Indian Matchmaking - Season 1

“Indian Matchmaking inadvertently promotes the very ideologies it aims to critique.”

Title: Indian Matchmaking
Episodes Reviewed: Season 1
Creator: Smriti Mundhra 👩🏽🇺🇸

Reviewed by Nick 👨🏽🇹🇹🇺🇸

Read the Season 2 review here.

Technical: 4/5

In her documentary A Suitable Girl (2018), director Smriti Mundhra revealed challenges for Indian women expected to be “worthy” for arranged marriages to male partners. This summer saw an addition to Mundhra’s broader project: an 8-part Netflix series called Indian Matchmaking where she explores arranged marriage as a cultural institution.

The series follows a high-profile Mumbai matchmaker named Sima Taparia and the families that pay her for her services. The title of the first episode—“Slim, Trim and Educated”—conveys a grim sales pitch for Taparia’s entire business model of helping a narrow subset of wealthy and high-caste Indians continue to pair and procreate with people just like them.

As Aditi Natasha Kini writes, the show “reveals all the isms associated with arranged marriages—colorism, casteism, sizeism, ableism, and classism—without criticizing any of it.” These things are blatantly on display throughout the show, but Mundhra approaches the issues with observation rather than moralizing. By presenting things exclusively as entertainment, she decisively omits her thoughts on how things should be and instead challenges the audience to apply their own critical lens.

Like other reality shows that center dating, Indian Matchmaking finds drama and humor in the mysterious search for romantic companionship. The key difference here is a focus on Indians and Indian Americans who navigate enforced cultural norms that warrant unpacking. Mundhra’s reliance on conscious questioning by the audience is admirable, but it’s likely that people without a personal stake in the show’s subject matter will simply binge and move on.

Gender: 3.75/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? NOPE

The rigid, status-based system Taparia upholds suppresses many forms of self-love and empowerment, especially for women. In a Decider interview with writer Radhika Menon, Mundhra describes the entire endeavor as “a marriage industrial complex.” One of her key motivators for making this show was to expose how women are commodified by a patriarchal, capitalist enterprise.

Even though marriage is expected of everyone Taparia tries to set up, the society she belongs to disproportionately pressures women to shrink their identities in the process. It demands that they view themselves in terms of their “value,” with overt premiums placed on thinness and whiteness. In one of the show's more revealing arcs, an ambitious startup employee named Ankita is so routinely criticized based on her body type and darker skin tone that she gives up on working with a matchmaker altogether.

Mundhra’s matter-of-fact storytelling emphasizes the narrowness of a world as curated by Taparia. Disappointingly, things like career ambition, assertiveness, and previous “failed” marriages are considered flaws in women seeking a partner. Conversely, men are not made to question their superficial standards or lack of emotional availability. Akshay communicates poorly and when asked for his preferences in a partner, defers to what his mother desires in a daughter-in-law. On the other hand, Vyasar, a man who is emotionally vulnerable and working through trauma, fears judgment from potential partners who may view his self-awareness as weakness.

Mundhra’s depictions of passive men and self-critical women reinforce stereotypical gender roles. Still, Taparia expresses a baseline awareness that certain gendered expectations are outdated. She adjusts for this reality by stressing that everyone should be open to compromise in relationships (meaning the men, too) and that both women and men should be attracted to their matches on some level.

Unfortunately, both Mundhra’s direction and Taparia’s tone suggest that such adjustments are little more than strategies to sustain a lucrative business. Yet scenes that depict Taparia herself in a partnership that was arranged, but that appears equitable, reflects the dissonance between how Indian women explore, experience, and discuss long-term partnership.

Race: 3.5/5

Taparia’s clients primarily belong to the privileged Rajasthani Marwari community in Mumbai. Given that a global viewership will experience Indian identity through this reductive lens, it’s difficult to hold the show up as a good example of racial representation.

Despite Taparia’s niche client base, the people featured on the show make for a somewhat diverse group. In particular, Nadia Jagessar is a Guyanese American woman working as an event planner in New Jersey. Her Guyanese background gives her intimate familiarity with the marginalization of Indo-Caribbean people among Indians in general. On the show, her options are quickly whittled down based on who might accept her full identity without judgment.

In a particularly vulnerable moment, Jagessar cries while expressing the loneliness she feels. Even knowing this was likely emphasized to add drama to the show, I couldn’t help but understand where her tears were coming from. Like Jagessar, I grew up as an Indo-Caribbean immigrant, only from the city of San Fernando in Trinidad. I navigated primarily white spaces in the North Texas suburbs and often felt minimized or erased because my cultural identity was the beginning and end of what people learned about me. I’m no stranger to the purity tests applied by specific Indian subcultures, religions, and castes to even fellow Indians. Jagessar’s story on the show affirms that no matter how successful and self-loving she or I may become, we’re still starting from scratch in the search for a romantic partner—even among the people with whom we share the most cultural similarities.

But despite the show’s welcome portrayal of diversity among matchmaking clients, it’s clear that Taparia’s work perpetuates these exact prejudices in Indian society. This is because any family that can afford to hire her is already at the highest point in its societal hierarchy. In Kini’s piece for Bitch, she writes that “those at the top...continue to benefit in the present and control people’s futures—or their expectations of what their futures should hold.” The glossy presentation of the Netflix show only provides temporary cover for these structural inequities.

By uncritically portraying the ranking of human value for a global audience, Indian Matchmaking may inadvertently be promoting the ideologies it aims to critique. Writer Yashica Dutt shares that “Mundhra’s biggest blind spot is her complicity in the normalization of Hindu upper-caste culture as larger Indian culture.” Dutt herself is Dalit, “the self-chosen identity for people formerly known as ‘untouchables.’” She is therefore no stranger to how the Indian caste system can encourage lethal discrimination. The challenge she poses to Mundhra’s passive filmmaking approach is a valid one.

LGBTQ: 1.5/5

In her Decider interview, Mundhra optimistically addresses a question about featuring same-sex couples on the show by saying, “Sima is growing and experimenting every day.” Her hope is that, as Taparia’s platform and network continue to expand, she might begin to admit more types of couples. But for now, absolutely no LGBTQ representation can be found among her featured clients on the show. Given that her current business model appears to rely on queer stigmatization, it remains unclear whether or not change can realistically happen.

Mediaversity Grade: C 3.19/5

Mundhra didn’t set out to portray Taparia as a protagonist making the world a better place. The overall goal of this project seems to be shedding light on how things are, and not on how things should be.

Designed to deliver the thrills audiences expect from reality shows about relationships, Indian Matchmaking prioritizes accessibility. The show doesn’t truly represent Indians or Indian Americans in a larger sense—then again, it’s difficult to expect that from any piece of pop culture. The only reason the burden of complete representation even exists is because it’s still abnormal to see mainstream stories focused on the lives of brown people.

Mundhra succeeds most when asking us to consider how we consume stories in the first place, exemplified by the season’s conclusion: an introduction to a woman named Richa who appears fairly Westernized and palatable to white audiences. She casually asks Taparia to help her find someone “not too dark, you know, like fair-skinned.” Malika Rao calls this a “haunting vision” and an “echo of a refrain repeated throughout the show.” These closing moments briefly fuse the thought-provoking subtext with what’s playing out on screen.

It’s almost as though Mundhra is using the final frames to say, “You know what you’ve been watching, right?”

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Grade: CLiSeptember 17, 2020Female/Nonbinary Creator