Cluster

Reality TV in the Social Media Economy / The Great Indian Wedding Saga

By Saumya Premchander & Anandi Rao
Photo by Rajesh Mishra (Unsplash).

Over the past few years, there has been a rise in reality TV that features the Great Indian Wedding (or Shaadi as it is known in several Indian languages), including Indian Matchmaking (2020) and The Big Day (2021), both on Netflix. Popular drama web series like Made in Heaven (2019, 2023) also highlight the centrality of the wedding as a socio-cultural phenomenon and mobilize it in the service of commentary on contemporary India. In this essay, we look at the kind of Indian-ness portrayed through Indian Matchmaking and The Big Day to argue that there is a relationship between these representations and the emphasis on a Hindu India in popular Hindu nationalist discourse, whether this discourse be in India, or abroad. We do this to show how weddings, both straight and queer, are packaged by Netflix and sold to an international audience to promote a Hindu notion of India. 

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Indian Matchmaking or Savarna Hindu Matchmaking for the American gaze? 

In one of the first moments when the audience encounters Sima Taparia, the matchmaker in Indian Matchmaking, she proclaims, “In India, we have to see the caste, we have to see the height, we have to see the age.”1 What she leaves unsaid is religion, perhaps because it is too obvious to be said, or indeed because she only has Hindu clients. In an essay for The Atlantic, that came out after season one, Yashica Dutt writes, “By coding caste in harmless phrases such as ‘similar backgrounds,’ ‘shared communities,’ and ‘respectable families,’ the show does exactly what many upper-caste Indian families tend to do when discussing this fraught subject: It makes caste invisible.”2 Dutt adds that “Though the show is called Indian Matchmaking, it portrays no couples who identify as Muslim, Christian, or Dalit—communities that represent close to 40 percent of India’s 1 billion–plus population”.3 All three seasons focus on Savarna Hindu clients, with the one Sikh exception. 

In Season 3 (2023), we see Arti, a client of Taparia’s, begin a relationship with Jamal (a Muslim of Pakistani heritage), whom she met on a dating app. Towards the end of the episode titled “Daddy’s Little Tall Girl”, Arti says, perhaps unwittingly, that Sima Aunty would “never” have matched her with Jamal, because he didn’t meet her parents’ “criteria.”4 Using such coded language, and particularly by calling the show Indian Matchmaking rather than Savarna Hindu matchmaking, there is a normalization of Indian equals Savarna Hindu in the show. 

The show itself was pitched by Indian-American Smriti Mundhra, and greenlit by producer Brandon Riegg, vice president of nonfiction series and comedy specials for Netflix, and produced without the involvement of Netflix India.5 Mundhra had previously directed a documentary about arranged marriage featuring Sima Taparia called A Suitable Girl (2017). Mundhra aimed for Indian Matchmaking to have a larger audience, and in an interview with Suryansu Guha calls the final product a “documentary-reality hybrid show.”6 Guha makes the case that the final product is much more like a reality show based on “its production, marketing, and framing,” including the show’s casting call for “upwardly-mobile millennials.”7 Packaged much like other American reality shows focused on weddings, such as 90 Day Fiancé, and Love is Blind, it functions as a primer for a non-Indian audience—one which Dutt points out, normalizes “Hindu upper-caste culture as larger Indian culture”.8

Season 3 features an Indian-American doctor, Vikash Mishra, who says that he wouldn’t mind having a Brahmin bride, as she would share his cultural background. Taparia pushes back saying he eats meat and isn’t observing the customs, so there isn’t any need to fixate on a bride from the same caste. The rest of Vikash’s storyline has him looking for a woman whose Hindi meets his standards, as he wants his children to grow up speaking it; however, when he is introduced to someone who recently has moved from India, he finds her accent in English too challenging to overcome. Examining the specificities of Vikash’s expectations reveals something of the interconnected nature of caste, class, migration and education in terms of social capital, which the show skates over by terming “Indian culture.” 

Photo by Fas Khan (Unsplash).

