Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India (7 page)

Horses, runners and rulers

Control of information and the movement
of people have always reinforced power. Before industrialisation began in Britain 250 years ago, most people were peasants, living in villages and subsisting off what they or their neighbours grew. Some people travelled. Alexander the Great led an army 3,000 miles (4,800 km) from Greece to Punjab in the fourth century BCE. Genghis Khan’s successors built an empire that stretched from China to Eastern Europe in the thirteenth century. ‘The obstacles and dangers of the road’, Marc Bloch wrote of medieval Europe, ‘in no way prevented travel. But they made each journey an expedition, almost an adventure’.
¹
Most people stayed very close to home. If strangers approached your village, the chances were that the consequences would be unpleasant. A few influential people travelled, and they often travelled long distances; but they travelled slowly. Most often, they travelled to make war, to trade or to worship. Today, too, mobiles phones facilitate all three pursuits, but the world of the cheap cell phone is remarkably egalitarian: almost anyone can become part of it.

Language, writing and printing allowed people to create complex tools, organisations and societies. Spoken language is relatively egalitarian: most people learn to speak. Power-holders need language so that underlings can readily follow instructions. Writing is elitist. Even in the twenty-first century, thirty per cent of India—more than 350 million people—could not read or write. In pre-industrial times, literacy was often seen as a skill akin to magic, and rulers of some of India’s greatest empires were illiterate, like the Mughal emperor Akbar and the Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh.
²
Akbar, who built the vast empire that preceded British rule, had scribes—reporters—placed in all the provinces. ‘Information … flowed constantly … to the Mughal imperial centre’.
³
The Italian traveller Manucci described the daily scene:

It is also a fixed rule of the Moguls that … the public and secret newswriters of the empire must once a week [send] … a sort of gazette … containing the events of most importance. These news-letters are commonly read in the king’s presence by women of the
mahal
[harem] at about nine o’clock in the evening, so that by this means he knows what is going on in his kingdom. There are, in addition, spies, who are also obliged to send in reports weekly…The king sits up till midnight, and is unceasingly occupied with the above sorts of business.
⁴

The Mughal empire at its height
controlled an area larger than independent India. It did so with communications based on horses and runners, on relatively few literate officials and on a system lacking plentiful paper or the printing press. Information and instructions flowed constantly, but did so slowly. In the 1770s, runners who maintained a good pace carried a message from Delhi to Pune—900 miles (1,400 km)—in 22 days.
⁵
In the seventeenth century, the travels of the emperor Shah Jahan ‘scarcely did more than ten miles a day’, and European merchants who used the western port of Surat as their base ‘took around ten weeks’ to reach Agra, 1,100 kilometres away.
⁶

Ordinary people could sometimes travel, often as soldiers or pilgrims. But travel was unusual. A young Brahmin from western India, caught up in the revolt of 1857, had been warned by his father not to leave their village because ‘the roads were said to be no good, being full of all sorts of dangers, with deceitful bands of thugs roaming all around’. He ignored his father’s advice and did not come home for three years.
⁷
The great-great-grandmother of R. K. Narayan (1906–2001), on whose legend he modelled
The Grandmother’s Tale
, walked from Kumbakonam in Tamil Nadu to Pune in the 1830s in search of a missing husband.
⁸
When they returned,

they were carried in two palanquins and had a retinue of bearers who took over in relays at different stages, and many torch-bearers and lancemen to protect them from robbers and wild animals when they crossed jungles in the mountain ghats…[They] arrived about a month later in Bangalore…
⁹

Word-of-mouth and gossip were the ways of common communication. ‘You may seal the mouth of a furnace’, the priest tells Narayan’s great-great-grandmother, worried about her daughter’s apparent widowhood, ‘but you cannot shut the mouth of gossip’.
¹⁰

Rulers recognised that controlling information was essential for maintaining power. They struggled to seal choke-points to prevent valuable news from leaking out from their territories, and they aimed to put the messengers of rivals on their own payrolls so that secret beans might be spilled. A British officer in the state of Awadh in north India in 1844 complained that his instructions from the Governor-General reached the ruler of Awadh before they reached him: ‘the identical letter arrived at Lucknow three days before the original reached me’.
¹¹
Being a writer or message bearer had rewards—payments from various sources—but it also had dangers. When messages and their bearers ‘disappeared, it was not always clear … if bandits … had killed them or … a political rival’.
¹²

Commercial networks carried
information and funds across India with surprising speed. In a celebrated example in 1761, the bankers of Pune were first to know of the Maratha defeat at Panipat 800 miles (1200 km) away—and ‘thus managed to limit their losses’.
¹³
A palanquin, carried in turns by a party of eight bearers, covered between 25 and 40 kilometres (15 to 25 miles) a day, even on poor roads.
¹⁴
When Sayyid Ahmed Barelvi, a forerunner of today’s
taliban
, embarked on
jihad
from a base in Peshawar in 1830, he had already travelled across north India, collecting funds and followers. After he was killed by the armies of the Sikh kingdom of Ranjit Singh in 1831, two of his followers ‘created an effective network for transferring men and supplies, primarily from Bengal [1,400 miles or 2,200 km away], across upper India and to the frontier’.
¹⁵
Such things were possible, but they were not common, and they required exceptional circumstances and influence.

