What's love got to do with it

Remember this line?

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

No, don't worry; this post is not about Jane Austen.

It is about marriage though.

The "arranged marriage."

A Netflix show has kicked up a great deal of controversy about arranged marriages in India.

From a young age, I have had nothing but complaints about the arranged marriage.  The criteria to select the bride were just godawful,  She cannot be too short or too tall.  God forbid if she were "dark."  No blemish anywhere.  And, oh, while her paycheck is desirable, she should also function as a traditional housewife.  The man will donate the sperm and soon after grow a huge pot belly from all the eating and doing nothing.  (Slowly women are gaining some say in the process, but men and their families control most of the arrangement process.)

There was nothing in this that appealed to the teenage me.  The older I got, the more I have awful things to say about this system.  Which is also why I have not watched the Netflix show, nor do I have any plan to watch it.

What are the problems with the arranged marriage that the show makes people talk and write about? Let's start with the godawful caste system:

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. 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. That's just the start. 

The caste is pretty much the point of departure in this process.

The average non-Indian viewer might not imagine an India beyond the Hindu upper-caste that the show is about:

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.

A while ago, I reviewed a book about the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean.  The author wrote about how the new professional Indians on work visas look down on the "native" Indian community, who are the descendants of people who left India to work as laborers in faraway unknown lands.  This also apparently features in the Netflix show:

[The] story of event planner Nadia Jagessar, who tells the camera she’s struggled to find a match in the past because she’s Guyanese Indian. This is code for a number of conditions: Nadia’s family, originally Indian, immigrated to Guyana in the 1800s, along with a vast influx of indentured Indian labor shipped around the world after the British outlawed slavery. Many consider them low-caste, or not “really” Indian; there is a suspicion of their heritage being mixed, carrying with it the stigma of being tainted. Yet the show merely explains that for many Indian men, bright, bubbly, beautiful Nadia is not a suitable match.

After all, high caste affluent Indians did not jump on those ships!

What is the view from India about the show?  "it has shown how casteism and sexism merge with money, high-status, and modernity in the urban milieus of Mumbai, Delhi, New York, and Chicago."

Given that my doctoral research was on the matchmaking practices of urban Indians, I can say that this show is not far from reality. We are perhaps uncomfortable and angry because this show has said it as it is, and has done so on a global platform, leaving little scope for pretence.

The messier the system, the better the entertainment and the money that it brings to the producers.  Netflix has the last laugh in this, similar to how the current President owes it all to the entertainment of the lowest kind.

What a depressing and sad state of the world!