Authors: Robin Jeffrey
‘WAYWARDNESS’ TO TERROR
| Dosti Jazz wali se : | make friends with the woman who uses Jazz [the name of a service provider]. |
| Pyar Ufone wali se : | make love with the woman who uses Ufone. |
| Bat Telenor wali se : | make conversation with the woman using Telenor. |
| Gift lo Zong wali se : | receive gifts from woman who uses Zong. |
| Date maro Warid wali se : | go on dates with the girl who uses Warid. |
| Per : | but. … |
| Shaadi karo baghair mobile wali se : | marry the girl without a mobile! |
| SMS from a Pakistani mobile user |
If mobile phones were as commonplace as footwear, we have to acknowledge that shoes, though they provide mobility, security and status, may also be caked in slime from walking in muck or capped with steel for kicking heads. Users of mobile phones have dark sides. The mobile phone made pornography more widely available in India than ever before—and in high-resolution colour.
Such material ranged from the mildly suggestive to the deeply disturbing.
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The worst of the latter broke the criminal law or ventured into areas that many argued
should
be governed by criminal law. But the law trailed behind the potential that the mobile phone offered for pornography, fraud and extortion.
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‘The courts needed to “educate” themselves about how the mobile phone can be used for criminal purposes’, a Supreme Court judge lamented in 2012.
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The mobile phone offered opportunities that no newspaper, telegram or landline could rival to spread scandal, exploit the gullible and coordinate crime, violence, espionage and terror.
The mischief
that mobile phones could make was limited only by the imaginations of their users. At an innocent end of the spectrum, they could carry suggestive songs and videos to anyone with the initiative to download them. Such saucy materials provoked outcries that the mobile phone was undermining the values and practices of decent families (
Chapter 7
). According to such critiques, suggestive songs and video clips led inevitably to pornography, and the mobile phone created a market for pornography that previously was unattainable.
‘Wrongdoing’ comes in different shapes and sizes and sometimes lies in the eye of the beholder. How best to organise an analysis of the cell phone’s contribution to wrongdoing in India? One way would be to approach ‘wrongdoing’ in terms of social class: from the multi-billion-rupee frauds and tricks of the superrich to the intimidation and extortion of ‘common criminals’. Instead, however, we have chosen to work from the risqué and the naughty to the terrifying and horrendous. Part of the ‘equalising’ quality of the mobile phone lies in its ability to let poor people become globally recognised—‘famous’—by doing terrible things. We begin by focusing on the songs and video clips that scandalised conservatives but were immensely popular and therefore remunerative for those who produced them. Similarly, gossip and scandal, ever practised among human beings, acquired new reach, circulation and permanence. Pornography—explicit and often violent sex—also found a new medium and greatly increased consumption. The mobile phone embellished and refined old-style crimes and allowed the planning, coordination and execution of terror. And to combat all these, the state searched for ways to ‘protect’ its citizens by monitoring their communications in ways that sometimes could also be construed as criminal.
‘Waywardness’
‘It is the girls who have gone astray’, a village elder told a journalist after the rape of a girl near New Delhi in 2012. ‘The girls … are so scantily clad that it’s shameful. … Mobile phones have given a lot of freedom to these girls and that’s why they are behaving in a wild manner’.
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It was a common and unsurprising theme. The autonomy that the phone provided led young people, especially girls, to elude the authority of those who in the past would have controlled and disciplined them. The phone symbolised social disruption.
Advertising
campaigns used alluring women to promote mobile phones, and makers of music videos incorporated the apparent liberation bestowed by the mobile phone into songs and dances for DVDs and mobiles. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, it was common in Indian cities to see middle-class women, dressed in Western-style business suits or jeans, using their mobile phones wherever they went. Advertisers tapped into an image of the mobile as an instrument of change. For new, ‘liberated’ women, the phone was portrayed as a perfect vehicle for gossip (
gupshup
), romance or the promotion of exciting social relations.
Beyond India’s cities, and among conservative people in the cities themselves, the mobile phone became a metaphor for changing values and practices related to domesticity, sexuality and morality. In a time of rapid change and disarray, certainties were challenged by ballooning consumerism, relentless migration and unprecedented access to information. The mobile phone embodied the ills of an anxious modernity.
Mobile Wali
, a Bhojpuri-language video about a woman with a mobile phone, sung by Manoj Tiwari, was one of many film clips circulating on mobiles in Banaras in 2010.
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Many songs and videos featured women—popularly known as ‘mobile walis’—speaking on their mobile phones to their lovers. Though available in CD/VCD shops and later on YouTube, they were most popular on mobile phones.
The clips featured seductively clad women using mobile phones, dancing in come-hither style and singing lyrics peppered with double meanings.
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Conservatives dubbed them as soft pornography.
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This is not to suggest that risqué entertainment did not exist in earlier times. Before it entered the mainstream music market, popular Bhojpuri music was characterised by ‘clever phrasing, double entendres, subtle innuendos and suggestive imagery that enabled it to convey taboo sexual acts and desires’.
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This, however, gave way to what the same critic called the ‘raunchy flavour’ of Bhojpuri music as it became popular throughout India in VCD/DVD formats and on mobile phones.
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Bhojpuri music retained its capacity to satirise the ‘modern condition’ and laugh at the antics of both women and men as they coped with new times and customs.
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The
Mobile Wali
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clip began with Tiwari (the singer) daydreaming of a woman he met in a bar. It cut to a scene where a glamorous young woman in a halter-neck top, tight jeans and loose hair danced seductively while drinking alcohol and talking on her mobile phone. (See
Illus. 31
and
32
). This Mobile Wali was depicted as a daring, sexy tease: a woman who defied the norms that usually bind Indian women.
