INDIA: IHT on Mumbai's Forgotten Letter Writer

Friday's issue of the International Herald Tribune has an article on a letter-writer in Mumbai, who once earned his living by writing letters for others and helping them complete the paperwork for parcel and money orders.

Anand Giridharadas writes:

"G.P. Sawant never charged the prostitutes for his letter-writing services.

Not long after the women would descend on this swarming, chaotic city, they would find him at his stall near the post office, this letter writer for the unlettered. They often came hungry, battered and lonely, needing someone to convert their spoken words into handwritten letters to mail back to their home villages."

The star of the article, G. P. Sawant, 61, claims that he has written over 10,000 letters. But it's been 3 years since he last received a request, and he now risks losing his business to mobile phones.

"But now the professional letter writer is confronting the fate of middlemen everywhere: to be cut out. In India, the fastest-growing market for mobile phones in the world, calling the village or sending a text message has all but supplanted the practice of dictating your intimacies to someone else."

Sawant started writing letters in the early 80s, when he gained a reputation among illiterate migrants.

Many of the letters were instructions from urban breadwinners on how to spend the money they were remitting to the countryside. They included expressions of affection for family members for whom they toiled in Mumbai but rarely saw. They warned relatives not to squander money. They asked about the health of the aged and infirm.

There were some letters Sawant would not write. He refused, for example, to trade in romantic love. Love is fickle and dangerous, he said. Lovers lie; they cheat; they offer their love and rescind it. He refused to engage in chicanery on other people's behalf.

According to a Business Week article last year, the number of mobile phone lines in India doubled to 142.2 million and it was expected to increase to about 211 million by the end of 2007.

"But for every occupation that vanishes, another is born. There are now mall attendants in a nation that until lately had no malls, McDonald's cashiers in a country where cows are sacred and Porsche sales executives in a land where most people still walk. It used to be hard to obtain your own computer or telephone line in India; the country now has more software engineers and call-center operators than just about anywhere else."

Sawant is reconciled to the decline of his business, and has reason to be happy about the new economy. His daughter works for Infosys and makes about $9,000 a year, three times more than what he ever did.

Here is a multimedia version of the story produced by SAJAer Jigar Mehta. The voiceover-translation of Sawant was provided by SAJAer Aseem Chhabra. The piece is quite moving, including a moment when Sawant recalls a prostitute from West Bengal who came to him for help.

"She left behind a 3-year-old son. She had to put him through school, take care of him. She came here regularly, to ask me to write  letters, and she used to cry every time she  narrated the letter. She called me brother, so even my eyes used to get wet, when I saw her, when I wrote her letter. These things were their secrets, not to be told to anyone. They used to tell me."

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[Jigar Mehta]

The accompanying video that Anand and I made is available at http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=FRdamp236023