A number of elements function together to present an Indianness that has much in common with that purveyed by increasingly prevalent Hindu nationalist discourse in the political realm. First, the slipperiness between the descriptions of Indian-ness and Savarnahood with Taparia’s Indian and Indian-American clients. Second, the markers of “Indian” culture, such as Viral from Season 1 hilariously refusing to confirm or deny her vegetarianism to her prospective husband (also named Viral). Third: the agents of Indian matrimony that the show presents—the Indian aunty, the Brahmin astrologer, the presumably Brahmin face-reader. As Khubchandani points out, the figure of the Indian aunty, is a distinctive one, which often serves to normalize and reinscribe “conservative values, casteism, patriarchy, fatphobia, colourism and cisheteronormativity.”9 Though she introduces herself as “Sima from Mumbai,” without exception her Indian and Indian-American clients call her Sima Aunty. 

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Reifying Through Laughter

While Indian Matchmaking borrows from the documentary mode, the reality tv production mixes realism with what Rijuta Mehta calls “dating show ridicule.”10 Suryansu Guha notes that the show was “conceived to spark progressive conversations,” but “underwent a genre repurposing and was ultimately understood as ‘trash TV’.”11 A big part of “trash TV” is the idea of “hate-watching” and “anti-fandoms.” Guha also points out that “the hatred that the Indian or diasporic viewer experiences with Indian Matchmaking […] implicitly provokes its viewers to act. But the activity it provokes is primarily discursive—an unremitting compulsion to talk about just how much one hates the show.”12 As Dutt points out, “the series has also generated the kind of intense conversation that many shows with nonwhite story lines can only dream of creating. Memes, essays, and long Twitter threads flooded both desi and non-desi corners of the internet almost immediately after the show’s release.”13

These meme accounts and filters circulate in the same social media economy as reaction videos to the show by social media influencers and comedians like Tanmay Bhat and Rohan Joshi. Guha points out that these were “commissioned by Netflix.”14 Does the laughter then retain the impulse to counter-hegemony, and remain a form of critique? Whitney Phillips argues, “oppositional laughter” can be “aligned with dominant ideology,”15 and when it comes to Indian Matchmaking, we would tend to agree. Here it is worth returning to Dutt, who says that the show, and we would argue reactions, including oppositional laughter, to the show, “deserves scrutiny because it promotes a practice that has enabled caste to live, breathe, and mutate over centuries. Indian Matchmaking allows a few jagged edges to remain as it tries to assure skeptical viewers that, ultimately, Indian arranged marriages aren’t that bad.”16 For Dutt, “that is the most chilling aspect of the show” and indeed we echo this sentiment in relation to the normalization of India = Hindu through the show and the social media response to it.

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Casting and Writing Caste in India and the Diaspora

One of the central claims of Dutt’s critique of Indian Matchmaking is that “Contrary to what some viewers might think, the caste system is an active form of discrimination that persists in India and within the Indian American diaspora.”17 The complexity of caste when it comes to the diaspora is exemplified through the storyline of Nadia Jagessar, a Guyanese-American client of Taparia who appears in seasons one and two of Indian Matchmaking. Nadia expresses concern that she will not be accepted by recent Indian immigrants to the United States, while Taparia meditates on the difficulty of finding a suitable match for Nadia. The ways in which prospective suitors engage with Nadia shows how caste is inseparable from the lived realities of anyone associated with the Indian subcontinent. The implication is that Nadia’s family were forced to move to Guyana as indentured labor under the British, leading to a fractured caste identity, and differently mediated relationship with the Indian homeland. Nadia is both within the Indian diaspora, and yet, in America, outside of its largely caste-Hindu domain, her Indo-Caribbean identity making it difficult to place her within traditional caste structures. As Mehta notes, Jagessar is the only person on the show offered a non-Hindu match: “Assimilation also excludes. In a singular moment of active endogamy that unfolds in narrative time, her father rejects the Catholic ‘biodata’ from Southern India, disqualifying a first date.”18 Despite being Guyanese, Jagessar’s Indianness cannot be allowed to encompass non-Hindu-ness. 

