India, Sept. 20 -- Child 'engagement' or prostitution. That is the stark choice facing girls in this 'prostitute village', the disparaging moniker not a throwback to a shackled past but a lived present where their weddings are fixed when as young as seven to escape the dragnet their mothers and grandmothers could not.

Vadia village, 200 km from Gujarat's bustling main city Ahmedabad and a world away from the aspirational India of gender equality, is where women are struggling to break free from the roles forced on them by history.

For generations, women in the traditionally nomadic tribe village have been forced into sex trade while the men acted as their agents.

It continues to this day.

In a discomfiting ritual, men from the village...