Human Tables & Balloon Dancers - India's Very Odd Jobs For 'White Women Only’

“I think at the end of the day, it’s not that weird to work odd jobs for a bit of money. What makes this compelling is the racial element... That Indian girls are not being offered this opportunity. The premium put on the ‘exotic’ element I guess.” - Ree Levin.

While speaking to Homegrown, when Ree Levin from Memphis, Tennessee, says ‘odd jobs’ – she isn’t talking about doing the paper route or working at a café or restaurant, as is conventional in the West.

There is a growing trend among middle class and upper-middle class Indians who love their fair share, so to speak, of exhibitionist indulgences–light-skinned Caucasian girls are being hired at weddings, parties and other events to do a range of incredibly bizarre things, having landed the job solely on the basis of their skin colour. This country places a premium on fair skin to such an extent, that it stemmed a whole range of materialistic obsessions prompting the Advertising Standards Council of India to release a statement regarding skin-lightening products. Has this indigenous obsession advanced so much that the presence of white women handing out drinks, or freestyle dancing with the event guests attaches a sort of pecuniary value, or upholds some sort of social status, somehow? It would appear so, if a conversation with Levin is read into, even a little.

“I’m acutely aware of the favourable bias towards foreigners in general, and I did those few wedding-hosting jobs both to earn some quick cash, but also to observe this weird phenomenon,” says Ree.

Making a quick buck is the primary reason why girls decide to take up these jobs on the whole, as this industry actually has handsome payouts. Even after the standard 10% commission that organisers of these generally ostentatious events avail of, the girls still make a pretty reasonable Rs. 5,000 – 10, 000 a night, and some events even go on for several days.

‘Wedding hosting’ jobs refer to a variety of things. One of the more ordinary ones involves the girls ushering guests in at the entrance with a ‘namaste’ and socialising. Then, there is the stuff that genuinely makes you wonder how people came up with it in the first place.
“There was this one grotesquely over the top wedding I did in Jaipur, the first job I had actually, where one of the parties was an ‘MTV-style’ party, and they gave us shorts and tank tops and told us to just go out there and free-style dance. Honey Singh was performing, and there were sushi buffets. African acrobats moved around as 3 DJs played simultaneously, and there were Brazilian Carnival-style dancers and some ten Thai women giving foot massages. With LED light-adorned dancers and other strange performers wearing gas masks, it was, in general, a shit show,” Ree tells us. “The last wedding I did, four of us were given ‘Rajasthani-style’ costumes and cheesy turbans, and they had us pretending to play drums along with the real drum players, escorting the groom and bride into the wedding. That was actually pretty fun.”

Another truly absurd notion that features in this list of jobs is that of paying a white girl to dress-up like a table (no really, this is a thing) at a wedding, handing out drinks and then waiting around for the empty glasses to be returned. “I get to be an inanimate object this evening,” says Morgan Kane (writing under a pseudonym) in another article describing working these ‘white girl jobs’. “Not in the sense of being objectified, like, “Women are just pieces of meat.” No—literally. Tonight, I am going to be a table! A human table wearing a glow-in-the-dark fireman’s hat.”

So, why do these girls decide to do the more degrading jobs?

“I don’t think I would ever have agreed to do things like the ‘human table’,” says Ree. “Honestly, most of the girls who do these things regularly are not really thinking critically about why this is even an opportunity that’s available. A friend of mine went to a wedding to pole dance, the skeeviest wedding she said she had ever seen. I guess I justified the jobs I took up by saying, if there are people who are tacky and rich enough to spend money just to have white girls at their wedding, then they deserve to be taken for all they’re worth.”
While Ree has only done a few gigs like this, and was lucky enough not to have any ‘overly-exploitative experiences’, she does know of many girls who do events like these full-time, on contracts or to supplement their contracts, and have had some creepy experiences.
“Over one of the event WhatsApp groups, I did hear of one girl who got left behind in Agra and had to make her own way back to Delhi at goodness knows what time of night,” Morgan Kane told TOI. “Having spoken with girls who work at club openings, or who are just paid to go to clubs, the ‘office environment’ seems a little different. They are paid to attend club nights, be bought drinks, dance around in skimpy dresses and bathe in the attention of amorous men with add that this is nothing unique to India. The same thing goes on in every over-priced Central London club.”

Plus there’s always the issue of a general lack of organization surrounding the event, with the girls being ordered around to pick-up points after having their photographs and measurements approved by a woman in charge until they get to the venue. Issues like these, and the sheer amount of risk involved, prompt us to ask yet again – why do the girls continue taking up these jobs?

A lot of the ‘full-time’ takers for jobs like these seem to be from Eastern European countries, where there aren’t a lot of job opportunities (especially those that pay so well) for women. So essentially, this is a great opportunity for them to make a pretty high income regularly if they take up these gigs consistently. Ree remarks that they all seem pretty blasé about it by now. Most of these girls even have degrees, and still continue to take up these jobs and however inadvertently - feed into an overarching mentality that so many of us are trying to fight in the country.

The organisers are, sometimes, completely professional, according to the girls. They are treated just like all the other entertainers, such as Bollywood dancing groups and so on.
“I also met some central Asian girls, and they seemed like very nice and normal people who just wanted to make some cash,” she recalls. At what cost, though?

Ree reckons she will probably stick around for about a half year or so before hopefully going on to teach English in South Korea. While most girls who take up these opportunities intend to do the jobs only for a while until they attain some sort of financial stability, they get stuck sometimes, lured by the lucrative promises that adorn the point-blank objectification involved, replete with (reverse) racial undertones.

For now, it seems we have found ourselves in an uncomfortable Catch-22 situation; these jobs will continue to exist in a country in which we are still not only bombarded with the objectification of women, but in which a lot of people still subscribe to the enduring belief, embedded in our social fabric, that alabaster skin is a prized possession. It is this mindset that creates an industry for jobs like these, wherein it is considered acceptable to have light-skinned women act as decorative elements to brighten up your special occasions. And thus, as the industry endures, there will continue to be takers for these opportunities which seem an easier prospect than many others, in other parts of the world.

Still suffering from our colonial hangover, fair skin is held in such high esteem in our country, that when it is clubbed with the patriarchal system plaguing India, the catastrophic result is white women dressed up like serving tables. “I’m super broke right now, I gotta fix that. Without working more weddings, that is,” Ree signs off.