In Trauma of Caste, Thenmozhi Soundararajan notes that “caste isn’t limited to the homelands of South Asia but migrates around the globe. Brahmins and other caste-privileged people reproduce it in their new homelands and among their social networks.”19 Soudararajan goes on to say that, “[people] in the West need to know that most of the spiritual, intellectual and cultural products of South Asia are tainted by Brahminism.”20 Weddings are a way in which caste is reproduced in both South Asia and the diaspora, and the Big Indian Wedding spectacle consumed on streaming services is one such product. 

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Homonationalism and the Big Indian Wedding

Thus far, we have talked about straight weddings. But one of the striking things about the wedding reality TV phenomena is that it has started to showcase queer couples as well, even though same-sex weddings are not legal in India. For example, The Big Day, a show that follows six couples with seemingly enormous wedding budgets, features a queer couple in the episode titled “All you need is love,” who have to go to Germany to have their marriage legally recognized.21 In India, keen to celebrate their union, they must abandon hope of being wed by a Father at a Catholic Church; to have a wedding venue and priest of any denomination, Daniel Bauer and Tyrone Braganza decide to have their nuptials overseen by a Hindu priest who manages to find space for the sanctification of queer love in his version of Brahmanism. Their contemporary queer wedding is surprisingly filled with Brahmanical and North Indian rituals for a couple who have discussed social progress in the first half of the episode. We can read this phenomenon through the lens of homonationalism. For Jasbir Puar, homonationalism represents a “brand of homosexuality that operates as a regulatory script not only of normative gayness, queerness, or homosexuality, but also of the racial and national norms that reinforce these sexual subjects.”22 In the case of Daniel and Tyrone then, despite them coming from a minority religion in India, their wedding seems to represent a “buying in” to the Hindu national project, which is one that is flexible enough to encompass the right kind of queer subject positions. 

Perhaps the best example of the mobilization of queer subjects to further the discourse of modernity appears in the Amazon web drama series Made in Heaven. The series follows the lives of two Delhi wedding planners. Voiceovers by an aspiring documentary filmmaker turned wedding photographer act as a framing device to every episode, with every wedding being an opportunity to provide commentary on contemporary India. We place Made in Heaven alongside the other texts we examine, as an essential comparison based on subject material—the mobilization of the event of the wedding to examine Indian society. While Made in Heaven is fiction, it also offers opportunity for critique. The episode “Warrior Princesses” follows the commitment ceremony of two women, who ride into the event on horseback, dressed in wedding finery that is meant to evoke Amazonian armor. The mother of one of the brides argues with her husband who tries to keep her from participating in the event. She asserts herself saying “you know what is not normal, that you think you have the right to tell your adult wife and adult daughter how they must live their lives.”23

In the very same episode, Karan, one of the wedding planners, who was jailed in Season 1 under Section 377—used to criminalize homosexuality in India—finds sympathy with Shehnaz, a Muslim woman, played by Dia Mirza, who is forced to accept her husband’s second wife. Shehnaz tries to kill herself, but then bolstered by Karan she vows (in Hindi) at the end of the episode: “I am going to fight to make polygamy illegal. I am not only a Muslim, I am a citizen of this country. We should have rights too.”24 Karan’s visibility as a queer icon makes him the recipient of this declaration of Indian civil identity, that is asserted by the only Muslim woman on the show. It is difficult not to read this as an intervention into the debate about the Uniform Civil Code in India, which allows communities to be governed by the differing laws of religious scriptures, and among other things prohibits polygamy to all but Muslims and the members of some Scheduled Tribes. Muslim men having the ability to marry multiple women legally has long been an emotive issue among various factions of the Hindu right, arguably much more than the many and multiple other facets of legal and gendered hurdles to social parity that women, and Muslims, in India face. 

