ISAS (Institute of South Asian Studies)

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.