Sima Taparia of Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking. Photo: Courtesy of Netflix
Arranged marriage is a contentious topic often triggering angry responses from those culturally unfamiliar with the concept. Disturbing thoughts transpire of an adolescent female married off to a man twice her age. A couple with no emotional or physical connection; the female expected to subserviently accept her fate. The male lauded and told to ‘do his duty’ of consummating the marriage that evening, to someone he has never met. What seems to be important more than ever in today’s society is context. Arranged marriage is not always forced marriage and if both parties are consensual to the match and each are able to exercise personal choice, what makes this ancient tradition differ from modern-day dating apps, where the app acts as ‘Aunty’, displaying the individual’s notable attributes, likes and don’t likes, while they metaphorically swipe left or right depending on who they deem most suitable?
Dating shows such as The Bachelor, Married At First Sight and Love Is Blind have been huge successes with viewers globally. The Netflix show Indian Matchmaking became a hit after its first season in July 2020, inspiring heated conversation and plenty of memes. It follows the process of Mumbai-based matchmaker, Sima Taparia and her process of bringing couples together in the hope of marriage. A pattern occurs, whereby particularly ambitious and intelligent females are asked to compromise, labeled as inflexible and “superficial.” The males are often petted and fawned upon, while both genders present similarly extensive lists of biodata characterizing their desired potential other halves.
Innocuous fun or normalization of harmful cultural traditions
At one point in Indian Matchmaking, Akshay, one of Taparia’s clients, asks his astrologer for a glance into the future. “You’ll get married to a very good girl,” the astrologer, Navnath Patil responds. “She will have a round face, fair, just like the moon.” Rooted in regressive ideologies Indian Matchmaking features problematic prejudice within the South Asian community and in many ways endorses casteism, ageism, classism, colorism, gender stereotypes, and the controlling behavior of parents hoping to micromanage their adult offspring’s lives (in India it is estimated that 90% of marriages are arranged).
Positively, the show has inspired difficult conversations about the ancient tradition of arranged marriage while highlighting the social acceptance of cultural prejudice. The show does not represent the country’s vast diversity and seems to omit ethno-religious minorities, predominantly focusing on ‘upper-caste’ Hindus from North India (around 16% of India’s population are classed as Dalit, 15% Muslim, and 2.4% Christian).
Ankita Bansal, a 32-year-old fashion entrepreneur from New Delhi, who decided to focus on her developing business, said in an interview with BBC Culture, “Matchmaker way— why not? For me, it wasn’t very different from being introduced to a guy by a friend or through a dating app. Of course, each of these comes with their own good, bad and ugly.”
Aparna Shewakramani. Photo: Courtesy of Netflix
Aparna Shewakramani, a 34-year-old lawyer from Houston who has received a polarising response since the show aired, including a number of death threats, says, “it was also just another way of meeting new people,” but that she was not able to express herself to Taparia and “set boundaries on camera.” She continues, “I think that we need to see women as more well-rounded and wanting all kinds of things for their life. They can want careers and they can want love.”
A mirror showing real life in South Asian society warts and all, or the perfect #cringebinge, there is no doubt the show has glossed over the ugly underbelly of arranged marriage.
Statistics on forced and child marriage
Published in February 2022 by UNICEF MENA:
• The world is home to 650 MILLION child brides (including currently married girls and women who were first married in childhood).
• Of those, 40 MILLION (equivalent to 6%) child brides are in the MENA region. The highest numbers are in Sudan and Yemen.
• Every year, 700,000 girls are forced into child marriage in the MENA region.
New analysis by Save The Children (www.savethechildren.org.uk):
• Every year around 12 million girls are married (two million before their 15th birthday). A further 2.5 million girls are at risk of marriage by 2025, because of the pandemic— the greatest surge in child marriage rates in 25 years.
• Up to 2.5 million additional girls are expected to marry over the next five years, together with the 58.4 million child marriages taking place on average every five years— amounting to a staggering 61 million child marriages by 2025.
• Girls in South Asia are disproportionately impacted by the risk of increased child marriage this year (191,000), followed by West and Central Africa (90,000) and Latin America and the Caribbean (73,400). The practice is also expected to rise in East Asia and the Pacific (61,000), Europe and Central Asia (37,200) and the Middle East and North Africa (14,400).
• “A growing risk of violence and sexual exploitation combined with growing food and economic insecurity— especially in humanitarian emergencies— also means many parents feel they have little alternative but to force their girls to marry men who are often much older. These marriages violate girls’ rights and leave them at increased risk of depression, lifelong violence, disabilities and death from childbirth.”
