They have penned everything from the missives of Mogul emperors to the love letters of modern commoners. Now the rise of the mobile phone is set to consign one of India’s most distinctive vocations — the professional letter writer — to the great wastepaper basket of history.

For hundreds of years the subcontinent’s streets have served as al fresco offices for India’s writers — the men who, for a small fee (10 pence), transcribe letters for the country’s vast illiterate population.

G. P. Sawant, 61, who still plies the trade under a banyan tree across the street from the old Bombay post office, is the doyen of this dying craft. He has written “more than 10,000 letters” over a career spanning 35 years. In all that time he has stuck by one rule: “Nothing romantic . . . too messy.”

A good letter writer combines the role of confidant and empathetic editor, and Mr Sawant has been made privy to countless poignant stories. In years past his customers included those desperately poor women who came to Bombay to search for work, only to fall into prostitution. He would write the letters — free — that accompanied the money they sent back to their villages. Nearly always, he would be asked to include details of a fictitious respectable job, blotting out mention of the beatings, squalor and rapes the women endured. “Nobody sends bad news home,” said Sajal S. Nag, a writer for 23 years, who has been known to jot the odd love letter in Bengali for migrants from his native Calcutta.

Mr Nag added that few people are sending anything back to their home villages these days — at least not by post. Yesterday he sat surrounded in the monsoon gloom by the tools of his trade — brown tape, string, hessian sacking and sealing wax for wrapping parcels — with no customers in sight. “Business is very dull,” said H. R. Khan, who occupies a neighbouring desk. “Ninety per cent has gone in the last ten years — because people have phones.” The conditions that once made letter writing lucrative still exist: adult literacy in India languishes at about 60 per cent and internal migration is huge. Estimates suggest that 400 families are arriving in Bombay every day, most from poor rural villages where suicide rates among farmers are soaring.

Those far from home no longer have to contend with India’s notoriously unreliable postal service to stay in touch. As many as 10,000 mobile phones are sold in the country every hour. Super-cheap handsets and rock-bottom tariffs have made India the world’s fastest-growing mobile market. At the same time electronic cash remittance schemes are steadily reaching even the most distant villages.

For the most part the letter writers seem sanguine. Mr Sawant has a son who is a banker and a daughter who works for one of India’s leading software companies. India’s economic renaissance has been kind to his family.

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