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She danced, smiled, drank, smoked and wore skimpy clothes—all with a mobile phone in her hand. This was her style, as the chorus said:
Mobile in [her]
hand, she has a smile on her lips.
She radiates style whenever she moves sideways, forwards, up or down.
Everyone, including neighbours are dying [from excitement]
[Because] the babe, having drunk beer … Oh baby, having drunk beer, …The baby (babe) dances chhamak-chhamak-chham.
The following scenes revolved around the woman who made men drool as she strutted around with a mobile glued to her ear. She was both objectified as a
femme fatale
and empowered as someone who could choose from those around her or from others at the end of her phone. The song continued:
Forever ready to explode with anger [and] swear words on your lips, You move the way life moves out of one’s body [when one dies].
The cap worn back to front, dark sunglasses, the cigarette is Gold Flake [a famous Indian brand],
I’m working at trying [to seduce you], there is still some time to go before we get married.
Portrayed as a loose, urban woman, the Mobile Wali broke long-established rules of conduct, partly empowered by her mobile phone. It could lead a village elder to apoplexy.
Mobile Wali Dhobinaya
, a video-clip by Dinesh Lal, was similar.
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(See
Illus. 33
). In the first song, entitled ‘A Mobile in the hands that normally clutch a rolling pin, My, My!’, a low-caste young washerwoman in a white sari walked joyfully in the fields near her village with her mobile phone. (This said a lot about expectations of network coverage in rural India in 2009.) Infatuated with her white mobile, she talked to an anonymous person and kissed her cell phone. The scene of the young maiden dancing in the meadows, uninhibited and daydreaming of love was common in Indian cinema, and the song used this framework to emphasise the changing times. Women were no longer bound by household tasks, such as making chapattis with a rolling pin, but instead were free to roam the fields and speak to their lovers on the mobile phone. Like the
Mobile Wali
clip of Manoj Tiwari, this video lampooned the men, who were depicted as drooling over this free-spirit, ‘the mobile woman’.
We found
more than a dozen popular songs at this time that highlighted the possibility of connecting young men and women through the mobile phone.
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The Mobile Wali was anything but the demure maiden presented to a select group of future in-laws prior to an arranged marriage. Rather, she was flirtatious, uninhibited and confident, challenging established social conduct and ‘traditional’ values. None of this, of course, was ‘pornographic’ or contrary to the law.
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Yet for guardians of old values, the unconstrained freedom enjoyed by the Mobile Wali led morality towards dark, wayward ways.
In the
Mobile Wali
clip, the young woman remained remarkably composed, comfortably entering male-only arenas and male-dominated practices, such as drinking alcohol in a bar and smoking in public spaces, all the while talking on her mobile phone. Only among urban sophisticates could such conduct be imagined. The singer and his rustic male companions went to pieces under her spell. The main male character warned his friends: ‘She shoots Cupid’s arrows with her eyes’. True to the Bhojpuri genre of satire, the clip ridiculed the lewd, drunken men at the same time as it reminded viewers of the challenges that new attitudes and technologies presented to old values. In the next stanza, the young men come upon a Brahmin priest reciting prayers while fingering his
maala
(prayer beads). Surrounding him, they chant verses to the elephant god Ganesh, and the pandit becomes increasingly confused:
‘Om Gam Ganapati Gam Gavamahe’. [a prayer offered to Lord Ganesh]
It’s good if the breeze keeps blowing like this.
Do glance this way, too, mate, sometimes,
Regardless of whether you call me ‘a rotten guy’ or ‘sinner’ [these remarks are addressed to the pandit, daring him to join in]
It’s awful—this Kaliyug [age of darkness]—[and] Mangaru agrees.
Even Pandit ji here has begun to comprehend the epidemic of fashion.
The clip
vividly illustrated the confrontations with tradition that cheap mobile phones provoked. The panicking priest remin ded viewers of the precariousness of religious structures and the frailty of people in authority. In the final scene, the priest succumbed to temptation and joined the men in a dance around the woman who still held her magic wand—her mobile phone.
Invoking the notion of Kaliyug, the final and most troubled of the four eras of cyclical time in Hindu cosmology, drew attention to the social and moral degeneration of the digital age. This critique was reminiscent of mid-nineteenth-century Bengal, where the motif was used in popular media to describe the anxieties of the time.
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The colonial period in Bengal was unsettled by dislocation and the changing status of men, many of whom moved from familiar villages to alienating towns and cities to take up clerical posts. Concerns about the corrosive effects of such movement on social bonds and gender relations found satirical outlets in literature and art, such as in Kalighat paintings. Much of this Kaliyug critique focused on conjugal relations, particularly images of insubordinate, lazy and luxurious women dominating the emasculated landowner-turned-struggling-clerk. The implication was that even the pure Hindu wife—the last bastion of national identity—had lost her immunity to colonial domination and was increasingly infected by Western values and practices.
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The
Mobile Wali Dhobinaya
video clip had similar concerns. The attraction and dangers of the village Mobile Wali betrayed a larger anxiety: that of the ‘village’ divested of its men who increasingly moved to the cities in search of work. The sari-clad wife roamed alone in the fields, with only a cell phone to communicate with her absent husband. The theme recurred in many video clips where the bemused Bihari migrant labourer arrives in the city. He finds a forbidding place, filled with voluptuous Mobile Walis, riding on scooters and confidently chatting on their mobile phones in public. This time, however, it is the Bihari
bhaiya
(village guy) who was ridiculed, a shadow of his former male-self, depicted as helpless and confused at the sight of these city-women with phones clapped to their ears. The mobile phone thus embodied a number of processes, integrated in the familiar motif of Kaliyug, that denoted how consumerism and technology were breaking down ‘traditional’ moral and social order.
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