“In India we don’t say ‘arranged marriage.’ There is the ‘marriage’ and then the ‘love marriage’”. best matchmaker mumbai and breakout star of Netflix’s “Indian Matchmaking,” none is truer than this. It’s not that finding husbands and wives for unmarried children hasn’t been an obsession of eager parents throughout centuries and civilizations, even if in Europe and the United States, love finally entered the chat room and stayed long enough to become normal. But for the older generation in India, parents finding spouses for their children has been the norm for so long that the idea of those same adult children marrying for “love” remains foreign enough to occupy a completely separate category; now it is a reality. -TV show.
“India Matchmaking”, whose third season premiered on April 21, follows the immaculately coiffed, highlighted and bejeweled Taparia as she traverses the lives of unhappily single men and women of Indian origin who mostly live in America. She promises to find them the spouses of their dreams, as long as they don’t dream too much. The cast varies (with some fan favorites and occasionally returning villains), but the majority are ostensibly wealthy, urbane, cosmopolitan young men, running their own businesses and attending boutique fitness classes. Standouts this season include an ER doctor named Vikash, whose god complex extends to referring to himself in the third person as Vivacious Vikash and performing solo dances to Hindi songs at his friends’ weddings ( and allow a video of himself doing it to be broadcast). at the show); he wants a tall girl who speaks Hindi because he is very attached to the Indian “culture”. There’s Bobby, the over-energy teacher who performs a math rap that ends with him growling “math, boiii” at the screen. Arti from Miami lists weekly visits to Costco as her hobby.
The activities these would-be matchees choose for the dates they go (wine tasting, yoga with kids) are straight out of gentrifying Williamsburg. Interspersed between these scenes are cameos of their stone-faced parents, astrologers giving sexual advice, face readers, tarot card readers, and Taparia’s peremptory warnings reminding them that they’ll never get everything they want in a partner, so it’s better. let them begin lowering your expectations now.
She promises to find them the spouses of their dreams, as long as they don’t dream too much.
The fact that she has yet to make a single union that results in marriage over the course of two seasons and 16 episodes has not deterred either Taparia herself or the show’s creators from continuing this Sisyphus journey into a third. She’s not one to suffer from imposter syndrome or even, apparently, introspection, so her matchmaking methodology remains unchanged. The only big news for her this time around is the expansion of her hunting grounds to Britain, where she begins her reign of terror in London by telling a 35-year-old divorcee named Priya that she “shouldn’t be so demanding”.
For people like me, who grew up in this third-party matchmaking environment, Sima Taparia or Sima Aunty (a nickname she gives herself) is just that: a aunt, an archetype we’ve known and avoided our entire lives: the obnoxious, overbearing relative, neighbor, or acquaintance with zero sense of boundaries. But for the global audience that eagerly lapped up “Indian Matchmaking” during the early months of the pandemic, Taparia was a delightful novelty, at one point spouting bon mots of marital wisdom with the serenity of an all-knowing sibyl (“Only will you know get 60 to 70 percent of what you want; you will never get 100 percent”) and the next moment ordering a client to ditch her “high standards” with the bluntness of a guidance counselor telling an overzealous student he won’t get into Harvard.
In India, the business of parents finding brides and grooms for their children is cruel and ruthless, as it originated as a way to preserve caste inbreeding.
Throughout history, the union of two people in marriage (holy or not) has never been just about the union itself: it is the larger institution that reveals the deepest anxieties (financial, religious, or racial) that sustain a society. “Indian Matchmaking” bills itself as any other show about the vagaries of trying to find love in a hostile world. It’s based on the idea that seeking help from someone as curiously old-fashioned as a matchmaker is superior to the travails of online dating, where one must suffer far worse indignities, like being ghosted or breadcrumbed. Here, at least, the relationship expectations are mutual, and after all, what is “biodata” (a curiously named document that Taparia uses in his practice) but the same exaggerated profile of a dating app but in the form curriculum and with fewer grimaces? inducing mentions about loving tacos and pizza.
But in India, the business of parents finding brides and grooms for their children is cruel and ruthless, originating as a way to preserve caste inbreeding, and continues to be rife with violence on all sides, a reality that it is close with the show’s depiction of the process as a civilized and decorous exchange carried out over tea and manners. The more pernicious aspects hide behind a flimsy cloak of made-up niceness, evident in the many euphemistic phrases in which Taparia, the singles she matches, and her parents communicate with each other. The title of the show itself reads like an awkward, faux-anthropological translation, when in reality, the Indian here on “Indian Matchmaking” is merely a stand-in for outrageously rich, land-owning upper-caste Hindus (with an exception here and there). .
Caste, one of the most malicious forces still dictating the social fabric of India, is cautiously hinted at by low muttering from the “same community”. Openly declaring that you want to marry someone filthy rich would be rude, which is why the words “good family, good upbringing” are thrown around frequently. Women cannot afford to be “picky.” Women have to be “flexible”. They must also learn to “commit.” My personal favorite of these, however, is “fit”, one of the most elaborate euphemisms in Indian English, the linguistic meaning of which can range from the compressed addition of a rear third on a bus seat meant to fit just two, to a man’s seat. The parents demand that the girl sentenced to marry her son give up her professional career to dedicate herself full time to the activities of her daughter-in-law. Curiously, men are spared the brunt of such exhortations.
“In marriage, every wish becomes a decision,” Susan Sontag commented in 1956, a surprisingly scathing line I was reminded of when I watched the show’s participants being questioned about their “criteria” for a potential spouse. Initially, they begin by reciting millennial lingo straight out of the twee internet age of 2012: the desire for someone “nice” with a “sense of humor.” But by insisting more, the real demands come to the surface, the decisions that show that its modernity has not yet overcome the inherited prejudices that govern this entire phenomenon. Costco-obsessed Arti can’t help but mention that her dad would really, really, In fact he loved that she married someone from his “community”. Meanwhile, the vivacious Vikash, despite all his insistence on Indian “culture”, forgot to specify that he wanted a Hindi-speaking girl from America (a “same community” of her own) and not the “very Indian” woman with the Indian accent that Aunt Sima found for her.
Photographs source: Netflix
Iva Dixit is the magazine’s staff editor. Previous articles of hers include an appreciation of eating raw red onions and an exploration in the continuing popularity of “Emily in Paris”.
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