Mobile

In the late 1990s, one the earliest Bollywood films to display a mobile phone features the stars dancing, only to be interrupted by the vibrating ring of their respective mobiles! ‘What is mobile number?’ asks the hero. ‘What is your private number?’ Given that at the time, mobile phones were the preserve of a privileged few, Bollywood was well ahead of its time. Fast forward a decade or so later and mobile phones are vibrating everywhere, reaching a mind-boggling figure of over 900 million subscriptions in India by 2012. By plugging a large number of previously unconnected people into a system of interactive communication, the mobile introduced a host of disruptive possibilities, causing India’s once-confident moral compass to spin ever since. The word ‘mobile’ is associated with movement and dynamism, as opposed to a stationary or fixed position or place. In the West, mobile is an adjective, which, only in the early 1990s, was paired with the phone (forming a noun), to contrast it with the old landline or fixed phone. But in India, the English word ‘mobile’ entered popular parlance with the appearance of the device itself. In fact, the word ‘mobile’ was indigenised early on by putting two vowels together, making the sound ‘mo-baa-il’—a vivid rendering of what is perhaps the most widely-used English word across the subcontinent in the twenty-first century. Until the arrival of the cheap mobile phone, communication was still fairly limited. This was not simply because of practical reasons—landlines were rare—but for social ones, too. Social interaction in India remains heavily shaped by enduring hierarchies of caste, gender and class relations, which often restrict bilateral communications. There are many reasons for this communication revolution, but at the social level, India’s relationship with the mobile was characterised by ambivalence and wariness. Such suspicion was especially evident in the more conservative parts of the country, where those in power have consistently tried to curb its effects, discrediting it and pointing to a range of monstrous outcomes, such as the ruin of Indian ‘culture’. The most striking example of this mistrust was successive reports (which made global headlines) that described the restrictions imposed by local village councils or caste groups, who banned the use of mobile phones among young women to prevent them from ‘going astray’ or eloping with their lovers. Unlike in Bollywood films, for a young rural woman to have a ‘private number’ could spell trouble. Unsupervised communication between men and women would disrupt longstanding marriage commitments, and caste and family relationships. In this