In this intervention, we have discussed how shows about Indian weddings portray the idea of “Indian” identity, or culture. Shows like Indian Matchmaking interrogate modernity in terms of the courtship rituals and social expectations of Taparia’s clients, while reinscribing, or reproducing hegemonic ideas of caste, class, and gender. The show’s spectatorial practices may have progressive, counter-hegemonic strains, and yet as a cultural artefact, when read against other series with Indian-American leads, or upwardly mobile urban Indians, the show trumpets the arranged marriage institution among Savarna Hindus. This idea of India being primarily Hindu and Savarna is a cornerstone of the militaristic Hindu nationalism that characterizes much public discourse, and electoral politics in India, and among diasporic Indians.

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Endnotes

  1. Indian Matchmaking, S1.E1, “Slim, Trim and Educated”.
  2. Yashica Dutt, “Indian Matchmaking Exposes the Easy Acceptance of Caste” The Atlantic, August 20, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/08/netflix-indian-matchmaking-and-the-shadow-of-caste/614863/
  3. Dutt, “Indian Matchmaking”. 
  4. Indian Matchmaking, S3 E7, “Daddy’s Little Tall Girl”.
  5. Suryansu Guha describes her “as Born and raised in LA, Smriti Mundhra, the showrunner of Indian Matchmaking, is a second-generation Indian American who got her MFA degree in Film from Columbia University”. The NPR article also points out that Mundhra “calls herself a proud “nepo baby”; her father was Jag Mundhra, a native of India who later came to the U.S. He was a self-taught filmmaker and mentored many other filmmakers”.

    Suryansu Guha. “Making a “Hate-Watch”: Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking and the Stickiness of “Cringe Binge TV”. Television & New Media, 24(8), (2023): 876. https://doi.org/10.1177/15274764221095792; 

    Eric Deggans, “’It’s about time’: How ‘Indian Matchmaking’ found love – and success – on Netflix” NPR, April 21, 2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/04/21/1170981913/indian-matchmaking-season-3; 

    Naman Ramachandran, “Why Wasn’t Netflix India Involved in ‘Indian Matchmaking’?” Variety, July 28, 2020, https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/netflix-indian-matchmaking-sima-taparia-1234716974/

  6. Guha, “Hate-Watch,” 878.
  7. Guha, “Hate-Watch,” 879; 880.
  8. Dutt, “Indian Matchmaking”.
  9. Kareem Khubchandani “Introduction: Transnational Figurations of the South Asian Aunty”, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 46:1, (2023): 71-94, DOI:10.1080/00856401.2023.2164414.
  10. Rijuta Mehta, “Brokering Suitability: On “Indian Matchmaking”” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 31, 2020. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/brokering-suitability-indian-matchmaking/
  11. Guha, “Hate-Watch,” 872.
  12. Guha, “Hate-Watch,” 873.
  13. Dutt, “Indian Matchmaking”. 
  14. Guha, “Hate-Watch,” 885.
  15. Whitney Philips, “Like Gnats to a Forklift Foot: TLC’s Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and the Conservative Undercurrent of Ambivalent Fan Laughter.” Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital age. Ed. Melissa A. Click. (New York: New York University Press, 2019): 267. 
  16. Dutt, “Indian Matchmaking”.
  17. Dutt, “Indian Matchmaking”.
  18. Mehta, “Brokering Suitability”.
  19. Thenmozhi Soundararajan, The Trauma of Caste (North Atlantic Books, 2022), 2.
  20. Soundararajan, Trauma of Caste, 80. 
  21. The Big Day, S1 E3, “All You need is Love”. 
  22. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke University Press, 2017), 2. 
  23. Made in Heaven S2E6 “Warrior Princesses”.
  24. Made in Heaven S2E6 “Warrior Princesses”.

  • Saumya Premchander

    Saumya is a South Asian feminist geographer particularly interested in questions of labour, work, property, and technology. She researches global production networks and local labour regimes with a particular attention to caste, class, race, gender, and other vectors of social differentiation.

  • Anandi Rao

    Anandi Rao (she/her) is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in South Asian Studies at SOAS, University of London. Her work has been published in venues such as South Asian Review, Studies in South Asian Film and Media and Shakespeare Bulletin. She is interested in issues of translation, gender and sexuality studies and cultural nationalism among other things.