The mobile phone and the smartphone have produced two revolutions in short succession across the globe, and a robust body of scholarship has grown up to document the effects and affordances of these technologies in different places. Across India, in urban and rural areas alike, mobile smartphones have become ubiquitous, spawning their own industries, challenging and sometimes completely changing social and political relations, and becoming a potent symbol of upward class mobility in the postliberalization era. Ravi Agrawal's India Connected and Sirpa Tenhunen's A Village Goes Mobile are two attempts to capture the complexity of the changes that these revolutions have unleashed. Agrawal's book does so through journalistic vignettes, while Tenhunen's is a grounded ethnographic village study conducted over a period of years. While Agrawal focuses on the smartphone and the implications of its internet-accessing capability, Tenhunen's study concentrates on the calling and texting functions of the early generations of mobile phones in the early 2000s. Together, they present a wide-ranging picture of the ways in which mobile and smartphones have affected family and labor relations, politics, and everyday life in India.

Agrawal's book is written in a breezy journalistic style; we accompany the author on his travels, and we meet individuals and become immersed in the dramas of their lives. The book is divided into three sections: “Opportunity,” which covers the role that the smartphone is playing in transforming the lives of rural women, in underwriting educational opportunities, and in creating jobs; “Society,” which covers three smartphone-enabled phenomena: a new online dating and marriage industry, a thriving pornography industry, and the problem of internet addiction; and “The State,” which details the ways in which the Indian government has tried to use and curtail the capabilities of smartphone-enabled internet.

Agrawal's book tries to strike a balance between enthusiasm for smartphone technology and awareness of the dangers, but overall it leans toward positivity. The section on “The State,” in which the dangerous and negative aspects of the smartphone revolution are discussed, is the shortest. One chapter in this section describes the internet shutdowns and e-curfews that have become a weapon by which the Indian government seeks to impose control in Kashmir. The other describes the government's attempt to solve the problem of “black money” by taking all 500- and 1,000-rupee notes out of exchange practically overnight in 2016. As Agrawal describes, one of the primary motivations for—and indeed, effects of—the demonetization plan was to push India toward online banking, a cashless economy that would be part of India's “digitization” campaign. Surprisingly, however, there is no mention in Agrawal's book of phenomena such as the distribution of government-issued phones to help election campaigns, a widespread Bharatiya Janata Party tactic. The book includes only a short mention of WhatsApp, which has become a dominating force in social and political life in India. Though Agrawal does mention the problem of “fake news” proliferated through WhatsApp and the violence that resulting from it, this section is buried within a chapter that quickly moves on to a more individualized, and somewhat sensationalized, focus on internet addiction.

Agrawal's book is at its best when immersing us in the lives of ordinary people, such as Phoolwati, a Rajasthani village woman employed by Google to be an “internet saathi,” or “internet companion,” whose job is to show village women the benefits of the internet and train them to use it on the smartphone. Phoolwati's story elegantly captures the tension between Google's motivation—to reach “the largest untapped market for the internet”—and the idealistic vision of Phoolwati herself, who sees it as a tool for gaining knowledge and safety and achieving upward social mobility. This is set against the backdrop of a patriarchal village economy where some villages have implemented a ban on phones for girls for these very reasons.

Agrawal captures other individual stories, juxtaposing those who are comfortably upper middle class with people struggling to make ends meet. One of those stories, the most extended individual story in the book, is that of the couple Simran and Ritesh, who use the Indian dating app Truly Madly to connect and, despite the disapproval of one set of parents, get married. As Agrawal suggests, dating apps, which have become extremely popular in India, may be a way for young people to take charge of the matchmaking process. As Ritesh tells him, “India has changed. In the old days it would take weeks and months to set up a meeting between families, and it would be formal and stifled. Today, if I have fifteen minutes of spare time at midnight I can just text someone I've met on Truly Madly” (p. 112). At the other end of the spectrum is the story of Sarvesh Kumar, an auto rickshaw driver whose faith in Narendra Modi's demonetization scheme is unshaken, even though it has destroyed his livelihood. Agrawal ends his book with this story, which is symbolic of the millions who will be “left behind” by India's great smartphone-enabled “digital leap forward.”

