Introduction_The Great Indian Phone Book (Harvard UP)

2013

The cheap mobile phone is probably the most significant personal communications device in history, and in India, where caste prejudice has reinforced power for generations, the mobile has proved even more disruptive than elsewhere. India had 35 million telephones in 2001, and only 4 million of them were mobiles. Ten years later, it had more than 800 million phone subscribers and more than 95 per cent were mobiles. In a decade, communications were transformed by a device that can be shared by fisherfolk in Kerala, boatmen in Banaras, great capitalists in Mumbai and power-wielding politicians and bureaucrats in New Delhi. Village councils ban unmarried girls from having mobile phones. Families debate whether new brides should surrender them. Cheap mobile phones have become photo albums, music machines, data bases, radios and flashlights. Religious images and uplifting messages flood tens of millions of phones each day. Pornographers and criminals have found a tantalising new tool. In politics, organisations with cadres of true-believers exploit a resource infinitely more effective than telegrams, postcards and the printing press for carrying messages to workers, followers and voters. The book probes the whole universe of the mobile phone — from the contests of great capitalists and governments to control radio frequency spectrum to the ways ordinary people build the troublesome, addictive device into their daily lives.

LSE Review of Books, 2013

The cheap mobile phone is arguably the most significant personal communications device in history. In India, where caste hierarchy has reinforced power for generations, the disruptive potential of the mobile phone is even more striking than elsewhere. The book probes the whole universe of the mobile phone from the contests of great capitalists and governments to control radio frequency spectrum to the ways ordinary people build the troublesome, addictive device into their daily lives. Matt Birkinshaw hopes the broad scope and rich empirical detail found in this book will prompt a range of further, narrower, investigations in its wake.

ubiquitous use and availability of shoes to cell phone use in India. Akin to a widespread use of shoes, they suggest that the widespread use of inexpensive cell phones empowers previously disadvantaged populations: cell phones, they argue, give them a means to interact in new ways as citizens, with both, a nation state and a global community. Australian anthropologists Doron and Jeffery thus paint a picture of a diverse population using an object often taken for granted, to show how it bridges divides in class, caste, gender, and occupation to undermine societal strictures. Through the lens of a widely affordable communication device, Doron and Jeffery present an ethnographic analysis of communities using inexpensive and easily available technology as a destabilizing force for India's structures of authority.

As of November 2013, the mobile subscriber base in India was 881.13 million (active lines) according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, and with around 6 million new mobile subscriptions being registered every month, a country of (estimated) 1.2 billion population could have more than 1 billion mobile subscribers by the end of 2015. What does this “untethered” technology do to the people of India? This paper discusses how a country steeped in history, culture, and tradition has embraced mobile technology and how the technology is creating a new design in the social fabric of India through transitive culture.

The mobile phone has been one of the most disruptive factors to come to India in modern times. This article aims to chalk out a framework for understanding the cell phone's all-encompassing social impact. The extent of the change is huge. In 1987, India had 2.3 million phone connections (0.3% of its population). By January 2010, that number had gone up to 688 million phone connections (about 60% of the population if phones had been evenly distributed). More than 90% of the phones by 2010 were mobile phones. Charting the vast universe of India's mobile telephony, this article identifies three categories of people: controllers, servants and users - those who control radio frequency spectrum; those who perform the host of tasks required to package and sell the spectrum; and those Indians, now numbering hundreds of millions, who use mobile phones every day. The theme is the profound transformation that mobile phones bring to individual lives, perhaps more fundamental in India than in other parts of the world. The mobile phone can be an equalizer: it has the potential to open to low-status people possibilities that they have never had before. The mushroom growth of the cell phone raises questions about effects on society, politics and economy. At the top of India's class pyramid, how does one understand the great political-economic contests generated by struggles to control the cell phone market? At the base of the pyramid, to what extent does the mass availability of cheap cell phones and services alter the lives of poor, low-status people? And what of those in between? Is the cell phone destined to change human activity as profoundly as the printing press? This exploratory article begins to identify key questions related to mobile phones and sketches how a holistic account of the device and its implications might be composed.

Journal of South Asian Development, 2020

The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 2012

"In this article I analyse the varied ways mobile phones are integrated into the daily lives of low-income people and the implications for courtship practices, marriage relations and kinship ties. Rather than offer a celebratory analysis of the mobile phone’s empowering effects, my ethnographic research reveals a more complex story, one that shows how the presence of the mobile both reinforces and undermines gender roles and institutions of authority. Conceptually, I argue that mobile communication provides insights into north Indian personhood as ‘nodal’, while also stimulating new practices and ideologies that render this technology central to the struggle for (and over) power and domination.

Pacific Affairs, 2012

This article scans the effects of mobile-phone communication, particularly in South Asia. It focuses on three important areas: political economy, politics and social practices. By 2012 India had more than 900 million telephone subscribers, 96 percent of them on cell phones, and the majority of users were the poor. At the other end of the social scale, the mobile phone provoked bitter struggles among some of India's biggest business houses and branches of government, and was responsible for criminal cases against politicians at the highest level. The essays in this volume are a reminder that technology is anything but neutral. The essays examine the many facets of mobile phone communication and the institutions, agents, mechanisms and networks such communication relies on. The essays contribute to efforts to interpret the effects of this technology and to gain insight into the most important aspect of the mobile phone: the sheer variety of activity (political, social and cultural) on which it impinges.

An ethnographic study of low-income cell-phone use primarily among domestic aid workers in Calcutta. Unpublished MA Dissertation in Anthropology, SOAS, 2013