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print versionIndia Ink, The New York Times, October 29, 2013
Morality and Mobile Phones in India
By ASSA DORON and ROBIN JEFFREY
Danish Siddiqui/Reuters
A man speaking on a mobile phone in Mumbai, Maharashtra, on Feb. 6, 2012.
The cheap mobile phone is the most disruptive device to hit humanity since shoes. It’s no accident that “barefoot†comes even before “pregnant and in the kitchen†in the male chauvinist’s trinity. Today, keeping mobile phones out of the hands of women has become a crusade for gray-bearded chauvinists in India.
The cheap mobile is particularly troublesome in India to those who want to preserve old controls, as Ellen Barry wrote recently. “The mobile plays a main role,†a male elder in a village near New Delhi told her as he described the temptations that personal communications posed for unrestrained young women. “A girl sits on a bus, she calls a male friend, asks him to put money on her mobile. Is he going to put money on her mobile for free? No. He will meet her at a certain place, with five of his friends, and they will call it rape.â€
In West Africa and the Caribbean, people have been putting credit on other people’s phones for 15 years, as the anthropologist Daniel Miller has written. But in India, the old-style moral guardians assert that such demonstrations of autonomy lead to rape and murder.
India’s struggle with mobiles and morality began in 2004, just as mobile phones were becoming affordable for the middle class. Two New Delhi high-school students used a cell phone to make a video of “an intimate moment,†as the police and the Los Angeles Times described it. The clip quickly sped round the digital universe through multimedia message service (MMS). India beat its breast about threats to traditional values. And porn entrepreneurs who download pornography on phones for a fee added it to their growing repertoire.
In 2004, phones and talk time were still relatively expensive in India, though prices were falling rapidly, and the country had a mere 34 million mobile subscribers. Today, official figures show more than 900 million subscribers – 75 percent of the country. Perhaps a third of these may be inactive numbers, but it still averages one phone for every two Indians.
You can buy a secondhand phone for less than $10, and a dollar will let you talk for three hours if you choose your plan carefully. A phone is not far away from anyone any more – even from young women and low-caste people. And for high-status men who have been accustomed to obedience and deference from these quarters, cheap phones are a menace.
The cheap mobile unsettles long-standing gender relations because it introduces a means of autonomy that was not present before. The sociologist Manuel Castells exquisitely captured the essence when he wrote that, “mobile communication is not about mobility but about autonomy.†It’s autonomy that makes a personal, private communications device so disruptive of old social structures.
The phone also gives a gentle judder to power relations. In 2007, Bahujan Samaj Party, the lower-caste political party, won an outright majority in India’s largest state. It had a large, dedicated but poor cadre of workers and it anticipated, in a low-budget, low-tech way, some of the techniques that the Obama campaign deployed in the 2008 and 2012 elections. Previously, such low-status people had communicated through postcards, bicycle processions and telegrams. The cheap mobile phone in the hands of dedicated cadres put metaphorical jet engines on their organizational bicycles.
But it’s in gender relations that the cheap phone so relentlessly challenges old ways. Daily decisions have to be made about who is to have a phone and how it is to be used. A new bride coming to live in her husband’s household in north India, for example, may be required by her in-laws to surrender her phone.
Stories are common of village councils declaring (without any legal right to do so) that no woman under 40 should have a mobile phone. Mobile phones, according to this view, are especially dangerous in the hands of young people who can engage in clandestine courtships, which could lead to elopements or resistance to marriages arranged by family elders.
The mobile phone’s ancestor—the landline telephone-was also controversial when it debuted 130 years ago.
[. . .]. Full Text at: http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/29/morality-and-mobile-phones-in-india/
