Deshu Chaudhary’s dupatta cleverly hangs from his shoulders in such a way that it hides one of his hands. She keeps her smartphone in it. She says it is an important tool that helps her stay connected with tuition centers that train students for competitive exams. They are about two hours away, and she cannot always be present.
However, in his village in Jalore district of Rajasthan, a smartphone in the hand of a woman, especially a young and unmarried one, is seen as an indicator of bad character and loose morals.
“Village elders need to know that you are using the smartphone only for educational purposes. If they catch you looking at your phone screen or smiling while talking to someone on a call, they may feel that your freedom needs to be curbed,” says Chaudhary. The 19-year-old, who is pursuing a Basic School Teaching Certificate course from Rajasthan University College, says that in her part of the world, women’s virtue entitles them to freedom ‘within permissible limits’.
“I am a (school) teacher in Pawli (village), and since teaching is seen as a noble profession, people assume I use the phone only for good things,” she said. Marking his case as an anomaly, Chaudhary says smartphones have been under the scrutiny of village elders for some time.
Earlier, the investigation used to happen at interpersonal level, but on December 21, men of Choudhary community in Jalore held a meeting in Gajipura village and announced that from January 26, all women will have to use only basic phones.
On 25 December, the caste panchayat, a non-constitutional body, withdrew the order. “The video was interpreted out of context, so we withdrew our decision,” says Sujanaramji Chowdhury, the panch (head) of the organization.
caste panchayat sits
Sujanaramji Chaudhary, head of the Chaudhary caste panchayat of Jalore district, with his members. , Photo Courtesy: Shashi Shekhar Kashyap
Under a bright pink canopy amid men dressed in white shirts, dhoti and turbans, Himmataram, part of the Choudhary caste panchayat, read out an edict from a piece of paper: “In the society, daughters-in-law will not have a phone with a camera. Mobile sans camera wala jise baat-chaat ho ho woh raha hai sakti (Women and girls of our community will no longer use phones with a camera. They can use a phone without a camera, on which conversation is possible),” he said. Said girls who are studying can use smartphones at home, but cannot step out of their house with the smartphone, not even to the neighbour’s house.
His orders were recorded and circulated among the community members. One of them uploaded it on social media and it went viral. Viewers around the world condemned the decision and some even compared it to the Taliban’s actions in Afghanistan. When news spread about this order, the press rushed to Jalore to talk to the women and men.
Days after the video went viral, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) took cognizance of the order and issued a notice to the District Magistrate of Jalore. A division bench headed by Priyank Kanungo directed the DM to inquire into the “allegations made in the complaint” regarding the incident. The body further directed that a report be submitted for review of the Commission within two weeks containing details of the action taken against such order.
The NHRC issued the notice after receiving a written complaint from Manish Jain, who runs the non-profit West Bengal National Crime Investigation Bureau.
Jalore deputy magistrate Pradeep Gawande said that the day after the video went viral, he sent a team to talk to the community to withdraw the order. “Following our instructions and taking cognizance of the response it received, the community soon withdrew its order,” Gawande said.
India’s comprehensive modular survey, Telecom 2025, found that 80.7% of men in rural India owned a mobile phone, while only 48.45% of women did.
women and children
Sujanaramji says the decision was taken after several women in his community complained about their children being glued to screens. “The daughters-in-law of our community were telling us to take our mobiles and save our children. So we thought anyway women will do with smartphones anyway, what will they do with smartphones; they don’t need to run an office,” says Sujanaramji. “Boys will have to get used to it because they need to get used to the ways of the world. What will women do after knowing all this?”
Women of Chaudhary community in Ghazipura village of Rajasthan. , Photo Courtesy: Shashi Shekhar Kashyap
A short distance from the gathering of male elders of the community, the women are sitting in the courtyard of Sujanaramji’s two-storey pucca house, their ghunghats (veils) extended to their midsections. Some people make tea and supply breakfast to the panchayat, while taking care of their children and throwing Mathaniya red chillies on a sheet to dry in the sun.
Between handling household chores and answering media questions about what the new rule means for her, 29-year-old Kanko Kumari clarifies in a partly angry voice that all the women around her support the decision. She says, “After completing the day’s work in the fields and kitchen, when we finally try to use our smartphones, most of the time our children have exhausted our data. Our husbands are glued to their respective phones. So, we don’t get to use these phones much anyway.”
