My parents’ marriage is straight out of a Bollywood movie. My father, who would skip school to watch art cinema and perform radical street theater, fell in love with my mother, a studious medical student who topped her university. A player and a know-it-all, a film buff and a talented artist, a Muslim and a Hindu. Falling in love was a decision, and a risky one. Interfaith Hindu/Muslim marriages in India are inherently political, and often provoke communal conflict and violence. Now in their 28th year of marriage, my parents recount the trauma and obstacles they faced from friends, family, and the state, as though they were living a rom-com.
In all likelihood, my parents’ marriage would have given Sima Taparia, the Mumbai-based matchmaker and star of the hit Netflix series “Indian Matchmaking,” a heart attack. In the show, Taparia traverses continents and oceans from Mumbai to San Diego to find the “perfect match” for each of her clients. Using “biodata,” a rigorous list of characteristics and qualifications ranging from height to eye color to caste, from numerous eligible (i.e. upper-class, upper-caste and conventionally attractive) South Asians, she promises relationships that will last forever to satisfy her clients, and more importantly, their parents. The show’s premise, perhaps, lies in its dual appeal: It at once joins the canon of guilty-pleasure reality dating shows, like “Love is Blind” and “Dating Around”, as well as a growing repertoire of South Asian American media representation, like “Family Karma” and “Never Have I Ever.”
As an Indian American woman and secret lover of reality dating shows, “Indian Matchmaking” should have ticked all the boxes. Instead, I found myself disturbed by the show’s unconcealed casteism, classism, and colorism. By the end of the first episode, I, like many other queer, anti-caste, feminist South Asians, could only move forward by hate-watching the rest of show. As many critics have pointed out, the show reifies, invisibilizes, and normalizes casteism and classism for South Asians, South Asian Americans, and those unfamiliar with the institution of arranged marriage. Even more pernicious, however, is its flirtation with orientalist self-exotification and its implications for the future of minority media representation.
“Slim, Trim, and Educated”
By commercializing the institution of arranged marriage, “Indian Matchmaking” is fundamentally complicit in upholding caste supremacy. Arranged marriage within the same caste and community, according to the noted Indian politician and caste abolitionist B.R. Ambedkar, is the primary reason for the perpetuation of caste. It consolidates and preserves upper-caste power. Disrupting these boundaries of power has deadly consequences; dozens of Indians are killed each year, usually by family members or in-laws, for marrying outside their caste. Last year, a father allegedly doused his daughter and her Dalit husband in kerosene and lit them on fire to protest their marriage in Maharashtra. Caste supremacy exists in America as well; in June, California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing regulators sued Cisco Systems Inc. on the basis of caste discrimination, accusing the corporation of denying an engineer professional opportunities, a raise, and promotions because of his Dalit background.
The show obscures the brutally violent reality of caste in India and America with seemingly innocuous marital preferences, including “slim, trim, and educated,” one of Taparia’s iconic catchphrases. Taparia does not hide her preoccupation with caste; within the first few minutes of the first episode, she explicitly calls attention to caste, height, and age as among the most important characteristics in arranging the perfect match. According to Dr. Suraj Yengde, scholar-activist and author of “Caste Matters,” “desirable qualities like ‘similar values’ or ‘good family background’ are actually caste markers. They are euphemisms for caste. Their purpose is to differentiate upper caste people from lower caste people, and in that sense they are the pinnacle of the caste system. Because Sima herself is not thinking actively about caste, the world that the show captures maintains and invisibilizes caste. Every Otherizing metaphor, reference, and gesture is about caste, and that’s how it operates on such a deep level.”
The problematics of the show, unsurprisingly, are not limited to caste supremacy. Taparia’s use of biodata is also used to match clients based on their religious background. Hindus are paired almost exclusively with Hindus, Sikhs with Sikhs. There are no Muslims, Christians, or Dalits. In addition to entirely erasing these marginalized communities, which in total constitute more than 40% of India’s population, Taparia’s insistence on religious endogamy has dangerous implications in an Indian political climate that encourages anti-Muslim hatred and genocide.
Beyond the particularities of the Indian political context, the show reinforces oppressive systems for South Asian Americans by reinforcing the model minority myth. From Aparna, the Houston-based attorney and general counsel whose incisive one-liner roasts have spawned countless memes, to Nadia, the New Jersey-based event planner and marketer whose Guyanese-American background brought much-needed attention to the reality of South Asian indentured labor in the Caribbean, “Indian Matchmaking” showcases only the experiences of upper-class, highly-educated South Asian Americans. When talking to Taparia about how she raised her children, Aparna’s mother reifies the model minority myth: “I don’t ever want to see a B on a report card. I don’t want two degrees. I want three. Nothing less than three degrees.” This emphasis on ambition, financial stability and education perpetuates the false stereotype that the diaspora is successful because of its adherence to traditional cultural values, including hard work and family loyalty; this logic in turn is often wielded to justify the marginalization of Black, Latinx and Indigenous Americans.
