The Great Indian Phone Book: How the Cheap Cell Phone Changes Business, Politics, and Daily Life

352 Pages·2013·1.93 MB·English

by  Assa Doron

THE
G R E AT I N D I A N
P H O N E B O O K
• • • • • • •
How the Cheap Cell Phone
Changes Business, Politics,
and Daily Life
• • • • • • •
ASSA DORON
AND
ROBIN JEFFREY
THE GREAT INDIAN PHONE BOOK

ASSA DORON and ROBIN JEFFREY
The Great Indian
Phone Book
How the Cheap Cell Phone Changes
Business, Politics, and Daily Life
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
2013
Copyright © Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey, 2013
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First published in the United Kingdom in 2013 by
C. Hurst & Co (Publishers) Ltd.,
41 Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3PL
First Harvard University Press edition, 2013
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Doron, Assa.
The great Indian phone book : how the cheap cell phone changes
business, politics, and daily life / Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-07268-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Cell phones—Social aspects—India. I. Jeffrey, Robin. II. Title.
HE9715.I4D67 2013
384.5’350954—dc23 2012040090
CONTENTS
Preface ix
Glossary xv
Abbreviations xvii
List of Maps, Illustrations, Figures and Tables xxi
Acknowledgements xxvii
Radio Frequency and Mobile Phones xxxi
Introduction: ‘So Uncanny and Out of Place’ 1
In India 2
In the world 9
In conclusion 13
PART ONE
CONTROLLING
1. Controlling Communication 19
Horses, runners and rulers 20
Untying communication 32
2. Celling India 39
Act I: ‘… Within a fortnight …’ 41
Act II: Sidelining the referee 47
Act III: Bread, clothing, shelter—and a mobile 53
Act IV: Schools for scandal 57
PART TWO
CONNECTING
3. Missionaries of the Mobile 65
Man’s best friend 66
v
CONTENTS
Talk time—small, medium, large 70
The art of retail 75
4. Mechanics of the Mobile 89
People 90
Factory workers 90
Tower walas 94
Mistriis 97
Trainers and trainees 100
Process 104
The Care Centre 104
PART THREE
CONSUMING
5. For Business 115
On the sea … 118
Around the globe … 121
At the bank … 123
On the river … 131
On the farm … 137
Empowering, ensnaring or just chatting …? 141
6. For Politics 143
‘Smart mobs’ in the world 144
‘Smart organisations’ in India 146
Limits, lessons and possibilities 158
7. For Women and Households 165
Who will guard the mobile? 170
The household mobile 172
Ownership and property 176
Romance, marriage and the mobile 178
8. For ‘Wrongdoing’: ‘Waywardness’ to Terror 185
‘Waywardness’ 187
Pornography 191
Crime 197
Scandal and surveillance 202
Espionage and terror 205
Conclusion: ‘It’s the autonomy, stupid’ 209
Health 211
Mobile waste 213
vi
CONTENTS
Social networks 215
Language and media 218
Politics and governance 220
Notes 225
Bibliography 265
Index 281
vii

PREFACE
‘Who did you write this book for?’ a publisher asked us. ‘Our-
selves’, we replied with as close to one voice as possible, given
that Doron was in Australia and Jeffrey in Singapore. But it was
true: this is the book we both were looking for in 2008 when the
puzzle—the miracle, the in-your-faced-ness—of Indian mobile
telephony began to strike us every day.
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Indian telephones. For Jeffrey, it was the marriage of two Canadi-
ans in New Delhi on a sunny Saturday afternoon in December
1967. After the ceremony, a reception was held in the grounds of
a grand old New Delhi bungalow, then occupied by a senior
member of the Canadian High Commission. From mid-afternoon,
attempts were made to telephone the parents of the bride and
groom in Toronto. The project came to resemble a disaster-rescue
saga. Occasionally, the person placing the call—we took it in
shifts—would break into the conviviality with an announcement:
‘We nearly got through that time. I think I heard someone pick up
… but it may have been another operator … Our operator says
perhaps in an hour’. Darkness fell, eventually the party broke up,
and the call was never completed. That experience was one of the
few times Jeffrey had any connection with a telephone during two
years in India between 1967 and 1969. The school where he taught
in Chandigarh was believed to have a phone, rumoured to be in
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heard that it had been used. No one Jeffrey knew had a phone or
thought of using one. What, after all, were bicycles, social visits
and Indian Post and Telegraphs (IP&T) for?
ix