Indian Matchmaking: Hot or Not?
The most important thing is for the girl to be a bit flexible...
Hey slurps!
For the much anticipated second edition of Slurp, I’ll be deep diving into Indian Matchmaking, a recently released reality show that follows a group of Indian and Indian-American marriage hopefuls on their search for love with the aid of Sima Taparia, allegedly Mumbai’s top matchmaker. I promise this newsletter is not exclusively about reality television, but I felt called to weigh in on some of the debate surrounding the show and Netflix moves on a fast news cycle, so I wanted to do so before everyone moves on to pondering the logistics of dating with autism with Love on the Spectrum. Important caveat is that I’m Sri Lankan, not Indian, so the finer cultural nuances of Indian Matchmaking definitely went over my head, but my grandma had an arranged marriage and they’re still common in parts of Lanka, so I have some insight. Plus, lack of context never stopped a whitey from weighing in, so giddy up!
I started watching the show just one week after it came out and was surprised and delighted to find that so many of my friends had already slurped up all eight episodes. Little piggies. Who can blame them when Indian Matchmaking offers up such an intriguing array of well heeled 20 and 30-something Indian and Indian-Americans waiting to be cuffed, from resident fuckboy Pradhyuman, whose hobbies include fingering fine diamonds and eating liquid nitrogen, to Type A lawyer Aparna, who hates relaxing and humor and travels with the ferocity of an Amazing Race contestant, and Akshay, the Freudian 25 year old who wants to marry someone “exactly like my mother”.
The show has spawned many an outraged think piece, with Indian and non-Indian viewers alike irked by the casual colorism, caste discrimination and sexism espoused by classically judgmental auntie Sima.
I’m surprised by the lofty expectations placed on Indian Matchmaking, given that the vast majority of western love and dating reality shows hinge on similarly outmoded assumptions that women must FIND LOVE OR PERISH! Routinely, small armies of women are trotted out and pitted against each other in a fight to the death battle for a man who is typically far less compelling than any of them. The exploitation of women’s fears around being “left on the shelf” are so deeply ingrained in the genre that it feels too obvious to even attempt a feminist critique (even for me, who wrote a literature undergrad thesis on Fifty Shades of Grey).
While it’s true that anything from being a divorcee, to being Indian via Guyana, to not being very photogenic makes a woman “difficult to match” in the Indian Matchmaking metric, it does cut both ways, with one male contestant turned down by a potential wife because his school teacher salary is “not okay for her” and another savagely dubbed “Srini the loser” by his date’s mom.
While western audiences will balk at the directness around preferences exhibited by the show’s contestants, particularly around skin color and caste, discrimination presents in American dating shows, just in more covert and insidious ways. Take Love is Blind, the “social experiment” dating show that saw would-be lovers date through pods that allowed them to hear but not see one another while falling in love, in an attempt to find out – you guessed it – if love really is blind (I assume that includes color blind). After introducing herself as Diamond, a black contestant is asked “where she strips”, while another white contestant thinks “you sound African American” is a good ice-breaker. In the first episode of Too Hot to Handle, Sharron, a black contestant, half-jokingly expresses his dismay when another black contestant named Kelz appears – “being the only black guy was going to be my thing!” – hitting on the traditionally precarious or tokenistic inclusion of people of color on reality television.
Non-white reality contestants are often positioned as the back drop to their white castmates’ central dramas and regularly come up against subtle or not so subtle discrimination. Take Southern belle Stassi Schroeder, of Vanderpump Rules, who insists that she is “NOT A GHETTO BITCH!” (the greatest crime of all), before going on to be fired from the show for an earlier incident in which she falsely called the police on Faith Stowers, a black castmate, dobbing her in for a random crime she had no connection to. In this instance, there were consequences, but only years later and amidst a racial reckoning in the media that made it impossible for the television execs to ignore or gloss over the incident.
Another central critique of Indian Matchmaking is how the show portrays arranged marriages in a largely positive light, going heavy on the cute depictions of older couples fondly recalling their own arranged marriage stories and focusing on contestants who, bar maybe Akshay, ultimately have the autonomy to opt in or out of the process. In one of the most interesting and thorough critiques of the show that I came across, Yashica Dutt notes that the dark side of how arranged marriages reinforce the caste system is glossed over, with little mention of the sometimes tragic outcomes:
Caste, much like race, is an identity that you can’t change, erase, or escape. Marriage, especially between “dominant” and “untouchable” castes, can pose a threat to that hierarchy. That explains why people in dominant castes often carry out brutal violence against their own family members who dare to marry outside their caste, particularly if a partner is Dalit. Just two weeks ago, three brothers from a dominant caste in India’s Uttar Pradesh state allegedly killed their sister for marrying a lower-caste man and shot the husband in the stomach. Last year, in Maharashtra, a father reportedly doused his daughter and her Dalit husband in kerosene and lit them on fire to condemn their intercaste marriage.
Such stories are horrifying, and the caste system and its relationship to marriage is clearly the source of much violence, trauma and pain in Indian society. At the same time, western marriages can be equally disastrous, yet no-one seems to be demanding that The Bachelor kicks off with a disclaimer about rates of intimate partner violence within marriage, lest it mislead its viewers. Nor do we expect western reality dating shows to include plot lines about wives getting beaten or killed by their husbands in the name of representation. Sometimes the darkness seeps in inadvertently, such as in the tense relationship between Taylor and Russell Armstrong in season one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, later revealed to have been physically abusive at the time of filming following Russell’s death by suicide. The revelation that viewers have been watching a battered woman hide her abuse on television for our entertainment makes the show feel unsettling and potentially exploitative, rather than inherently more honest or good, as suggested by the line of thought that Indian Matchmaking would be improved by including similarly painful realities.
Perhaps Indian Matchmaking is best enjoyed as a reality television show focused on a specific subset of mainly Hindu, upper middle class to wealthy clientele, rather than demanding it exhaustively represent all of Indian culture and experience. I appreciated that the show avoided presenting arranged marriage to western audiences as a freak show to behold, instead humanizing the process as a potentially useful tool for young Indians today, when certain social conditions are on their side. As a South-Asian who has pretty much exclusively dated white people (much to unpack), I appreciated the position of the Indian-Americans who had made a concerted decision to seek out a mate who would understand their culture, however fraught some of its traditions may be, rather than seeking to escape it or spend their life explaining it to an outsider.
Anyway, Nadia forever. Still cursing the man who stood her up!
What did you think? Slurp, slurp!