Orientalism Revisited
Despite the overtly problematic nature of the show, “Indian Matchmaking” has captured the imagination of South Asians, South Asian Americans, and non-South Asians alike. After its release, it remained on the Netflix Top 10 list for more than two weeks in both the United States and India. Despite its mixed reception, the one thing critics and consumers can agree on is its highly addictive quality. Importantly, the show functions differently for each of these groups.
For South Asians and South Asian Americans, the show, according to Yengde, does not provide any new information; rather, it simply mirrors the injustices that exist within our reality: “Ask any Indian auntie or any desi kid what the show is about and they’ll know it’s about caste. Indians know how caste is everywhere, yet not seen by the naked eye. The diaspora has long maintained a conspicuous silence on caste, and yet Indian American kids have been educated about caste in its internalized forms. It is the north star for every desi kid’s sense of identity.”
But for non-South Asians, the show has a dangerous effect: It reinscribes an Orientalist view of South Asia and naturalizes the caste system. Orientalism, a term conceptualized by Edward Said, refers to the cultural representations produced by the West about the Orient. Said, a seminal figure in postcolonial studies, argues that the West’s construction of the Orient is one of perpetual backwardness, barbarism, and eroticism while the West itself emerges as rational and superior. From “Indiana Jones” to “Aladdin,” Orientalism manifests most readily in pop culture for our consumption.
“Indian Matchmaking” is an Orientalist fantasy. Even though the show’s co-executive producer Smriti Mundhra claimed the show was not made for the white gaze, in reality “Indian Matchmaking” exoticizes elements of Indian culture for the white gaze. One particularly notable example of the show’s harmful Orientalizing quality lies in Taparia’s consultation of Janardhan Dhurbe, the face-reading astrologer who predicts the strength of her arranged matches from photographs of her clients’ faces. After taking one look at Aparna’s photo, Dhurbe discerns that she is “obstinate and stubborn,” and divines that “her husband will be subservient to her and absolutely devoted.” By emphasizing Taparia’s reliance on Indian astrology, the show constructs Indian culture as superstitious and backwards.
For casual, non-South Asian viewers who have little knowledge of the caste system or Indian ethno religious politics, the show propagates an image of Indian society deeply rooted in casteism, classism, colorism, and sexism without critiquing it. Arranged marriage is transformed into a cultural artifact immune to criticism because it is normalized for a global audience. The caste system, in turn, is transformed into an inevitable and integral part of Indian society.
Not the Representation We Need
It is important to situate “Indian Matchmaking” within the larger context of South Asian media representation, and more specifically within a growing canon of South Asian American television and movies. According to Professor Vivek Bald, who teaches in MIT’s Department of Comparative Media Studies, the show is representative of the fraught history of South Asian American representation more broadly: “At every moment there have simultaneously existed both an acceptable version of South Asianness and an unacceptable version, one that was celebrated and desired, and one that was denigrated. In the late 19th and early 20th century, there was a widespread craze for Oriental consumer goods while Asian laborers were kept out of the United States by immigration laws.” In our current historical moment, according to Bald, the system is “set up to reward us for seeking to be model minorities and punish members of our communities who will not or cannot do so. To put the recent changes in representation in that context is important to understand the types of South Asian representations that doors open for in the industry and what types of representations are not.”
While Mundhra claims that one of the goals of the show was to start difficult conversations in the South Asian community about caste, colorism and sexism, this goal is not radical enough when the stakes of arranged marriage itself can literally be life and death. An institution as inherently oppressive as arranged marriage does not need media representation, according to artist and co-founder of Bombay-based “Not Your Newspaper” Sarah Modak: “I don’t think arranged marriages require a narrative at all unless it is criticism. I don’t really see a way of making content about arranged marriage that’s caste-sensitive, not sexist, and unproblematic and still making it a light, bingeable Netflix show.”
The ultimate goal of ethnic representation must transcend the limitations of acceptability. As producers and consumers of media and culture, we have the opportunity to redirect our attention to a vision of justice and equality. It’s time for South Asians, and particularly those from oppressed caste, religious minority, and queer backgrounds, to reclaim our creative agency and tell our own stories from a place of radical honesty.
Image Credit: Image by Yogita is licensed under CC BY 3.0.