Khalid Al Ameri and Salama Mohamed with their children. Photo: Instagram.com/salamamohamed
Labor of love
Emirati YouTuber Khalid Al Ameri, who gained fame posting daily videos of his life, met his wife Salama Mohamed while working in Dubai. They have been married for 15 years and have two sons. In an interview for Khaleej Times, Mohamed said, “How we met… everyone thinks it’s a glorious, romantic story. It was a semi-arranged marriage. I liked the fact that I saw a future with him other than just normal marriage and having kids. I thought I could have a conversation with him and that he could challenge me mentally. That clicked for me.” Ameri explains, “It was arranged in the sense that you introduce two people who you think will get along well and they end up getting married. We were only engaged for six months. She would make me laugh.” On July 18, 2017, Ameri also shared the couple’s struggles on Instagram— “For so long Salama and I’s marriage wasn’t our marriage, it was everyone else’s. It was relatives who told us what was best. It was ‘friends’ who told us what we should do. It was people we didn’t even know, that we were trying to be like because they fit in. We grew so far apart that we no longer knew why we were together.”
Dubai-based couples and individuals counselor, Evelyne Thomas explains, “In my experience, very few couples from arranged marriages consult for counseling. Often they suffer alone as they are afraid of stigmatization and going against decisions taken either for them or with their cultural ethics. Difficulties in an arranged marriage would often be deemed as, the match was ‘wrong’. However, when these couples do consult, they have the same relationship issues as couples who have a ‘love marriage’. They have the same need for connection and safe attachment. The aim is to help them voice what they would like in their relationship. The work is to help people take the risk of being intimate in their conversation. Communication skills, empathy, and validation of each other’s thoughts and emotions can be taught in the same ways as in a couple who marries out of love.
Matchmaking throughout history
Centuries-old, strategic marriage was and still is used as a matchmaking tool to ensure families’ inheritance and continued dominance over wealth, land and status. The sacrificial virgin has also been depicted in paintings in patriarchal society throughout history, used as a pawn to grow a family empire or as a way of bargaining. In Greek mythology the legendary sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father, to appease the goddess Artemis, poses a grim picture as the Greek fleet gathers to prepare for war against Troy. A mother’s boastfulness and pride resulted in Andromeda being sacrificed in order to appease the Gods, leaving her at the mercy of the sea monster, Cetus (aka the Kraken), chained to a rock on a cliff overlooking the sea. Even Game of Thrones introduced us to a humiliated Daenerys Targaryen, married off by her brother Viserys, to Khal Drogo, in exchange for an army. The common denominator— often the female draws the short straw.
Are times changing?
Authors such as Jane Austen provide sharp and satirical insight into the prominence of matchmaking in 18th-century Britain. A matchmaker in her own right was the 21-year-old protagonist of the novel Emma. Modernist in her belief of ‘love marriage’, Austen shows her contempt for matchmaking in Pride and Prejudice, where the character Elizabeth talks about her mother, Mrs. Bennet, who wants her five daughters to marry for “fortune and status.”
In today’s society right-wing tabloids frequently collude arranged marriage with forced marriage, representing women as victims of their culture, in need of liberation, often through the scrutinously narrow lens of ideological Western views.
Topics of sociocultural context and the summarising of a tradition steeped in history and cultural nuances can be difficult to navigate. Raksha Pande, a senior university lecturer and author of Learning To Love, mentions in her thesis for Durham University, UK, that women who have an arranged marriage are “often seen as having given up on the ideals of choice and love, as victims of the inertia of South Asian cultures.” Padne argues, “that there is a need to theorize arranged marriage practices and the role of agency and power in the lives of women from lenses other than those that cast South-Asian women as victims of their cultures. All societies, whether patriarchal or otherwise, are complex assemblages where everyday life involves compromise, negotiation and flexibility in the dealings between men and women.”
Both men and women can be victims of forced marriage. If you are affected or know someone who is affected by forced or underage marriage, here are some helplines:
Ohchr.org/en/women/child-and-forced-marriage-including-humanitarian-settings
General inquiries:
Telephone: +41 22 917 9220
Email: ohchr-InfoDesk@un.org
The UN Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture
Email: ohchr-unvfvt@un.org
Asha: A South Asian organization that works to end violence against women and girls. Can offer confidential advice and information to any South Asian woman who is experiencing violence, or is worried about someone they know.
+44 208 696 0023, email: advice@asha.org.uk
Forced Marriage Unit: Government help and support line – +44 20 7008 0151 (Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm) email: fmu@fco.gov.uk.
