Mobile lives: totems, cell phones, and symbolism in India

Much has been said and written about the role of the mobile phone in modulating social behaviours and cultural dynamics in India. Far less attention has been paid, however, to emerging cultural narratives about the phone which showcase the active, often troublesome and intrusive role the device plays in increasingly technologically inflected lives and landscapes. How are we to understand these new readings of the phone as itself a protagonist in our cultural lives? This essay uses a series of cultural reference points (movies, plays, news-media reports, popular music) to survey new metaphoric and symbolic terrains that the mobile phone guides us through. The mobile device's character, I argue, is totemic: it acquires the capacity to express desires, aspirations, and ambivalences; invoke social differences, and assert cultural norms. What Indian cultural narratives reveal is the desire for communion with the technologies which now both contain our natures and hold them up to view. The mobile phone plays a critical role in this process of reflection and self-making.