Sirpa Tenhunen's A Village Goes Mobile is a deeply grounded study of the introduction of mobile telephony in a village in rural West Bengal between 1999 and 2013. As an ethnographer studying women's political participation in this area, Tenhunen became interested in the role of the mobile phone in expanding social and political networks. Tenhunen's ethnography takes up the questions, “Who benefits from mobile telephony and how? Can people use mobile phones to help them achieve the goal of changing their lives, or does phone use merely amplify the existing social patterns and power relationships? How are people as mobile media users constrained by the different axes of their identity and social position, and can they refashion their identities through this use?” (p. 2).

In the first three chapters of the book, Tenhunen provides an extensive review of the literature on phone use and mediation from technology studies, anthropology, and communication studies, focusing on the concepts of mediation and remediation. She shows how in Janta, West Bengal, mobile phones remediated preexisting communicative practices that were enabled by radio, television, and loudspeakers. Tenhunen provides quantitative data on villagers’ mobile phone use, documenting things like the number of minutes spent on calls, the topics covered, and the relationships between callers.

This is followed by four chapters that describe in more detail transformations brought about by the mobile phone. Tenhunen shows how mobile phones have helped businesses and the agricultural sector by making possible and speeding up communication that previously would have depended on traveling to face-to-face meetings. Mobile phones are also used to access and manage health care in a system in which state-managed health care is unreliable. In a subsequent chapter, Tenhunen analyzes gendered calling patterns, which she relates to longer-term changes in gendered interactions around marriage arrangements and women's increased participation in the spheres of education, white-collar employment, and politics. Phones, as she suggests, have increased the amount and frequency of contact a woman can have with her natal family, potentially raising their status within their marital family. Phones also enable women to have “secret” or private conversations that stay under the radar of the patriarchal joint family structure. Crucially, as Tenhunen notes, in this context, phones are treated as a collective family resource to which different members of the family have differential access, so the assumption that a mobile phone is a “personal” item cannot be taken for granted. Rather, it is important to look at the ways in which women carve out “personal” or “private” spaces through their use of and capitalization on the affordances of mobile phones.

Tenhunen also explores the ways in which mobile telephones have reshaped the sphere of local politics. Mobile phones make political activist work easier; they also make possible secret or clandestine conversations and alliances that depart from the public face of a political party's work. Significantly, they also enable communication across levels of political organization, so that local leadership can sometimes be bypassed to contact people higher up in the party hierarchy. As Tenhunen states, “while phone use built on earlier political patterns and meanings, it made politics faster, more heterogeneous, and translocal” (p. 141). As elsewhere, here, too, Tenhunen avoids sensationalizing the mobile phone as transformative, just as she avoids making generalizations about the mobile phone as a democratizing force or a tool for strengthening civil society in itself. Instead, in her account, the changes are subtle and incremental. A final chapter, based on fieldwork from 2012 to 2013, considers the introduction of the smartphone in relation to caste and social status. Tenhunen here considers the symbolic functions of smartphones as wealth objects that can be used to assert status and belonging, discussing this in the context of ongoing negotiations of particular communities’ status in caste hierarchies.

While both of these books could be used in undergraduate teaching, they would each require a good deal of contextualization. Tenhunen's style tends toward reporting patterns and trends rather than presenting ethnographic detail or depth. There are few personal stories in the book, perhaps reflecting Tenhunen's survey-based approach. Though many intriguing facts and patterns are mentioned, there is little ethnographic follow-up on their implications. This makes the book more suitable for classes in communication or development anthropology, but less so for undergraduate courses on India or anthropology of media. Agrawal, on the other hand, provides compelling stories but relatively little analysis. Where Agrawal tends toward sensationalizing the impacts of the smartphone, Tenhunen is much more measured in her assessment of the mobile phone's role in effecting change. This reflects the different audiences for whom these books are intended; Tenhunen's book is directed toward a developmental anthropology audience, while Agrawal's is meant for a popular, nonacademic audience. Ultimately, while both books have much to offer their respective audiences, they do little to transcend that divide.