Mumbai: 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.
Stamp of an era: G.P. Sawant (left) and his assistants at work in front of the General Post Office in Mumbai.
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 letters ferried false reassurances. The women claimed in them that they had steady jobs as shopkeepers and Bollywood stage hands. Saying nothing of the brothels, beatings and rapes, they enclosed money orders to remit home rupees agonizingly acquired. Many called Sawant brother and tied a string on his wrist each year in the Hindu tradition.
Sometimes, suspicious parents would board a train to Mumbai and turn up at Sawant's stall, which a daughter had listed as her address. Sawant greeted them kindly but revealed nothing about the woman's work or whereabouts.
Such is the letter writer's honour code: When you live by writing other people's letters, you die with their secrets.
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.
And so Sawant, 61 years old 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 Rs5 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.
But this is not the familiar story of the artisan flattened by the new economy, because, it turns out, his family has gained more from that economy than it has lost.
Sawant has three children riding the Indian economic boom, including a daughter, Suchitra, who works at Infosys Technologies Ltd, one of the pre-eminent Indian outsourcing firms. In the very years that a telecommunications revolution was squashing her father's business, it was plugging India into the global networks that would allow her industry to explode. Suchitra now earns Rs3.5 lakh a year, three times as much as her father did at his peak.
Globalization is said to create winners and losers. In the Sawants, it created both. And that duality reflects the furious pace at which entire professions are being invented and entire professions destroyed in the rush to modernize India.