Inside India's White Flesh Trade

Sleeping with white women is an aspirational goal for many Indian men, for which they are prepared to fork out large sums. It is a task made easier by the hundreds of prostitutes from Central Asian Republics and Ukraine who frequently fly down to India. Here’s the story of one of these women and her experience working here.

- Vikram Zutshi

Anya sat on a large couch with a floral chintz pattern, playing blackgammon with a friend. She tapped her cigarette and looked up at me with piercing blue eyes, slightly upturned at the corners, a sign of her Kazakh-Mongol heritage. She was tall and gangly, with a mop of windswept blonde hair and had a fragile yet steely air about her, like a porcelain doll which had taken a fall, shattered into tiny pieces, and been glued back together with the cracks visible.

A flamboyant Punjabi gent called ‘Tony’ had taken me to her Mumbai apartment. I had met him while researching a film on the white flesh trade in South Asia. He called himself her caretaker.

She was a professional escort, one of the thousands from central Asian countries like Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia and Azerbaijan, who travel to south Asian boomtowns like Dubai, Mumbai, Delhi, Goa, Ahmedabad and Hyderabad to ply their wares. The women are usually labelled ‘Russian’ for the sake of convenience.

Sleeping with white women is an aspirational goal for many Indian men, and they are quite willing to fork out large sums of money – up to the equivalent of 1500 USD — to spend a night with them, considerably higher than the going rate for Indian women.

The prostitution issue had escalated to the point where the Indian embassy in Ukraine was asked to screen ‘suspicious’ visa applications from girls between the ages of 18-40. This action led to crowds of topless activists assembled outside the embassy, waving flags and protesting the stereotyping of Ukrainian women as sex workers. It was one of the more intriguing manifestations of runaway globalisation.