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India's Booming Economy Signals End To Letter-Writing Jobs

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By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS, The New York Times

Published: December 26, 2007

MUMBAI, India - G.P. Sawant never charged the prostitutes for his letter-writing services.

Not long after the women would descend on this 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 words into handwritten letters to mail back to their home villages.

The letters ferried false reassurances. The women claimed they had steady jobs as shopkeepers and Bollywood stagehands. Saying nothing of the brothels, beatings and rapes they endured, they enclosed money orders to remit rupees agonizingly acquired. Many called Sawant "brother" and tied a string on his wrist each year in the Hindu tradition.

Sometimes, suspicious parents boarded a train to Mumbai and appeared at Sawant's stall, which a daughter had listed as her address. Sawant greeted them kindly but disclosed nothing about the daughter's work or whereabouts.

Such is the letter writer's honor code: When you live by writing other people's letters, you die with their secrets.

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

And so Sawant, 61, and by his own guess the author of more than 10,000 of other people's letters, was sitting idly at his stall on a recent Monday, having earned just 12 cents from an afternoon spent filling out forms, submitting money orders, wrapping parcels - the postal trivialities that have survived the evaporation of his letter-writing trade.

This is not the familiar story of the artisan flattened by the new economy, though, because it turns out his family has gained more from that economy than it has lost.

Three of Sawant's four children are riding the Indian economic boom, including a daughter, Suchitra, who works at Infosys, one of the pre-eminent Indian outsourcing firms. While the telecommunications revolution was squashing her father's business, it was plugging India into the global networks that would allow her industry to explode. Suchitra earns $9,000 a year, three times as much as her father did at his peak.

Globalization is said to create winners and losers. For the Sawants, it created both. That duality reflects the furious pace at which entire professions are being invented and destroyed in the rush to modernize India.

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