Read Online Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India by Robin Jeffrey - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Robin Jeffrey
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Though we had both used mobile phones in Australia and elsewhere since the mid-1990s, we realised we knew little about them—how they worked, how and where they were made, and who made money from them and how. Such questions provided the motivation for this book—an attempt to piece together the jigsaw of how cell phones came to India and what their impact has been.
We were alsostruck by the fact that so many individuals we met carried a mobile regardless of whether they were boatmen or high officials. In the West, the smart-phone revolution was beginning to make its mark, but up to then, mobile phones were just another telephone, often associated with ‘work’, rather than ‘play’. In India, for millions who never had the luxury and opportunity to communicate through a household fixed-line, the arrival of the cheap cell phone was a revolution, and everyone wanted to have at least one in the family—usually the men, but increasingly women too.
Each of the eight chapters of this book is worth a book in itself, and each is imperfect in ways that we as the authors know too well. But, so far as we can see, there is no book about cell phones—not just in India but worldwide—quite like this one. It’s an attempt to map the mobile-phone food-chain from the Killer Whales at one end to the Small Fry at the other. We’ve divided the book into three sections. The first is called Controlling . Its two chapters examine how powerful people struggle to control information, beginning with the sub-continent’s Mughal rulers 500 years ago but quickly moving to Radio Frequency (RF) spectrum, big business, bureaucrats and politicians today. (There is a note about RF on pp. xxxi-xxxii). The second section is called Connecting . It aims to understand how in less than ten years mobile phones, and the technology to support them, found their way into the hands of hundreds of millions of people in a vast country of dispersed population, low literacy and extensive poverty. The third section of the book constitutes half its content. We call it Consuming . It explores how people in India use cell phones—in business, politics, domestic life and crime.
We had afew advantages when we set ourselves the too-ambitious task of trying to answer our own questions about cell phones. Between the two of us, we have been powering our intellectual lives off the unpredictable electricity of India for more than sixty years. We also had a range of complementary techniques and skills. Jeffrey was trained as a historian but worked most of his academic life in a university department called ‘Politics’. Doron is an anthropologist. Jeffrey’s white hair and forty years of friendships in India sometimes helped to make connections and organise interviews. Doron’s anthropologist’s affability, solid Hindi and myriad connections in Banaras generated revealing conversations with people in all walks of mobile-phone life. He did what anthropologists do: ethnographic fieldwork, based on observation and interviews. He aimed to de-familiarise what seemed a banal topic: mobile phones. These new, small artefacts, which changed the lives of millions and saturated the Indian landscape, had quickly become commonplace and taken-for-granted—an extension of the self—a prosthetic. Often, we had to remind people that the mobile phone was a recent phenomenon whose entry into their lives was worth considering. ‘How’, we would ask, ‘did you do X before you had a phone?’ A pause. ‘Oh, we didn’t of course’.
Geographically, Jeffrey had friends and interests in Kerala, Punjab and New Delhi. Doron had lived and worked in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Goa. In researching this book, we travelled from Thiruvananthapuram to Shimla, and Lucknow to Mumbai, on a number of visits of varying durations. The many debts we incurred during those travels are recorded in the Acknowledgements later in the book. We had relatively formal interviews with more than sixty
Though we had both used mobile phones in Australia and elsewhere since the mid-1990s, we realised we knew little about them—how they worked, how and where they were made, and who made money from them and how. Such questions provided the motivation for this book—an attempt to piece together the jigsaw of how cell phones came to India and what their impact has been.
We were alsostruck by the fact that so many individuals we met carried a mobile regardless of whether they were boatmen or high officials. In the West, the smart-phone revolution was beginning to make its mark, but up to then, mobile phones were just another telephone, often associated with ‘work’, rather than ‘play’. In India, for millions who never had the luxury and opportunity to communicate through a household fixed-line, the arrival of the cheap cell phone was a revolution, and everyone wanted to have at least one in the family—usually the men, but increasingly women too.
Each of the eight chapters of this book is worth a book in itself, and each is imperfect in ways that we as the authors know too well. But, so far as we can see, there is no book about cell phones—not just in India but worldwide—quite like this one. It’s an attempt to map the mobile-phone food-chain from the Killer Whales at one end to the Small Fry at the other. We’ve divided the book into three sections. The first is called Controlling . Its two chapters examine how powerful people struggle to control information, beginning with the sub-continent’s Mughal rulers 500 years ago but quickly moving to Radio Frequency (RF) spectrum, big business, bureaucrats and politicians today. (There is a note about RF on pp. xxxi-xxxii). The second section is called Connecting . It aims to understand how in less than ten years mobile phones, and the technology to support them, found their way into the hands of hundreds of millions of people in a vast country of dispersed population, low literacy and extensive poverty. The third section of the book constitutes half its content. We call it Consuming . It explores how people in India use cell phones—in business, politics, domestic life and crime.
We had afew advantages when we set ourselves the too-ambitious task of trying to answer our own questions about cell phones. Between the two of us, we have been powering our intellectual lives off the unpredictable electricity of India for more than sixty years. We also had a range of complementary techniques and skills. Jeffrey was trained as a historian but worked most of his academic life in a university department called ‘Politics’. Doron is an anthropologist. Jeffrey’s white hair and forty years of friendships in India sometimes helped to make connections and organise interviews. Doron’s anthropologist’s affability, solid Hindi and myriad connections in Banaras generated revealing conversations with people in all walks of mobile-phone life. He did what anthropologists do: ethnographic fieldwork, based on observation and interviews. He aimed to de-familiarise what seemed a banal topic: mobile phones. These new, small artefacts, which changed the lives of millions and saturated the Indian landscape, had quickly become commonplace and taken-for-granted—an extension of the self—a prosthetic. Often, we had to remind people that the mobile phone was a recent phenomenon whose entry into their lives was worth considering. ‘How’, we would ask, ‘did you do X before you had a phone?’ A pause. ‘Oh, we didn’t of course’.
Geographically, Jeffrey had friends and interests in Kerala, Punjab and New Delhi. Doron had lived and worked in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Goa. In researching this book, we travelled from Thiruvananthapuram to Shimla, and Lucknow to Mumbai, on a number of visits of varying durations. The many debts we incurred during those travels are recorded in the Acknowledgements later in the book. We had relatively formal interviews with more than sixty
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