Authors: Robin Jeffrey
Nevertheless,
‘India’s first mass-mobile phone elections’ in Uttar Pradesh in 2007 showed what cheap, autonomous, mobile communications could do. For the BSP and its activists, the cell phone was faster than a bicycle, more powerful than a postcard; it leapt physical barriers, whether imposed by cost, distance or social superiors. It bypassed mainstream media controlled by caste-Hindus, unsympathetic to Dalit causes. It enabled the difficult message of a Brahmin-Dalit alliance to be explained personally, relentlessly and widely. It fostered activists’ sense of importance and purpose by enabling person-to-person conversations to instruct, inform, rally and praise. And it ensured a fair, free election by providing rapid access to responsive election officials. In a country as hierarchical as India, such innovations heralded significant disruption to long-standing social and political relations.
Now, a ban on mobile phones for unmarried girls.
Times of India
, 23 November 2010
Man kills daughter for cell chat with boyfriend.
Times of India
, 5 June 2011
Bagpat panchayat issues Taliban-style diktat to women. No love marriages, mobiles or unescorted visits to markets for those up to age of 40.
Hindu
, 13 July 2012
Elites and ruling classes tend to live by different rules from poorer and less powerful people. In a notorious example from the English-speaking world, Henry VIII had six wives in a time when an ‘average Englishman’ would have had one. The powerful change the rules when it suits them, and they are usually first to adopt ideas and technologies that alter prevailing social customs. From washing machines to the contraceptive pill, upper classes have been able to take on new devices because they have the leisure to discover them and the wealth to acquire them.
The cheap mobile phone in contrast has a unique potency: it puts an immensely disruptive device within reach of the poor. It is small and discrete and can be hidden if necessary. And it enables connections and encounters that would previously have been impossible. The effects of its arrival among poorer people in India have been to shake and challenge institutions of authority and both to reinforce and undermine gender roles.
‘Man
kills daughter for cell chat with boyfriend’ read a headline in the
Times of India
in June 2011 reporting a case in a town called Nawada, 90 kilometres south of Patna, the capital of the state of Bihar. The story continued:
A man allegedly strangled his 20-year-old daughter, doused her body in kerosene and burnt it before burying her. He did this because he found her talking to her boyfriend on a cell phone. The boy has reportedly recorded [the girl’s] screams on his cell phone.
1
Mobile phones were central to these events and their revelation. A police officer told a
Times of India
reporter that
following an anonymous phone call that a girl was being burned around 10 pm on May 7, he along with forces had gone to the village around 11 pm. They, however, returned empty-handed as they could not locate the place.
2
The mobile phone did not create the beliefs that generated the violence. Though the young man and woman were of the same caste, her father drew on a long-standing belief that his family was of superior status to that of the man, whose father had been an electrician.
3
In the past, a father could more closely control the people with whom a young daughter fraternised until the time of her marriage. The mobile phone enabled a couple to make initial connections, keep in touch and plan meetings. The sight of the phone in his daughter’s hands, and of its being used to connect with her despised suitor, appeared to have sparked ruthless anger.
Similar sex-and-the-phone stories were common. As early as 2002, when India had fewer than ten million mobile phones,
India Today
devoted a cover story to ‘Love in the Time of SMS’. It was illustrated with a ‘Mughal miniature’ showing a courtly ruler and his lover communicating on their mobile phones. (See
Illus. 2
). The story was an excuse to titillate. ‘Some say’, the writer enthused, ‘that SMS stands for “some more sex”!’ Short Messaging Service, she asserted, had ‘changed the lifestyles and attitudes of many cell phone users’.
4
The claim at that time was exaggerated, but a cover story in
India Today
signalled growing awareness that the mobile phone, even as an urban middle-class device, was disrupting conventions and opening possibilities.
5
‘It is so private’, an enthusiast explained to the
India Today
journalist. ‘Privacy’ had been rare in most Indian families.
As the
cheap mobile phone spread, it raised apprehensions about threats to morality. A caste organisation in Orissa ‘banned the use of mobile phones among unmarried girls to prevent them from “going astray”’. The reason, according to a statement by the group, was that ‘girls fall in love after they come into contact with boys through mobile phones’.
6
In northern India, 1,700 kilometres away, ‘a village panchayat … banned the use of mobile phones by unmarried girls, a move they feel would prevent them from eloping with their lovers’.
7
These publically proclaimed bans had no force of law, but journalists eagerly picked them up as examples of the tensions that readily-available, easily-concealable phones were introducing into Indian families. In western Uttar Pradesh, a village elder explained a publicised rape in suburbs near Delhi: ‘Mobile phones have given a lot of freedom to these girls and that’s why they are behaving in a wild manner’.
8
In taking cheap mobile phones into their daily lives, large numbers of people of poor or modest means found that they affected courtship practices, marriage relations and kinship ties. This story was not one of unqualified celebration. Commenting on experiences in Africa, Anneryan Heatwole accurately described the ambiguities: ‘although access to mobile telephones has many benefits for female users, it [is] not a solution to female poverty or gender inequality’.
9
On one hand, such access could generate conflict; on the other, it could provoke desirable change.
