Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India (34 page)

Despite his absence, Vinod’s involvement in the household was maintained throughout his stay in hospital via his and the household’s mobile phone. He and his family communicated regularly, enabling him to monitor activities. The mobile phone was carefully managed by his mother, who kept it under her control at all times by tucking it under her sari. This old handset was the only mobile phone in the household, other than those belonging to the two brothers. The majority of households in Banaras had never owned landlines. Essential calls had been made from PCOs (
Chapter 2
).

During
Vinod’s first few days in hospital, his wife spoke with him regularly to inquire about his health. When Doron suggested that his wife accompany them (mother, sisters and Doron) to visit Vinod, his mother quickly replied that there was little reason for her daughter-in-law to leave the house as she was able to speak with Vinod on the household mobile. The mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationship was strained: the mother-in-law asserted her authority in the house over the newly-arrived daughter-in-law by restricting her movements outside the home as well. Restrictions on women venturing into public spaces were common enough in India, and Banaras was no exception.
¹⁸
The restrictions could be traced to cultural ideas based on inside and outside worlds ‘aligned with a number of parallel contrasts, including family/not family … safe/unsafe, protected/unprotected, clean/ dirty, and private/public’.
¹⁹
These, in turn, expressed themselves in gender roles and social structures in the home.
²⁰

Despite the daughter-in-law’s obvious concern for her husband’s well-being, she was denied the hospital visit. Restrictions on movement were much more stringent for a daughter-in-law than for Vinod’s sisters, who were allowed visits to the hospital. This was partly because the daughter-in-law represented the
izzat
(bearer of honour and reputation) of the household. As it became clear that Vinod would need surgery and would have to stay in hospital for more than two months, his wife was eventually allowed to visit the hospital, accompanied by family members. The daughter-in-law was in a slightly more empowered position than she would have been in past times in that she was able to keep in touch with her husband without having the man’s mother as the sole legitimate go-between. The husband had fewer choices to make between his mother and his wife.

The household mobile phone, unlike the ones belonging to the male members of a family which were their own personal handsets, was not considered a ‘private’ possession of any of the female members. Conversations were conducted in the open, in ear-shot and under the authority of family elders. In very small houses, there could be few spoken secrets. Unlike the household mobile, the men’s mobiles had contact lists, songs, video-clips and screensavers, and their handsets were secured with passwords to protect privacy. These were the private mobiles of individual owners and encouraged ideas of ‘privacy’ and ‘ownership’—albeit for men. But gender governed a person’s entitlement to privacy and distinguished between different kinds of ‘attachment to things’. Literacy, once achieved, could not be taken away from a woman; but she could be barred from having and using her own mobile. ‘Keeping in touch’ was thus linked with notions of appropriate conduct and possessions for a woman at particular stages in her life. The household mobile in Vinod’s home was allotted within the family to maintain a certain social order. Mobile conversations, though an innovation, modified existing social roles and gender ideology only slightly.

The household mobile

Household
mobiles among the community with whom Doron lived were often older, basic devices passed on by the men of the house who had purchased new multimedia phones for themselves. For men, the mobile phone was a tool for work, for communication with friends and relatives and for entertainment, while for women the mobile was for ‘basic conversations’ (
sirf baatchiit karne ke liye
). The woman’s phone should be used only to communicate with her natal kin and husband.

There was more than meets the eye, however, in the term ‘basic conversation’, and the mobile phone began to affect the intensity, and therefore the quality, of accepted social connections. A woman’s natal home—her mother and father and brothers and sisters—had long been a source of support for a newly married woman living as junior member of her husband’s household. The natal family was often celebrated in songs and proverbs in contrast to the intimidating and much maligned home of the inlaws.
²¹
By facilitating natal ties, the household mobile phone became a valued possession for newly married women trying to find their way in the new conjugal setting. The phone facilitated more regular connections with her natal family, whether appreciated or deplored in the husband’s household; but either way, the phone forced new choices. These possibilities made the household mobile phone a focus of contention which required careful management. If ‘unsupervised’, the phone was potentially threatening and disruptive. As one informant told Doron:

My sister-in-law who got married a year back, her husband does not appreciate that she speaks a lot with her sisters, he thinks that whatever problems are created in his family are due to the cell phone because his wife can speak with her sisters a lot and they are giving her tips and tricks how to handle the mother-in-law. So he banned her from using the cell phone.

