Authors: Robin Jeffrey
13.
Hiyam Omari-Hijazi and Rivka Ribak, ‘Playing with Fire: On the Domestication of the Mobile Phone among Palestinian Teenage Girls in Israel’,
Information, Communication and Society
, vol. 11, no. 2 (2008), pp. 149–66.
14.
Sirpa Tenhunen, ‘Mobile Technology in the Village: ICTs, Culture and Social Logistics in India’,
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society
(New Series), vol. 14 (2008), p. 524.
15.
Sebastian Ureta, ‘Mobilizing Poverty?: Mobile Phone Use and Everyday Spatial Mobility among Low-Income Families in Santiago, Chile’,
The Information Society
, vol. 24, no. 2 (2008), p. 88.
16.
Kathleen Diga, ‘Mobile Cell Phones and Poverty Reduction: Technology Spending Patterns and Poverty Level Change among Households in Uganda’, written April 2008 and presented at Workshop on the Role of Mobile Technologies, Sao Paolo, Brazil, 2–3 June 2008,
http://www.w3.org/2008/02/MS4D_WS/
papers/position_paper-diga-2008pdf.pdf
(accessed 13 January 2012).
17.
Cara Wallis, ‘The Traditional Meets the Technological: Mobile Navigations of Desire and Intimacy’, in S. H. Donald, T. D. Anderson and D. Spry (eds),
Youth, Society, and Mobile Media in Asia
(London: Routledge, 2010), p. 59.
18.
Steven Derné, ‘Hindu Man Talk About Controlling Women: Cultural Ideas as the Tool of the Powerful’,
Sociological Perspectives
, vol. 37, no. 2 (1994), pp. 203–27. Chanasai Tiengtrakul, ‘Home: Banarasi Women and Perceptions of the Domestic Domain’, in Lina Fruzzetti and Sirpa Tenhunen (eds)
Culture, Power, and Agency: Gender in Indian Ethnography
(Kolkata: Stree, 2006), pp. 22–51.
19.
Sara Dickey, ‘Permeable Homes: Domestic Service, Household Space, and the Vulnerability of Class Boundaries in Urban India’,
American Ethnologist
, vol. 27, no. 2 (2000), p. 470.
20.
Such spatial
classification and gender relations are not static and have changed overtime. For example, Judith Walsh,
Domesticity in Colonial India: What Women Learned When Men Gave Them Advice
(Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).
21.
Gloria G. Raheja and Ann G. Gold,
Listen to the Heron’s Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
22.
Cf. Omari-Hijazi and Ribak, ‘Playing with Fire’, p. 153.
23.
Hindu
, 13 July 2012,
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/
article3632680.ece
(accessed 13 July 2012).
24.
Sara Dickey, ‘Permeable Homes’, p. 474.
25.
Sarah Lamb, ‘The Making and Unmaking of Persons: Notes on Aging and Gender in North India’,
Ethos
, vol. 25, no. 3 (1997), pp. 279–302.
26.
Lamb, ‘The Making and Unmaking’, pp. 289–90
27.
Srimati Basu,
She Comes to Take Her Rights: Indian Women, Property, and Propriety
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1999).
28.
Patricia Uberoi,
Freedom and Destiny: Gender, Family, and Popular Culture in India
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 31.
29.
Ibid.
30.
Katherine Boo wrote about similar telephonic assignations in
Behind the Beautiful Forevers
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012), p. 182.
31.
Michel
Foucault
,
Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth
, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: New Press, 1997). Laura Ahearn,
Invitations to Love: Literacy, Love Letters, and Social Change in Nepal
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).
32.
For detailed discussion of mobile phones as a ‘technology of the self’ in India, see Assa Doron ‘Mobile Persons: Cell Phones, Gender and the Self in North India’,
The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology
, vol 13, no. 4 (2012).
33.
Leela Dube, ‘On the Construction of Gender: Hindu Girls in Patrilineal India’,
EPW
, 4 June 1988, p. 11–19.
34.
See Craig Jeffrey
et al
.,
Degrees without Freedom
.
35.
Uberoi,
Freedom and Destiny
, p. 252.
36.
Anand Giridharadas,
India Calling
(Melbourne: Black Inc., 2011), p. 172.
37.
Horst and Miller,
Cell Phone
, p. 57.
38.
Ibid., p. 173, citing R. T. Smith,
The Patrilocal Family: Power, Pluralism and Politics
(New York and London: Routledge, 1996).
39.
The study of mobile phone usage among Palestinian teenage girls in Israel suggests similar challenges and rigidities. Patriarchy continues to set the tone for household and gender relations, and planned marriage remains a common practice. See Omari-Hijazi and Ribak, ‘Playing with Fire’, p. 159.
40.
Daniel
Miller,
Tales from Facebook
(Cambridge: Polity, 2011), pp. 167–8. See also p. 174, for Miller’s musings on what effect Facebook may have on Trinidad’s ‘shy East Indian girls’ and the possible ‘eventual extinction of this stereotype’.
8. FOR ‘WRONGDOING’: ‘WAYWARDNESS’ TO TERROR
1.
How to manage, control and define what
constitutes obscenity and the ‘public good’ is a politically charged issue. For an excellent summary of these debates in India, see Brinda Bose (ed.),
Gender and Censorship
(Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2006).
2.
See Anita Gurumurthy and Nivedita Menon, ‘Violence Against Women via Cyberspace’,
EPW
, vol. 44, no. 40, 3 October 2009, pp. 19–21.
3.
Indian Express
, 4 February 2012, quoting Justice Altamas Kabir,
www.indianexpress.com/story-print/907671
(accessed on 2 June 2012).
