Impact of WhatsApp on South Asian Digital Kinship

Every family uses a group chat, whether it be to send birthday wishes, family photos, or religious messages or just to have casual conversation. South Asians tend to use the platform WhatsApp for family group chats, and it reveals a lot about their borrowed digital identities as "avatars," Akansha Awal explains. Sahahna Udupa and Max Kramer describe the internet as a space of “multiple interfaces” connecting families, communities, organizations, and specifically South Asian diasporic networks. Their research shows that WhatsApp does not simply preserve South Asian kinship but transforms the kinship into something that must be performed, monitored, and constantly negotiated. But the question still remains of why is WhatsApp so popular in India with over 500 million users and not in the United States? 

This can be answered by looking at India’s socioeconomic context. When WhatsApp launched in 2009, sending SMS messages in India was often still charged per text, making frequent conversations and group messaging expensive. In the United States, however, unlimited texting was already becoming standard, so Americans did not have a financial reason to switch to an internet-based messaging app. As smartphones became more accessible in the early 2010s, the two countries followed different technological paths. Affordable Android phones from companies such as Samsung, Xiaomi, and Micromax spread rapidly across India, while iPhones became increasingly popular in the United States. WhatsApp offered Indian Android users a free, lightweight platform that worked across brands and phone models, whereas American iPhone users could only use Apple’s iMessage system. 

WhatsApp’s position in India became even stronger after Reliance Jio launched inexpensive mobile data plans in 2016, allowing users to send messages, photos, videos, and make calls without worrying about high costs. Its group-chat features also fit naturally into a society where extended families often remain closely connected, turning WhatsApp groups into spaces for wedding planning, festival greetings, family updates, and everyday conversation. By the time mobile data became widely affordable, WhatsApp was no longer just an alternative to texting in India as it had become the country’s default communication system. In the United States, SMS and iMessage had already filled that role, meaning that WhatsApp did not have the same role to fill.

 Now we can understand what kind of impact WhatsApp has. This transformation begins with the contradiction between digital freedom and family authority. In northern India, families can strongly influence young people’s jobs, marriages, clothing, and even musical preferences. Mobile phones give young people access to new urban opportunities and relationships, including connections across caste boundaries. At the same time, these private digital worlds can create distance within the household. Parents may feel that they no longer know what their children are thinking or doing. Instead of weakening family authority, this uncertainty can intensify it. Families impose greater restrictions and surveillance, with unmarried young women facing the harshest controls. The same phone that expands a young person’s social world can therefore become the reason their family imposes stricter controls and monitors them more closely.

Digital media also changes how family belonging is shown to others. Even people who experience estrangement or abuse may feel the need to maintain a visible public connection with relatives. An individual might post a photograph with their mother or share a birthday greeting for a brother, not because the relationship is close, but because the post signals that the family remains intact. To followers, these interactions suggest that the person is living away from home rather than alienated from their relatives. Public kinship can therefore provide social legitimacy.

These performances are not created by one person alone. Friends and peers help maintain them by liking photographs, leaving comments, and participating in family exchanges. A post becomes convincing because other people respond to it, creating the image of a stable relationship. On WhatsApp and Facebook, kinship is therefore not only something people experience privately. It is something that must be made visible and recognized by an audience. Even when the relationship has fractured, the public image of the family can remain intact.

Overall, WhatsApp has played an important role in transforming Indian society to what it is today.

Bibliography

Awal, Akanksha. 2025. “To Speak as Another.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 15 (3): 714–28. https://doi.org/10.1086/737760.

Udupa, Sahana, and Max Kramer. 2023. “Multiple Interfaces.” American Ethnologist 50 (2): 247–59. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13117.

“Why WhatsApp Is Popular in India but Not in the United States? | by Lahiru Senarathna | Medium.” Medium Human Stories & Ideas, February 19, 2026. https://medium.com/@99xdilshan/why-whatsapp-is-popular-in-india-but-not-in-the-united-states-0d1f9bc5cb50.