In Banaras, Doron spoke with a few boatmen about the roles of wife and husband. Many of them had recently married, and some had young children. They emphasised the ‘division of labour’ whereby their wives held responsibility for household chores, including cleaning, washing and feeding the children, as well as managing the income the men brought home. They said that men couldn’t save money (
aadmi paisa nahin bacha sakta
) and that men just spent it on drinking and gambling. Women, on the other hand, were thrifty by nature, though there were some ‘hi-fi’ women who were loose with their spending. They mockingly contrasted their own marital relationships with that of their colleague, Dilip, whom they said was controlled by his wife (
vo biibi ka gulaam hai
). The marker of Dilip’s loss of control could be seen, they said, in the use of the mobile phone. Carrying her own mobile phone, Dilip’s wife ventured outside the house alone to the market or even the riverfront. None of their spouses, they noted, had their own mobiles. Rather, in their homes the mobile phone was kept strictly for family use and to contact the men if the need arose. One of the group suggested that the disruption caused by a wife commandeering the mobile phone was to be expected once families no longer followed the practice of arranged marriage and tradition (
parampara
) and permitted ‘love marriages’.
In other
times and places, the expanding popularity and social use of the mobile phone’s ancestor—the landline telephone—was also controversial and shaped by gender and class. ‘Telephone-company managers’, wrote Michele Martin of Canada from the 1880s, ‘thought that “women’s use of men’s technology would come to no good end”’.
10
The landline when it arrived in north Atlantic households at the beginning of the twentieth century was viewed with distrust by guardians of social order. ‘Some worried’, Claude Fischer wrote, ‘that the telephone permitted inappropriate or dangerous discussions, such as illicit wooing’.
11
In Pennsylvania, Amish communities saw the phone as a threat to the home and social order, bringing with it the corrupting influences of the ‘outside’ world.
12
The mobile phone, a technology so close to the skin and carried wherever one went, could be seen as even more ominous. It enabled people to communicate with unparalleled privacy and independence. How individual families and the world’s different cultures adapted the device to daily life fascinated scholars (not to mention marketing divisions and advertising agencies). Scholars used the term ‘domestication’ to describe the patterns of behaviour that emerged as people acquired objects and used them in their daily lives. Analysing this two-way process of adapting, interpreting and redefining technologies like the TV, microwave and the phone (landline and mobile) became a main concern of the ‘domestication’ approach in studies with titles like
Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces
.
13
The film classic
The Gods Must Be Crazy
zanily highlighted these processes. The Coca-Cola bottle that fell unexpectedly into the Kalahari Desert dislocated local society. The Bushmen who found it put it to use according to their own interests and perceptions and gave it their own meanings, none of which had anything to do with its being a container for black fizzy drinks. The bottle developed an insidious side. It introduced ownership and property, followed by jealousy and rivalry; relations among individuals and within the community soured. Finally, the Bushman who found the bottle ventured to the end of his known world to throw away the pernicious object. The fate of the Coke bottle dramatised the unpredictable effects of new objects. How much more disruptive was the potential of a new device with the capacity to make any one of its hundreds of millions of owners a broadcaster to wide audiences?
When the
Banaras boatmen mocked their colleague for having a wife who wore the mobile phone in the family, they reflected ideas and practices relating to ownership, gender and household economy. Nor were they alone in their apprehensiveness. In West Bengal, the anthropologist Sirpa Tenhunen remarked that the mobile phone had ‘increased women’s role’ in a vital aspect of social life—‘marriage negotiations’. Women in the rural areas in which Tenhunen lived now used mobile phones to ring a wide circle of connections in the search for suitable brides and grooms.
14
The mobile phone tested household dynamics and gender relations; but the complex and fraught relationship between the phone, the community and the individual was not unique to India. Whereas in the industrialised world a mobile phone was usually a private personal item even for young people, in the developing world, especially in low-income families, frequent contests occurred over whether the phone was the personal property of any single member of a household or whether it should move around—be mobile—between family members. Among poor families in Chile around this time, because of the expense associated with the mobile phone, it was considered common property, intended to promote the ‘collective good’ of the family.
15
In Uganda, ‘some … women were limited in usage of the phone or … put under escalated control by their partners’.
16
For poor Chinese women migrating to big cities, working and courting relationships were initiated and maintained through mobile phones. The women acquired freedom from the ‘restrictive patriarchal conditions in their villages, where they were subordinate in their family and their lives were dictated by housework, farming and after marriage by reproduction’.
17
The Indian context presented similar challenges, though they arose from India’s specific historical, economic and social conditions and ideologies.
Doron
had the chance to be part of the coming of the mobile phone to the ghats. From the late 1990s, he lived periodically among communities of boat people in Banaras. His informants and friends were mostly men, and he had limited interaction with women, especially young brides. However, studies by women scholars illuminated women’s experiences of dealing with the challenges and opportunities presented by the arrival of mobile phones. In the 1990s, phones posed few such dilemmas: the chief accessible telephone was attached to a meter in a yellow-painted Public Call Office (PCO) where a PCO owner supervised calls and took payments.
When mobile phones began to arrive, several questions arose. What was its place in the household, especially in the relationship between a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law? How could a mobile phone be used by young couples in romantic relationships away from the gaze of society? What did the phone mean for people’s understanding of themselves as individuals and of their roles as women, men and family members?
Who will guard the mobile?
Doron was invited to live with a boatman and his family. Like many households in the city, the house accommodated two brothers: Vinod, who was in his late twenties, and was married with an infant son; and his unmarried younger brother, Arun. The brothers owned and operated several boats on one of the major ghats. A few days after Doron’s arrival, Arun left the city to accompany an old family friend to south India. Soon after his departure Vinod injured his foot seriously. Doron arrived home one day to see him lying in bed being nursed by his wife, and in a matter of days his foot became heavily infected, and Vinod had to be admitted to the local hospital with a high fever.