A young bride, who may have enjoyed a degree of autonomy in her natal home, had the potential to retain at least a little autonomy in the home of her in-laws through the mobile phone. But elders in her husband’s house may have resented and resisted challenges to former practice. A popular Indian soap opera was called
Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi
—‘because the mother-in-law was once a daughter-in-law’. What applied in the old days should also apply in the new days.

When Doron
expressed surprise about Vinod’s wife being barred from leaving the home, even to go to the hospital, friends of Vinod explained that a young daughter-in-law must be particularly chaste: a
pakki bahu
. Other attributes of the ‘proper demure daughter-in-law’ included wearing a
ghuunghat
(veil) and acting modestly, all of which contrasted with acceptable conduct in her own natal home (
maika
), where she might walk uncovered and be chatty and friendly with members of the household.

In Vinod’s home, maintaining control over the household mobile was important. The men purchased the recharge cards.
²²
Even when absent, men still exercised their dominant position as household managers and breadwinners. Though weak, bedridden and in hospital, Vinod was constantly on the phone, managing his boating business and his home.

In some instances, lower-class women did have their own personal mobile. Most of these women worked outside the home as domestic workers, school peons or sellers of goods at family-owned stalls. They used the phone to communicate with husbands or for arrangements connected with the business. All of these women were well-established in their husband’s home, and some were already mothers-in-law. (See
Illus. 29
).

Doron arranged to interview one young woman who had her own mobile. As he entered her in-laws’ one-bedroom house, he could feel tension. The mother-in-law was seated on the bed behind, carefully listening to the conversation. Throughout the discussion the young woman glanced repeatedly in the direction of her mother-in-law. She said that her husband had recently bought her the phone, a basic Nokia model. Almost apologetically, she explained its importance. With her mobile phone, she, her family and her in-laws felt more comfortable when she travelled long distances to her natal home. Everyone knew that she could be contacted at any time and would be met immediately upon arrival. Thus the inside/outside distinctions were maintained, and the mobile phone was perceived as a tool to manage risk: the risk of a woman venturing into the dangerous and disordered outside world. But part of the danger associated with the outside world was that women left unsupervised were not only vulnerable but also threatening. Though the cell phone defended against danger, it also introduced danger by enabling the outside world to penetrate the ‘inside’.

Neither
family relations nor inside/outside distinctions were static. Women underwent considerable shifts during their lifetimes, as the above examples demonstrate. Unlike a young daughter-in-law, whose subordinate position in the household was designed to preserve the integrity and honour of the patrilineal group, a woman with school-going children was perceived as less threatening and was allowed considerably more mobility. Her right to use the mobile phone indicated where a woman stood in the hierarchy of family relations at different stages of her life. For the male elders of a village an hour’s drive from New Delhi, the magic age in 2012 was forty: they tried to ban women under forty from having mobile phones or going alone to the market.
²³

Experiences varied from region to region and community to community. In the relatively conservative setting of Banaras, concerns about a woman’s reticence, modesty and deference seemed to bridge caste and class. When Doron interviewed an educated, middle-class and upper-caste woman living in the same neighbourhood of the city, she explained that prior to her marriage she had owned a mobile phone. During her college years in Allahabad, she had numerous contacts stored in her mobile, including the numbers of friends and classmates, as well as teachers, in case she needed to inquire about an assignment. However, once she arrived at her mother-in-law’s house in Banaras, she was required to relinquish her handset. It took her over two years to convince her in-laws (indirectly, by beseeching her husband) to give her a new mobile phone so she could talk to her sisters and family members without needing to use the household mobile. This was fairly common practice in joint-family homes in Banaras, as one man explained:

All the
women who are getting married will not bring their cell phone along with them to their husband’s house, and while it’s different in different families, until now in my family none of the daughters-in-law brought their cell phones with them. They always leave it at their parents’ place and then their parents or sisters use it. Once they arrive at the in-laws place then their husband may buy them a new mobile. A lot of trust is involved. If she will bring her mobile with her into marriage she will receive a lot of calls. Like one of my sisters. She got married and despite previously being a very frequent user, she did not take her cell phone with her. She left it. Later her husband got her a new cell phone. I mean if she would have brought it with her she would continue to receive calls from her friends and then the husband would be doubtful, anyone would be doubtful. After marriage each and everything is exposed to your partner, and if you have a cell phone your husband will certainly go through it …

The mobile phone was viewed as an object of distrust, unless it was monitored by the husband and family. This distrust arose because of the possible flow of ‘inside’ information to the outside world (e.g., in the form of gossip)—the leaking of family news may threaten the reputation and honour of the household.
²⁴

With the arrival of a young bride, the family ensured that her previous social network was dismantled. Sarah Lamb called this the ‘making and unmaking of persons’: a woman should discontinue most of the connections with her previous household when she entered the patrilocal household. Potentially empowering, these connections were a cause for concern for the conjugal family.
²⁵
‘Women’s personhood is unique’, Lamb wrote, ‘in that their ties are disjoined and then remade, while men’s ties are extended and enduring’.
²⁶
A woman was expected to cut her ties to her previous networks (symbolised and/or represented by her mobile phone), where she may have had more independence, mobility and freedom, and to re-attach herself to a new kin network and become absorbed into her husband’s family. At the same time, her contact with her natal home came under the control of the husband’s family. A woman complained to Doron that the mobile phone had reduced the number of times she was allowed to visit her family home, as her in-laws argued that there was no reason to visit if she could call and speak to her relatives. The mobile phone intensified the drama of transition from a young woman to a wife. A device that could keep her connected to her former life raised a question that had immediately to be answered—retain the phone or surrender the phone?—and foreshadowed her relationship with her husband’s family in her new home.

Ownership and property

The newly
married
bahu
had to appear to adhere to the conduct of an ideal wife, at least until she found enough common ground with her husband to make claims of her own. Mobile phones introduced into millions of even quite poor families a new object of contention, to which a young woman may have had greater access in her natal home than in her husband’s. The mobile, moreover, brought with it intrusions from the outside, even as it offered certain benefits of security and convenience. In Doron’s experience, contests were usually—though not always (witness Dilip’s phone-wielding wife)—settled in favour of the husband’s family.

Even when a mobile phone was designated for a young woman’s use, it effectively was for ‘family’ purposes. Raju was in his early twenties and belonged to a socially and economically disadvantaged community (Mallah, or boatman caste) in Banaras. His family earned little from boating, which meant he regularly worked for others, plying their boats as well as tending his family’s fields during the hot season. Doron was surprised to see that Raju had not one but two mobile phones. Raju explained that the mobiles had been very useful to him because he recently began working in the catering business. Having a mobile allowed him to communicate with potential clients and arrange his business more efficiently. When Doron asked who else in his family had a mobile phone, he replied that there was one mobile phone used by members of the household and another which he had given to his older sister as a wedding present. She lived with her in-laws in the nearby town of Ramnagar. That mobile, Raju noted, was now mostly commandeered by her husband for his work. Raju explained that his brother-in-law produced small flashlight bulbs, which in the past meant a daily trip to the phone booth to get orders from his clients, which could cost Rs 30 a day in transportation in addition to the cost of calls. By using the mobile, Raju noted, his brother-in-law increased his earnings and saved time. Doron laughed and said that the phone that he bought for his sister was now really for his brother-in-law. Raju nodded in agreement, but added that it was useful for the whole family, as they did not have a landline. When Doron asked if his sister ever got to use the phone, Raju answered that once or twice a week she called her natal home to speak with her family.