Travel and knowledge tended to be confined to political rulers and religious authorities—the people who controlled the sword and interpreted the supernatural. As Bloch wrote of medieval Europe, ‘to control a country, there was no other means than to ride through it incessantly in all directions’.
¹⁶
In India, social and cultural restraints curtailed the movement of people, particularly poor and low-status people. The caste system of Hindus imposed limits appropriate to people of particular status. Ancient scripture validated the exclusion of low castes from information:

If a Sudra … listens in on a vedic recitation, his ears shall be filled with molten tin or lac; if he repeats it, his tongue shall be cut off; if he commits it to memory, his body shall be split asunder.
¹⁷

Low-status people in many parts of India were bound to their places of birth and held in semi-bondage by caste superiors. ‘In many cases’, writes Sudha Pai, ‘they were bonded slaves, often for generations, with no freedom to move out from their villages’.
¹⁸

Brahmins and other high-status people enjoyed wide freedom of movement. Long before British rule or railways, Nambudiri Brahmins from Kerala in the southwest provided priests for the temple at Badrinath in the Himalayas.
¹⁹
In Kerala, ‘complete freedom of movement’, Miller wrote, ‘was denied to all but Nambudiri Brahmins, who helped to maintain a unified system of values’, which, not surprisingly, validated their pre-eminence.
²⁰
‘Ananda Ranga Pillai never fails to mention in his diary’, Deloche writes,

the brahmins in the service of Dupleix [the 18
^th
-century French adversary of the English] who conveyed the letters from Mahe to Pondicherry [i.e., from Kerala on the west coast to the French centre on the east coast].
²¹

Nambudiri Brahmins were ‘sometimes used as ambassadors
and even for espionage’.
²²
In the twenty-first century, mobile phones democratised espionage and subversion, as the skilfully directed mayhem unleashed on Mumbai on 26 November 2008 illustrated (
Chapter 8
). Scarcely literate youths from rural Pakistani Punjab reported by mobile phones to distant minders as they slaughtered bewildered Mumbaikars.
²³

The East India Company, which slithered into sovereignty over India in the eighteenth century, was founded on ledger books and office procedures. One of its strengths lay in the systematic control of information that a crumbling Mughal empire could not equal. Indeed, when the Company began to incorporate Mughal officers into its apparatus, they were instructed by exasperated officials of the Company ‘to number all … letters that it may easily be known if any letter miscarries’.
²⁴
The bureaucratic colonial state quantified and recorded relentlessly. ‘The conquest of India’, Cohn wrote, ‘was a conquest of knowledge’—initially for profit, then for power.
²⁵

When the printing press began to spread in India from the 1780s, it was scarcely more democratic than the handwriting of court reporters and imperial agents. The East India Company saw the press as a tool of government, enabling the laws and requirements of rulers to be brought to the notice of servants and subjects more quickly than squads of copyists could manage. The press, however, became as big a nuisance for rulers of India as it was for rulers in Europe. James Hicky’s
Bengal Gazette
, often deemed the first newspaper in India, was dedicated to attacking the Governor-General, Warren Hastings; it lasted two years before Hicky’s press and type were seized by the government while Hicky was in jail for debt.
²⁶

The printing press, and its offspring
the newspaper, were essential ingredients of modern individualism, ‘public spheres’ and public life. They allowed information—‘news’—to be reproduced and to spread widely and quickly. As an English nobleman complained in the seventeenth century, newspapers enabled ‘the multitude’ to become ‘too familiar with the actions and counsels of their superiors’.
²⁷
But printing was costly. ‘I calculated’, wrote an Englishman setting up a press in Meerut in north India in 1845–6, ‘that two thousand five hundred pounds would cover every expense’.
²⁸
This was a huge sum by Indian standards and a substantial one even in Britain at that time. The Englishman and his Meerut-bound press underlined the fact that print and newspapers were not technologies available to everyone. He had to find a press, types, compositors and pressmen and then convey them from Kolkata, first to Allahabad by river barge and then 400 miles (650 kilometres) to Meerut by bullock cart. To produce the paper required improvisation: a tombstone as a makeshift lay-out table and brandy to keep up the spirits of the printers. ‘If you were to treat the hands a couple of bottles of brandy, they would stay and set it all up again’, the chief printer said after a disastrous first attempt to print the paper. It eventually appeared; but the process was cumbersome and complex.
²⁹
‘Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one’, observed A. J. Liebling. And even then, he might have added, it was not simple and straightforward.

The contest to control the press in India continued throughout British rule. Colonial officials felt contradictory pressures. At one level, they discounted Indian-run publications as unimportant in a country that was 90 per cent illiterate. At another level, however, they worried about the reach and endurance of print and the authority it gave to ‘wild rumours’ and extravagant criticism. The short-lived Vernacular Press Act of 1878 attempted to control Indian-language newspapers and indicated the anxieties of British governments once printing presses were capable of being easily moved around India on railway trains rather than barges and bullock carts.
³⁰
Governments imposed various forms of censorship on the press during the world wars and the nationalist challenges of the 1920s and 1930s. The most recent example of heavy-handed censorship—as opposed to various other ways of influencing printed material—was the nineteen months of Mrs Gandhi’s ‘emergency’ in 1975–7.

What has this discussion
of the Mughal empire, pre-modern communication, printing presses and censorship to do with mobile phones in the twenty-first century? The answer is simple: it emphasises the contrast—the revolutionary change—between how the mass of people communicated in the past and the way in which the mobile phone transformed the ability to communicate in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Imagine a
Monty Python
-style scene, as the editors of the magazine
India Today
did with a cover theme in 2002. (See
Illus. 2
). An illiterate Mughal emperor on his mobile phone takes calls from round the provinces, while women of the harem are on their own mobile phones making social calls—no more having to read boring spies’ reports to an illiterate ruler. The fantasy catches something significant: the mass mobile phone enabled the illiterate to communicate and the disempowered to connect. The fantasy also hints at the disruption that the mobile phone threatens for relations between men and women. Unless we understand the ways in which information moved in the past, we cannot appreciate the changes in private and public life that the mass mobile phone made possible.