate with family and friends.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, all this changed. The take-up of cell phones from 2004 was rocket-like. (We use ‘cell phone’ and ‘mobile phone’ interchangeably). By 2012, mobile-phone subscribers in India exceeded 900 million out of a total population of 1,220 million (1.22 billion). On those numbers, three out of every four Indians, from kids to octogenarians, had a mobile phone. And even if we don’t take the 900 million figure too seriously (there is a lot of double-counting), and even when we recognise that phones are much less common among rural poor people than urban rich ones, it means that close to half of Indians almost certainly owned a phone. Doron and Jeffrey were like millions of others who came to marvel at daily encounters with these facts and to add to their story-telling repertoire tales that began: ‘The rickshaw guy the other night … he was pedalling me home and his phone rang! He stopped and told me to get out—he couldn’t take me any farther. His wife wanted him to do another job’.