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

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.

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