'Indian Matchmaking' 2020

There's so much buzz and discussion about the reality show in my social circle that I had to hate-watch Netflix's 'Indian Matchmaking' (2020), produced by Smriti Mundhra, and starring professional Indian matchmaker Sima Taperia. 

It's a reality show that skims the surface of Indian culture and how traditions are still ingrained in the diaspora. It's a show about privilege and more privilege. It completely avoids the elephant in the room- the social stratification caste system and the huge shadows it casts on every Hindu of Indian ethnicity, regardless of where they are born, and where they now live. 

 Season One features seven singles who engage Sima Taperia's services to find suitable life partners in either the US or India, mainly Mumbai. She also trots out face readers, life coaches and astrologers. Sheila Marikar's piece in The New Yorker's September 7, 2020 issue 'Sima Taperia's Matchmaking Business Booms in Lockdown' totally drew out the conversation between the friends and I. 

Smriti Mundhra, the executive producer of “Indian Matchmaking,” joined the call from Los Angeles. She had a shoulder-length bob; children’s drawings hung on cabinets behind her. Mundhra, who is forty and grew up in L.A. and Mumbai, had been tracking reactions to the series. “There are a lot of people tweeting that this upholds a very narrow, caste-ist infrastructure,” she said. “They’re not wrong. But, ultimately, it’s where Indians are as a culture, and I’d rather talk about it and engage with it than just pretend it doesn’t exist.”

I didn't really bother to go into the 'characters' on the show. These are real humans with real stories, and the spoiler is- nobody in Season 1 got hitched, which was the whole point of a successful match made. The show left it to the audience to be its critics, and decide whether to root for anyone, or none at it. It doesn't try that hard to do any social commentary, although it essentially is. The executive producer herself had a few matchmaking meetings arranged by Sima Taperia, but ultimately, none went through. 

“There were a couple people I would’ve considered, who rejected me,” Mundhra said. “I was never the ideal body type,” she added, “but I have light-skinned privilege. My family would talk about that—‘Oh, she’s a little chubby, but she has good fair skin.’ ” Taparia nodded knowingly. “In India, they still want fair skin,” she said, despite recent campaigns against popular skin-lightening creams such as Fair & Lovely. “They want good height. They want good education. They want good family—everything, they want. You know Aishwarya Rai?” she asked, referring to the actress, model, and former Miss World winner—“I explain to them, you will not get Aishwarya Rai.”

I binged all eight episodes of this first season. My jaw dropped to the floor so many times that I didn't bother picking it up anymore. I have no words. My Indian-American friends are extremely vocal about it, as are the Indian-British and Indian-Singaporeans. The diaspora has so much to say about this show and its cultural significance that I don't think I can contribute anything else to it. In Ritu Hemnani's piece for South China Morning Post, she wrote, 

So why are viewers rage-watching the show? Indian Matchmaking comes with toxic cultural truth bombs and blatant absurdities, and it skewers the double standards the country’s foreign-educated upper-middle-class. Despite Twitter rants against misogyny, colourism, casteism and beauty requirements, the show reveals that, in traditional Indian families, choosing a life partner is still very much a business transaction.