Joining Kumari, her sister-in-law Rajni Devi, 25, says at least this will ensure that children stay away from phones. “The children keep crying and asking us to give them our phones; we are fed up. They should play outside,” she says. “Look at him right now; he’s glued to the screen watching video after video,” she says, pointing to her 5-year-old son.
Sujanaramji is listening to what the women are saying. “Tell them you all have agreed to this matter,” he says loudly.
The women laugh and say that they are ready to hand over their phones immediately. Panch explains that such a rule is only for women because children usually bargain with their mothers, not with their fathers, whom they fear. To the media, whose vehicles are parked on the narrow roads leading from the fields of Jalore, Sujanaramji says authoritatively that the rules made by the caste panchayat are flexible and take into account the diverse opinions of community members. Their jurisdiction, although not constitutional, is accepted by the Chaudhary community in 14 villages across the region. “Instead of understanding where the New Testament came from, people started saying negative things about us,” he says.
Many countries around the world have banned mobile phones for children. France, Italy, South Korea and New Zealand ask students to put their phones away throughout the school day. Many countries such as Australia and Malaysia have banned children under 16 from creating or operating social media accounts.
women talk about aspirations
In Ghazipura, the village where the meeting was held, Anju, the only woman from the Chaudhary community who is pursuing a degree from college, says women are rarely taken into account when taking such decisions. “If men my age can stay glued to their phone screens, why can’t women like me use it beyond education?” She questions.
While Anju is angry with this decree, Deshu, who lives in Pavli village, 5 kilometers away, says that the decisions taken by the caste panchayat are binding. “If you fail to follow their instructions, you are cut off from the community. On many occasions, they have even imposed fines,” she says. She also points out that in these villages, and especially in her community, women either work in the fields or migrate with their husbands to do domestic work.
Deshu says, “No one has dreams because no one has encouraged them to pursue a career or develop interest in building their lives. Now, an increasing number of young women are very active on social media platforms like Instagram, where they upload photos and meet new people.” This, she says, has upset the elders and on social media women wear pants and skirts, talk about their feelings and get intimate with men from another community.
Deshu says that in the past few months, many families engaged in satta-vatta marriages – a system where a brother-sister pair from one family marries a brother-sister pair from another family – are bearing the brunt of social-media exposure. In these villages, marriages are arranged for boys and girls when they become young, but while most of the men migrate to work in cities after 10th and 12th class, the women remain in the villages.
Deshu says that with social media, women finally feel they have a window to the world. Relationships formed online have led women to leave their marriages and live with other men. Although the breakdown of marriages is not viewed well, such incidents also hurt the Sattva-Vatta marriage system. “When a woman leaves her marriage, the other couple’s marriage is also affected. The panchayat started imposing fines on the woman’s family,” says Deshu.
Meanwhile, the panchayat also realized that women in their 20s were using the internet liberally. “Living in villages, women make reels, get their photos taken and aspire to become models, where even wearing pants is looked down upon,” says Anju.
Shweta Acharya, a teacher at Shantipura Senior High School, laughs about the panchayat’s interest in educating girls. “If a child needs help around the house, or it’s farming season, or cattle need tending, parents stop girls from going to school,” she says.
India’s Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), 2024, conducted by non-profit Pratham Education Foundation, found that in the 14 to 16 year age group, 32.2% boys and 26.9% girls across India own smartphones. In rural Rajasthan, among those who can use smartphones, 42.7% of boys and 34.6% of girls have smartphones.
Acharya says that in her decade-long experience as a teacher, women in these villages have been controlled by elders. “Even the brightest girls have dropped out of school because families fear they will be more educated than their male counterparts, who mostly go to class 12,” she says. Acharya says the combination of diktats and limited exposure forces women to see marriage as their only avenue of growth.
More than 1,500 km away is Halaga in Karnataka, where the gram panchayat has started a digital detox initiative where parents and children avoid using screens from 7 pm to 9 pm every day. A siren sounds at 7 pm in Halaga village, when all households are expected to switch off their televisions and mobile phones. During this period, that gram panchayat patrols the area to monitor whether the instructions are being followed or not. A similar initiative was also started by Mohityanche Vadgaon, a village in Maharashtra, where a similar methodology has been adopted to combat cellphone addiction. Both of these are gender-neutral.
alisa.d@thehindu.co.in
Edited by Sunalini Mathew
