Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India (6 page)

Curiously, the social aspects appeared to trump the business ones that were originally envisaged as providing the most important market for mobile phones. It is worth recalling that the businessmen who propagated the first telephones in North America took time to discover that the desire for social conversation sold phones more widely and quickly than a wish to do business or to call for help.
³²

Other research into the
social aspects of the mobile phone focused on ‘performativity’—the way a device became a prop that individuals used in presenting themselves to the world. Everyone has a sense of how the world sees them, and everyone thinks, at least occasionally, about how they are presenting themselves to their world. Unlike a striking haircut, a flashy watch or particular physical mannerisms, the mobile phone not only allowed the individual to make a fashion statement but also to become a broadcast personality and have an audience of thousands.
³³

Indians were not alone in their anxieties about the challenges mobile phones set for social practices, religion, government control and state security. Agonised questions were asked everywhere. In Japan, an early refrain was: ‘What is this mobile phone doing to our young people?’ And in one of the first books about the effects of the cell phone in a specific country: four of the fifteen chapters concerned young people.
³⁴
In India, the question was often: should a woman be allowed to have a mobile phone at all (
Chapter 7
)? In conservative families, a new bride’s mobile might be taken from her on arrival at her husband’s household. In its fostering of individual privacy, the mobile phone brought a disruptive intruder into social relationships, gender hierarchies and patriarchal order. In Africa and the Caribbean, on the other hand, a young woman with a mobile phone was a common sight.
³⁵
A character in an African short story says:

Most of the women who own phones get them from men, who also feed the phones regularly with airtime. … Sometimes somebody gets into a serious crisis with a wife or girlfriend because he has refused to buy her a phone or to pay for airtime.
³⁶

In Jamaica, it was widely understood that one of the three common uses of a mobile phone was for ‘sexual or potential sexual liaisons’. The other two were for economic transactions and church networking.
³⁷

Religious use of the cell
phone underlines the point that
people
wherever they live invest the mobile phone with meanings that fit existing practices and requirements. People ‘appropriate’ or ‘domesticate’ the device, and such appropriations vary across social and cultural settings.
³⁸
The mobile entered the lives of Muslims in Malaysia and Jews in Israel differently, yet in both places religious authorities sought to harness the phone to faith. In Malaysia, anxiety at the corrupting effects of global influences prompted governments to endow the cell phone with a moral character, hence mobile phones had Islamic qualities ascribed to them to incorporate them in everyday Muslim life.
³⁹
To strip the mobile of its Western veneer led to the creation of the first fully Islamic mobile phone, launched by Ilkone in the United Emirates in 2004. The CEO explained that

consumers nowadays view mobile phones as devices which can add value to their self being and inner feelings rather than just a simple communication tool. Ilkone i800 is specially designed to serve Muslims all across the world to address their needs, and add value to their spiritual self being.
⁴⁰

The phone was welcomed in many Muslim countries. It offered automatic and precise prayer timing, alarms to note the call to prayer, direction-finding to position the user towards Mecca and the full text of the Holy Qur’an with English translations. In Indonesia, mobile-phone service providers in Java offered an array of religious ringtones and special arrangements to cater for extra SMS traffic during religious holidays.
⁴¹

In Israel, orthodox religious leaders similarly battled to shield moral integrity from a mobile-phone market that offered corrupting content, including girls and gambling. The religious establishment used its significant purchasing power to make business heed their demands.
⁴²
In 2005 rabbis joined with one of the smaller mobile operators (Mirs) to launch the ‘kosher cellular phone’, which religious leaders told their followers to purchase. Supported by a growing number of applications, the kosher phone aimed to supplant the ‘sacrilegious’ offerings of competing service providers. More than 10,000 numbers for dating services and phone sex were blocked. Calls to kosher phones cost less than 2 cents a minute, compared with 9.5 cents for non-kosher phones, and on the Sabbath every call was penalised with a charge of $2.44 a minute.
⁴³

Users in India and Sri Lanka also turned the mobile phone towards religious fulfilment. In India screensavers featured saints, gods and goddesses; ringtones buzzed with
bhajans
(devotional songs). Pilgrims carried their cell phones to document their journey, subsequently showing pictures to friends and relatives back home. The album of sacred images and sounds provided evidence of the cultural capital collected on the journey. The digital images enabled those unable to make the journey to gain merit through the sacred vision (
darshan
) of the deity, viewed on the handset.
⁴⁴
Digitised religion catered for all faiths, including Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians, and was not restricted to religious material. Mobile phone services also offered images of sexy girls, popular songs and love horoscopes.

