The Ink Fades on a Profession as India Modernizes

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The Ink Fades on a Profession as India Modernizes

The New York Times

December 26, 2007

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

 

MUMBAI, India

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 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 Mr. Sawant

" brother " and tied a string on his wrist each year in the

Hindu tradition.

 

Sometimes, suspicious parents boarded a train to Mumbai

and turned up at Mr. Sawant's stall, which a daughter had

listed as her address. Mr. Sawant greeted them kindly but

disclosed nothing about the woman'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.

 

But now the professional letter writer is confronting the fate

of middlemen everywhere: to be cut out. In India, the

world's fastest-growing market for cellphones, calling the

village or sending a text message has all but supplanted the

practice of dictating intimacies to someone else.

 

And so Mr. Sawant, 61, and by his own guess the author of

more than 10,000 letters of others, 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.

 

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.

 

Three of Mr. Sawant's four children are riding the Indian

economic boom, including a daughter, Suchitra, who works

at Infosys, the Indian technology giant. 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 $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. And that duality reflects the furious

pace at which entire professions are being invented and

entire professions destroyed in the rush to modernize India.

 

There is, on one hand, a national quest under way to excise

inefficiencies - to cut out middlemen. As go the letter

writers, so go bank tellers as India adopts A.T.M.'s, phone-

booth operators as cellphones spread, and rural

moneylenders as new Western-style supermarket chains

start trading directly with farmers.

 

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 a

computer or telephone line in India; the country now has

more software engineers and call-center operators than just

about anywhere else.

 

G. P. Sawant entered the letter-writing trade in 1982 when

he won a government contract for a coveted stall inside the

post office headquarters. Before long, he earned a reputation

among illiterate migrants as a gifted writer of letters.

 

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 whom they rarely saw. They warned relatives

not to squander money. They asked about the health of the

aged and the infirm.

 

There were some letters Mr. 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.

 

Though hardly a literary man, with schooling only up to the

10th grade, Mr. Sawant described himself as a fastidious

editor. He chopped pitilessly from his customers' dictations,

rendering long speeches into short, punchy, to-the-point

missives. (His customers were illiterate, so it was not as if

he was going to get caught.)

 

The early years were bliss. But, in 1995, the post office was

declared a historical site and the entire letter-writing squad,

including Mr. Sawant and four assistants, was relocated

across the street to where they are now, at the base of a

gnarled tree, under a tarpaulin mat that shields them from

the ceaselessly defecating pigeons that flutter among the

branches.

 

As Mr. Sawant remembers it, 1995 happened to be the year

when everything began to change.

 

India was emerging at that time from a long spell of

economic self-sufficiency and stagnation, in which one had

to reserve long-distance telephone calls as if they were

tables at a fancy restaurant, days in advance. With the land-

line infrastructure so dreary, the mobile phone was greeted

with special enthusiasm when it arrived in India in the

1990s. Cellphone companies, seeking to tap a vast market of

1.1 billion Indians, innovated to drop their prices to as low

as 1 cent a minute. It did not take long for the personal letter

to become obsolete.

 

Mr. Sawant mourns the demise of the letter culture. After

dropping a letter in the box, he used to imagine its winding

journey. Someone far away would open what he had written

on someone else's behalf; the reader would savor its kind

words or its little secrets, then maybe file it away in a box,

and perhaps revisit it weeks later in a burst of nostalgia.

 

But Mr. Sawant is not bitter. He said he was happy to stay

behind if his country advanced. " With mobiles, India wins, "

he said. " For other people, it may be difficult. But I'm

happy. "

 

He is happy, of course, because his four children, all of

whom he sent to private school using the proceeds from

letter writing, have pulled the family into the upper middle

class. His son works at a bank; one daughter works as a civil

engineer in Denmark; another daughter is studying

computers in college; and there is Suchitra, who is currently

in New Jersey on assignment for Infosys.

 

Mr. Sawant's mention of New Jersey prompted a

suggestion. A producer making a Web video for this article

was about to return to New York, not far from where

Suchitra is working. Did Mr. Sawant want to scribble a

letter to his daughter for him to hand-deliver?

 

His answer was instantaneous.

 

" Why would I send her a letter? " he asked, perplexed. " I'll

just call her on the phone. "

 

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ml?pagewanted=1 & _r=2 & ei=5087 & em & en=1c8a85687bd2

3586 & ex=1198818000

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[Guest guest]

It is nice to see that not only did the G.P. Sawant gain more than he lost from

the modernization of India, but that he seems to be taking the changes

optimistically. I think we could learn from the way he has handled change.

 

Sincerely,

Christina

 

---- msbauju <msbauju wrote:

> The Ink Fades on a Profession as India Modernizes

> The New York Times

> December 26, 2007

> By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

>

> MUMBAI, India

> G. P. Sawant never charged the prostitutes for his letter-

> writing services.

> [....]

> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/world/asia/26india.ht

> ml?pagewanted=1 & _r=2 & ei=5087 & em & en=1c8a85687bd2

> 3586 & ex=1198818000

> or

> http://tinyurl.com/387rtp

>

>

>