4.
Tehelka
, 31 March 2012, p. 36.
5.
‘Wali’ or male ‘wala’ is a common suffix to denote someone who is engaged in the business of ‘x’. Because it is increasingly common to see women speaking on the phone, such a woman is referred to as a Mobile Wali.
6.
Some of these can be viewed on YouTube, for example,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vcmwohzFHs
; and
7.
See
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011–05–14/patna/29542871_1_bhojpuri-films-bhojpuri-cinema-bollywood-movies
and
http://www.sunday-guardian.com/artbeat/bhojpuri-cd-migrant-movies
(both accessed 20 February 2012)
8.
Vishal Rawlley, ‘Miss Use: A Survey of Raunchy Bhojpuri Music Albums’,
Tasveer Ghar: A Digital Archive of South Asian Popular Visual Culture
,
http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/essay/
66/index.html
(accessed 10 May 2010).
9.
The Bhopuri-speaking area comprises eastern UP, Bihar and Jharkhand, although with recent migration, Bhojpuri is now heard and spoken across India and beyond. Rawlley, ‘Miss Use’.
10.
Manuel also speaks of the parody and raunchiness characteristic of these folk tunes. Manuel,
Cassette Culture
, pp. 133, 172.
11.
Compare this Bhojpuri clip with the more tame, but equally suggestive, Bollywood film song from
Haseena Maan Jaayegi
. The first words are in English: ‘What is you mobile number? What is your smile number? Can we have a private party? What is your private number?’, featuring Karisma Kapoor and Govinda. See
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhHrV5 UsQ_Q
(accessed 10 May 2010).
12.
The association between loose hair and sexuality has long been a theme in South Asian culture.
13.
See
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJOlV0nhVko&feature=relmfu
(accessed 20 February 2012). This song draws on a long tradition of the Bhojpuri Brahe tunes associated with different low castes, such as washer-men and boatmen. See Edward O. Henry, ‘Social Structure and Music: Correlating Musical Genres and Social Categories in Bhojpuri-Speaking India’,
International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music
, vol. 19, no. 2 (1988), pp. 217–27.
14.
There were many more film clips that
played upon the ‘mobile wali’ theme, expressing similar desires and anxieties. For example,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SlwNJbpX5k
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=prGSJQes8_w&feature=related
(accessed 10 April 2012); see also the India Ink blog in the
New York Times
discussing such songs,
http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/20/
colloquial-music-spawns-a-culture-ofromance/
(accessed 14 July 2012)
15.
Duggal,
Mobile Law
, pp. 237, 353, points to section 67 of the Information Technology Act, 2000, as the legislation governing electronic pornography. Possession is not a crime; publishing or transmitting is.
16.
Sumit Sarkar, ‘“Kaliyuga”, “Chakri” and “Bhakti”: Ramakrishna and His Times’,
EPW
, 18 July 1992, p. 1544.
17.
Ibid., p 1550. See also Ratnabali Chatterjee, ‘Representations of Gender in Folk Paintings of Bengal’,
Social Scientist
, vol. 28, nos. ¾ (2000), pp. 7–21.
18.
The arrival of the railways in the nineteenth century also raised patriarchal concerns. Tanika Sarkar,
Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism
(London: Hurst, 2001), pp. 80–1. See also Christopher Pinney, ‘On living in the kal(i)yug: Notes from Nagda, Madhya Pradesh’,
Contributions to Indian Sociology
, vol. 33, no. 1 & 2 (1999), p. 93.
19.
http://www.madaboutads.com/video/telecom/873/lava-mobiles-a10-sorry-no-change.html
(accessed 15 June 2012).
20.
Times of India
, 26 April 2012,
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012–04–26/telecom/31409497_1_mobile-phones-mobile-handsetstouch
(accessed 15 June 2012).
21.
Correspondence, A. Kumar with A. Doron, 8 December 2011.
22.
These were usually traveling music and dance groups that specialised in offering as part of their ‘entertainment package’ nude dancers for bachelor parties. Film clips were circulated by mobile phones.
23.
This figure was hard to corroborate, as was the question of whether female actors earned as much as males.
24.
Vinod Mehta,
Lucknow Boy
(New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2011), p. 84
25.
http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/
living/porn-for-all-seasons
(accessed 20 February 2012).
26.
Raids by police received a boost in the late 1980s with the enactment of obscenity laws. See ‘Obscenity law “a victory” for Indian women’s groups’,
Sydney Morning Herald
, 3 November 1987.
27.
Srivastava analyses this ‘minor’ literature as subversive of the ‘official’ discourse on sexuality and ‘sex education’ in India. Sanjay Srivastava,
Passionate Modernity: Sexuality, Class and Consumption in India
(London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 121–46.
28.
See Lotte Hoek, ‘Cut-Pieces as Stag Film: Bangladeshi Pornography in Action Cinema’,
Third Text
, vol. 24, no. 1 (2010), pp. 135–148; Bhrigupati Singh, ‘Aadamkhor Haseena (The Man-Eating Beauty) and the Anthropology of a Moment’,
Contributions to Indian Sociology
, vol. 42, no. 2 (2008), pp. 249–79.
29.
On pornography and south
India, see
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main5.asp?filename=Ne082804never_mind.asp
(accessed 22 March 2012).
30.
Duggal,
Mobile Law
, pp. 237, 353. The Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act also deals with pornography. See
http://www.priyo.com/tech/2011/05/28/watching-pornography-legal-new-27397.html
(accessed 22 March 2012).