In Sri Lanka, the anthropologist
Dennis McGilvray discovered the transnational and spiritual significance of the technology when he visited a longtime Sufi Sheikh friend. The Sheikh used cell phones to ‘confer blessings and curative incantations on his followers, some of whom live in Denmark and New Zealand’. The scale of his operation was remarkable:

[The Sheikh] claims he receives 1000 cellphone calls every day from disciples and seekers asking for his divine blessings via cellphone. His followers regularly give him the latest model cellphones as a devout gift to their Sufi master, and he in turn passes his used cellphones on to his favourite followers, who treasure the worn-out equipment that has touched his saintly ears and transmitted his saintly words. He said he has gone through 50 cellphones in the past ten years, each one acquiring
barakat
[charismatic power] from heavy use. Spiritually speaking, this is a win-win form of recycling.
⁴⁵

In Indonesia too, ‘mobile religiosity’, Bart Barendregt concluded, ‘has become a business just like any other’.
⁴⁶

Not all of the uses for which people deployed the mobile phone were benign. The final chapter of this book looks at ways in which cell phones were used for everything from simple nastiness to unpitying terror. Modern states struggle to monitor and control mobile telephony and prevent users from subverting the state.
⁴⁷
In China, governments aimed to control the digital flow of information as tightly as possible, yet at the same time to promote a market economy and the adoption of new technology by an increasingly prosperous and educated population. The time-tested method of mutual spying—squeal-on-thy-neighbour—was one way of monitoring. Citizens were invited to email a website or phone a hotline to report illicit trafficking of audiovisual information, including pornography.
⁴⁸
There were higher-tech methods. ‘It is not complicated to add an intrafirm surveillance system over mobile communication—both voice telephony and SMS’, wrote a scholar of the Chinese mobile. A company could readily set up a factory-based surveillance system and put a ‘wireless leash’ on its employees.
⁴⁹
Governments staged education drives to promote ‘traditional values and healthy social norms’ among the youth ‘as an alternative to the corrupt individual moral practices’.
⁵⁰

In conclusion

In the industrialising, urbanising
world, individual merit, individual mobility and individual expression have been steadily celebrated for the past 200 years. Pressure of ideas and economics has nudged India in similar directions; but even in the twenty first century structures of authority—gender, caste, class and family—impose limitations on many people’s ability to imagine or conduct themselves independently of such frameworks. This is where the disruptive potential of the mobile phone becomes significant: the new tool affords the possibility of escaping existing structures. People, of course, must already have the imagination to want to do things differently. Only then, as we try to illustrate in the following chapters, do they use the technology to save money independently of a spendthrift husband (
Chapter 5
), infect others with commitment to a cause (
Chapter 6
), or communicate with a sweetheart without the approval of the family (
Chapter 7
). The consequences of such actions are often unanticipated. Their cumulative effects alter expectations about how people should live and present tough puzzles for scholars, policy-makers and politicians.

Mobile phones can both empower and disempower, and it would be a distraction to focus on questions of ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The technology exists; immensely powerful economic forces, augmented by widespread social acceptance, have disseminated it widely; and it will only go away if a major cataclysm befalls humanity. We live with mobile telephony, and most of us relish the benefits. India in this sense is no different from other places. But the disabling inequalities and the diversity of India mean that the disruptive potential of the cell phone is more profound than elsewhere and the possibilities for change more fundamental.

Like Johnny Cash, we want
to walk the line, namely that between proclaiming the uniqueness of India on one side and over-emphasising irresistible, universal forces on the other. Easy, private communication introduced tensions and conflicts into households from South Africa to Japan and Finland to Israel.
⁵¹
In each place, just as in India, specific histories and ideas shaped anxieties and aspirations. Historically, too, there was nothing new in technological innovation disrupting practices relating to gender and social customs. ‘New forms of communication’, Marvin wrote of the nineteenth century, ‘created unprecedented opportunities not only for courting and infidelity, but for romancing unacceptable persons outside one’s own class, and even one’s own race’.
⁵²
India’s resilient hierarchies have made its encounter with the cell phone more significant, because it gives the lowly poor a potential that has not before been possible for people of their status. In India, autonomy has often in the past, and still even today, been rationed on the basis of gender, caste and class. Such constraints have been eroding slowly, but affordable mobile communication presents them with greater challenges by offering new and relished opportunities. An Australian resident of Delhi experienced the poignant puzzle:

On one construction site there were a few labourers, one gentleman looking quite old and having no teeth, probably illiterate, was mixing cement and kept smiling at me. So I went over just to say a few words in Hindi. He had one of the large Samsung smart phones; it was so uncanny and out place. There amongst the dust, pillars and rubble of a building site was this person, dressed very poorly, holding and obviously enjoying his smart phone. He was using one of the applications, but I’m not sure which. Still curious about which application he was enjoying.
⁵³

Such curiosity—about what
is happening, why, how and what it means—fuels our inquiries in this book.

PART ONE

CONTROLLING

1

CONTROLLING COMMUNICATION

I began to sense an unholy alliance among many politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen to stop people from taking power into their own hands through literacy and community-based programs—and through communications.

Sam Pitroda,
Harvard Business Review
, 1993

A little of this
book is
about
subversion and spying, and it is also about governments and high-stakes capitalism. Most of all, it is about ordinary people’s lives and how they alter as their access to information changes. At the centre of the story is the mobile phone. To appreciate the remarkable transformation that it wrought in India in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and why this was especially noteworthy, we need to understand how ideas and information were communicated in the past. Only then can we gauge the extent of the change that the mass-ownership of mobile phones made possible. Mass consumption of mobile phones pulverised characteristics of ‘old India’: the relative isolation of most of its people, the difficulty of movement and the fact that information was more available to the powerful than to the poor and to men more than to women. All these conditions were reinforced by the
ideology and practices of caste.