In his seminal work, India’s Newspaper Revolution, published by the Oxford University press, sociologist Robin Jeffrey had traced the revolution in the Indian language press that started in the late seventies and follows it up to the present day with the impending inflow of foreign direct investment into the print media. His latest book, Cell Phone Nation, co-authored with Assa Doron, is a comprehensive chronicle of how mobile phones changed Indian lives and in the process India’s economy. Combining a pan optical overview of the broader media landscape with deeply insightful ethnographic vignettes, the authors have attempted an interdisciplinary analysis of popular aspirations and anxieties surrounding mobile telephones.
Since the late 1990s, anthropologists and sociologists have been trying to find answer to two broad questions about the effects of mobile phones. How do people use this new tool? And, does it change the patterns of behaviour
or simply reinforces existing practices? The world over, mobile phones have
provided access to global flow of knowledge, altered local cultural patterns, provided impetus to political and social movements and challenged existing power relations. India, with a population of 1.2 billion, a resilient system of hierarchy founded on caste and gender is an ideal backdrop to find answers to these nagging questions. A globalising India, to which vast number of people are increasingly connected through affordable cell phones, often collides with the realities of day to day life in which power structure and social practices are frequently challenged. The mobile phones are both the cause of such contestations as well as tools to carry out the fight against prevailing mores of sexuality and gender relations.
In this sense the mobile phones embody aspirations and anxieties of a rapid, fundamental change. They are, simultaneously, empowering and disruptive.
As the authors observe, in the Indian context, the cheap mobile phone may not be a magic wand of liberation. But, like the Colt .45 revolver in the Wild West, it has turned out to be ‘the old equaliser’. More than 830 million people live in rural areas and more than half the rural household own mobile phones. Though a potential tool for power-holders, the mobile phone gives the disempowered vast new vistas of entertainment and a chance, howsoever slight, to even up odds a little. It is able to overcome the obvious hurdles of poverty and illiteracy which limit the outreach; it is becoming increasingly affordable and has, therefore, unparalleled reach.
Cell Phone Nation acknowledges the reality that the telecom story is not a fairy tale. Neither the nation state nor the private service providers
are above board. The expansion of the Indian telecom sector is the classical example of crony capitalism, with attendant machinations of greedy politicians, collusive bureaucrats and businessmen which ultimately exploded in 2G scam. Despite this, the authors hold, the consumer has not suffered.
What makes the book eminently enjoyable is its journalistic brio. Capitalists, ministers, boatmen, farmers, advertising geniuses, porn peddlers, political workers and tireless salesmen populate the narrative. The researchers have done elaborate documentation to support their hypotheses. Their fascinating and erudite analysis of how the Indian cell phone industry developed, and what its extraordinary growth has meant for the country is a kind of vade mecum for interested readers, amateurs or specialists, wishing to know how mass technology changes a society.