Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India (2 page)

Though we had both used mobile phones in Australia and elsewhere since the mid-1990s, we realised we knew little about them—how they worked, how and where they were made, and who made money from them and how. Such questions provided the motivation for this book—an attempt to piece together the jigsaw of how cell phones came to India and what their impact has been.

We were also
struck by the fact that so many individuals we met carried a mobile regardless of whether they were boatmen or high officials. In the West, the smart-phone revolution was beginning to make its mark, but up to then, mobile phones were just another telephone, often associated with ‘work’, rather than ‘play’. In India, for millions who never had the luxury and opportunity to communicate through a household fixed-line, the arrival of the cheap cell phone was a revolution, and everyone wanted to have at least one in the family—usually the men, but increasingly women too.

Each of the eight chapters of this book is worth a book in itself, and each is imperfect in ways that we as the authors know too well. But, so far as we can see, there is no book about cell phones—not just in India but worldwide—quite like this one. It’s an attempt to map the mobile-phone food-chain from the Killer Whales at one end to the Small Fry at the other. We’ve divided the book into three sections. The first is called
Controlling
. Its two chapters examine how powerful people struggle to control information, beginning with the sub-continent’s Mughal rulers 500 years ago but quickly moving to Radio Frequency (RF) spectrum, big business, bureaucrats and politicians today. (There is a note about RF on pp. xxxi-xxxii). The second section is called
Connecting
. It aims to understand how in less than ten years mobile phones, and the technology to support them, found their way into the hands of hundreds of millions of people in a vast country of dispersed population, low literacy and extensive poverty. The third section of the book constitutes half its content. We call it
Consuming
. It explores how people in India use cell phones—in business, politics, domestic life and crime.

We had a
few advantages when we set ourselves the too-ambitious task of trying to answer our own questions about cell phones. Between the two of us, we have been powering our intellectual lives off the unpredictable electricity of India for more than sixty years. We also had a range of complementary techniques and skills. Jeffrey was trained as a historian but worked most of his academic life in a university department called ‘Politics’. Doron is an anthropologist. Jeffrey’s white hair and forty years of friendships in India sometimes helped to make connections and organise interviews. Doron’s anthropologist’s affability, solid Hindi and myriad connections in Banaras generated revealing conversations with people in all walks of mobile-phone life. He did what anthropologists do: ethnographic fieldwork, based on observation and interviews. He aimed to de-familiarise what seemed a banal topic: mobile phones. These new, small artefacts, which changed the lives of millions and saturated the Indian landscape, had quickly become commonplace and taken-for-granted—an extension of the self—a prosthetic. Often, we had to remind people that the mobile phone was a recent phenomenon whose entry into their lives was worth considering. ‘How’, we would ask, ‘did you do X before you had a phone?’ A pause. ‘Oh, we didn’t of course’.

Geographically, Jeffrey had friends and interests in Kerala, Punjab and New Delhi. Doron had lived and worked in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Goa. In researching this book, we travelled from Thiruvananthapuram to Shimla, and Lucknow to Mumbai, on a number of visits of varying durations. The many debts we incurred during those travels are recorded in the Acknowledgements later in the book. We had relatively formal interviews with more than sixty people directly connected with aspects of mobile telephony, and we enjoyed informal conversations with scores of others. It was difficult to talk to us in India without being interrogated about cell phones and what they meant for the person who had fallen into our inquisitive clutches. We read everything we could find on the spread of mobile phones elsewhere in the world and came to admire the work of analysts like Manuel Castells, Jonathan Donner, Heather Horst, Daniel Miller, James Katz, Rich Ling, Howard Rheingold and others. Those debts are recorded in notes and comments in the following chapters. We culled major newspapers and periodicals and drew on government documents and the publications of businesses and non-government organisations. The Web makes some of this work quicker and easier than it would have been twenty years ago. But sitting at a computer screen is a poor substitute for visiting a crowded training institute for aspiring technicians on the outskirts of Banaras or trailing behind an engineer as he walks through a rubber estate in Kerala to inspect the air-conditioning unit that cools one of his transmission towers.

The writing
of
Cell Phone Nation
proved as joint a project as one can imagine ‘joint authorship’ being. As the structure of the book evolved, one of us took responsibility for writing the first draft of particular chapters. Doron wrote first drafts of chapters dealing with the social uses of mobile phones; Jeffrey started chapters on history, politics and marketing. The other author then took the first draft and objected, deleted, edited and added. It was a bit like planting a garden or playing pingpong. One author planted, the other weeded, added his own favourites and turned the plot back to the originator to go through the weeding-and-planting process again. The pingpong ball went back and forth across the net many times, and we infected each other with daily doses of enthusiasm.

We aimed to write a book that would hold up its head as both sound scholarship and engaging reading. Our potential readers were us: curious people, eager for understanding and intolerant of jargon. We have tried to make the book accessible. Mobile telephony produces an ABC of acronyms; we have tried to use them sparingly and have provided a list of Abbreviations for quick reference. Similarly, the Glossary contains words that may be unfamiliar to people who are not electronics engineers as well as to people who are not Indians or Indophiles. The two Maps provide a reminder of India’s size and diversity and identify the ‘circles’ (geographic units) into which the Government of India has divided, and leased out, the right to use Radio Frequency for mobile telecommunications.

We have not used diacritical marks for Indian words. When transliterating extended passages from an Indian language, we show long vowels by repeating the letter (for example, ‘aa’), except at the end of words, in which case they are simply ‘a’. For words that are in wide use, we follow common spellings. A ‘wala’ remains a ‘wala’ and the god Ganesh stays ‘Ganesh’, though a more pedantic transliteration would have ‘vaala’ and ‘Ga
e
a’. Official spellings and direct quotations appear as they do in the originals.

Early attempts to come to terms with issues raised in this book appeared in journals and magazines. We thank the editors of the
Journal of Asian Studies, South Asian History and Culture
,
Pacific Affairs
and
The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology
, as well as various media outlets, for publishing the earlier work and enabling us to develop ideas that we explore here.

In the Acknowledgements,
we thank the host of people whose kindness, patience and knowledge have helped us so generously. Here, we thank the institutions that have supported us: the Australian Research Council, the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University, and the Institute of South Asian Studies and the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, where Jeffrey benefited from a delightful and stimulating environment for three years. Domestically, Jeffrey is, as usual and forever, indebted to Lesley for tolerating constant chatter about India, now made even more glorious by references to ‘RF’, ‘fibre optic’ and various ‘Gs’ from ‘2’ to ‘4’. For Doron, his family and especially Udi, Harry, Raya and Guy provided invaluable intellectual and emotional support. Minnie and the kids (Itai and Tomer) were a constant reminder of the most important things in life; they shared the passion and curiosity for India, with many memorable moments on north Indian trains and flying kites from the boats of Banaras.

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