Robin Jeffrey

Celling India: Exploring a society's embrace of the mobile phone

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 phones 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 Indias 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 Indias 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.

Clean India! Symbols, Policies and Tensions

This essay assesses the Swachh Bharat! or Clean India! campaign of Prime Minister Narendra Modis government. The essay identifies the immense scope of the task—to create a ‘clean India’ by 2019—the pressures that make improved public sanitation urgent and the prime ministers experience in the state of Gujarat that may encourage him to believe that achievements are possible. The essay gauges the political risks and benefits for a prime minister noted for his media proficiency and keen sense of symbolism.

Research Fields and Scholarly Goats

Three factors guided my discovery of ‘fields’ of South Asian history in 1970. The first was the research going on into the modern history of the subcontinent’s regions, the sorts of studies represented in Soundings in Modern South Asian History, edited by Anthony Low and published in 1968. The second was the recent promise that there were untapped sources in regional archives, a prospect made widely known with the publication of Government Archives in South Asia: A Guide to National and State Archives in Ceylon, India and Pakistan, edited by Anthony, M.D. Wainwright and J.C. Iltis. And the third was Anthony’s interest in ‘indirect rule’ which stemmed from his research in Uganda, the empire-building career of Frederick Lugard in Uganda and Nigeria, and teasing questions about how ‘Princely India’ fitted into such a global, imperial picture. There was a tendency among aspiring graduate students in 1970 to think of South Asia as a cake and to request a slice. John Broomfield had smacked his lips over Bengal; Ravinder Kumar had sat down to Maharashtra; and Peter Reeves to the United Provinces (UP). There were plenty of other examples, but these three were well known to anyone who was starting to study South Asia in Australia or at Sussex, where Anthony had relocated in 1965. I had lived in Punjab (more accurately, Chandigarh) for two years, but I had been charmed by Kerala, and I puzzled over the ‘Kerala and communists’ theme that was widely known. Kerala had another attraction—indirect rule. Travancore was teasingly dubbed ‘a model Princely state’ and, according to Government Archives in South Asia, there were records in the archives in Trivandrum. The scholarship on Kerala at that time was led by anthropologists, notably A. Aiyappan and Kathleen Gough. Aiyappan had published three substantial articles on Nair kinship in the 1930s and an admirable monograph, Iravas and Culture Change, in 1943. Gough published half a dozen substantial articles about Nair kinship in the 1950s.