Indian Matchmaking's advantage over The Bachelor: "It’s about people, not about people starring in a reality TV show"

Slate

"On Indian Matchmaking, Mumbai-based Sima Taparia attempts to arrange marriages for a wide variety of young people living both in India and America, traveling back and forth to meet her clients and their families, gathering and sharing biodata about prospective matches," says Willa Paskin. "The show leans heavily into a documentary, as opposed to a game show, aesthetic, boosted by the fact that it’s about a practice many Americans are unfamiliar with. It’s upscale, informative reality TV, even as it tracks with tawdrier shows. It has a villainess; it regularly deploys tried-and-true reality TV workarounds, like giving the shy and laconic Akshay the full The Hills treatment, pairing him with a chatty interlocutor and leaning heavily on his decontextualized but freighted facial expressions; and it’s sly about its outcomes, which are apparently worse even than The Bachelor’s. But unlike most reality shows, which have long since become shows about what it’s like to be on a show, the cast here is triangulating so many desires—their own, their families’, their dates’—that the camera has to take a number. How can you present yourself as one type of person when there are so many people, also on camera, who know you as another? The web of relations holds everyone in place. If there’s another season, I doubt this will remain the case: The reality camera knows how to shoulder its way to the front of the line. But it gives this first season, at least, a rare and satisfying texture and psychological heft. It’s about people, not about people starring in a reality TV show." Paskin adds: "One way to think about Indian Matchmaking vis-à-vis other reality shows is that it revives the Marriage Plot, treating marriage as a serious lifelong commitment permanently entangling not just spouses but entire families. That gives the show stakes that The Bachelor—its own kind of matchmaking business, after all—can’t begin to feign, no matter how much it plays up the 'hometown visit.'"

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• Indian Matchmaking deserves praise for showing people of Indian descent dating each other: "There is more nuance to this depiction of arranged marriage than what’s been shown in other films and TV shows featuring South Asians, which have long disdained match-made partnerships," says Sanjena Sathian. "On the sitcom New Girl, Cece Parekh and her parent-approved betrothed narrowly escaped their union, instead finding love with white people. In The Big Sick and Meet the Patels, matchmaking served as the obstacle to South Asian men’s sexual liberty. Even Bollywood prefers meet-cutes. In fact, Western viewers rarely get to see South Asians in romantic partnerships with one another. Hollywood deserves blame for this — for too long, one brown person on screen was revolution enough; two boggled producers’ minds. Bend It Like Beckham and Mississippi Masala featured Indian women dating outside the race. (Masala deserves praise for tackling anti-Blackness among South Asians.) On Master of None and The Mindy Project, the protagonists generally dated white people. But by 2020, South Asians have arrived on screens in more formats. Hasan Minhaj is the new Jon Stewart on Patriot Act; Bravo’s deliciously tawdry Family Karma showcases rich Indian Americans in Miami. Netflix and Amazon are investing in stories for Indian viewers. Now, desi creators can portray ourselves dating and marrying brown. Family Karma sees Indians courting (and sniping) within the community. Mindy Kaling’s comedy Never Have I Ever subverts familiar narratives: A woman trying to avoid a family setup ends up actually liking the guy."
• Indian Matchmaking exposes the easy acceptance of caste: "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," says Yashica Dutt. "One of the primary functions of arranged marriage is maintaining this status quo. This can be confirmed by a cursory glance at matrimonial columns in Indian newspapers, which are full of 'Caste Wanted' headlines, or at the ubiquitous matchmaking websites that promise to help users find an upper-caste 'Brahmin bride' or 'Rajput boy,' while filtering profiles from people in lower castes. Marrying into the same caste of one’s birth is not, as Indian Matchmaking might suggest, a benign choice akin to finding someone who “matches your background” or has 'similar values.' It’s a practice that helps dominant-caste folks preserve their power. Caste, much like race, is an identity that you can’t change, erase, or escape. Marriage, especially between 'dominant' and 'untouchable' castes, can pose a threat to that hierarchy."
• In defense of Aparna Shewakramani: "Reality TV tends to turn flesh-and-blood people into stock characters, and Aparna’s archetype is easy to recognize," says Alison Herman. "She’s the quintessential career woman who doesn’t have the time, energy, or inclination to focus on her love life. And now that she’s decided to put more effort into romance, she’s unable to turn off the perfectionism that’s gotten her so far in her professional life. Take the way she describes a typical first date: 'I have a place. It’s a wine bar, and we do 55-minute dates there. I sit at the same table—it’s right by the door—and I literally give the person an hour.' Aparna may be on a dating show, but she talks like a Shark Tank judge."
• Aparna is quick to emphasize the heavy editing on Indian Matchmaking: "You’re watching a heavily edited version of our stories, of the hundreds of hours of footage that we filmed," she says. "The point of the show is to talk about Indian matchmaking and arranged marriage, and how the seven individuals progress through meeting with Sima Aunty in the process.” She adds: “The show couldn’t touch upon all the issues in such a loaded area of our culture, which is our understanding of marriage. It was important to me that they showed different archetypes of people, which is what they are, to start the conversations that could be beyond matchmaking – like, ‘what is a woman’s voice in a workplace?’ ‘How does she assert herself?’ ‘How does she ask for what she believes she deserves?'”
• What is it really like to go through the arranged marriage process?