The second part of a two-part Mumbai Mirror column (published in August 2020).
What Indian Matchmaking doesn’t tell us about arranged marriage, and popular Hindi cinema increasingly does.
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| A scene from Motichoor Chaknachoor, where Nawazuddin Siddiqui reprises his 'permission' scene from GoW in a new context |
One of the unaddressed problems with Indian Matchmaking, as I suggested last week, is that it seeks to club too many disparate worlds under Sima Aunty’s umbrella – leaving some out in the wind and weather. But if you think about it, many of the candidates with whom Sima Taparia has the least success – Aparna the opinionated lawyer, Nadia the hopeful dance trainer, Vyasar the good-humoured schoolteacher, Rupam the divorced single mother – are Indians in the West, for whom she is but one of a bouquet of options. Taparia’s claim of custom-made choices may seem a great option to these people bruised by past relationships and the dating game, but they also know can always go back to meeting people online or off-: to non-Indian matchmaking, if you like. This is true even when they want a partner from a particular community: Rupam, for instance, manages to find a Sikh American man on Bumble who fits better with her familial priorities than Taparia’s prospects. Also, though the explosion in dating apps and marriage websites is kept rather obviously to the sidelines of IM’s India-set narratives, the reality is that Pradhyuman in Mumbai and Ankita in Delhi, too, have many options besides the mythified personal matchmaker.
Taparia’s
inability to match most of her clients on the show ends up making her look
foolish, even redundant. But it’s a set-up designed to fail. No lone matchmaker,
no matter how well-networked, can possibly provide the range and variety of
prospects needed to cater to IM's selection of clients: so distant in location, age, social and educational background. It’s no accident that
the only success on IM is the engagement of
Akshay, whose mother is the real mover on both marital deadline and choice of bride. And while the show doesn’t vocalise it, the way Akshay and Radhika’s families greet each other
with “Jai Shree Krishna” suggests membership of the same religious
sub-community.
In Mundhra’s
2017 film on arranged marriages, A Suitable Girl, all three young
women she tracks get married: two within their communities, and the third to
someone off Shadi.com, only after failing for years to find a match within her
caste. Meanwhile, other than Rupam’s dad wanting only a Sikh husband
for her (interesting, given that her sister's husband is African American), IM mostly
elides the biggest factor in real-life Indian
matchmaking: caste and community. The ‘reality show’ also leaves out an
even more ubiquitous vector of Indian arranged marriages: money.
In many of these depictions, comedy works to make the medicine go down. At least two films -- Habib Faisal’s Daawat-e-Ishq (2014) and Dolly Ki Doli (2015) -- have featured trickster-brides who dupe the men lining up to marry them. What screenwriters likely depend on to make these heroines remain likeable is the commonly understood fact that marriage in India is a market, and a market loaded so unfairly in favour of the boy’s side that the girls are being driven to illegalities.
Motichoor has been much berated for its
political incorrectness. Indeed, the fat-shaming of Pushpinder’s (Nawazuddin)
first marital prospect feels like a horribly unfortunate throwback to our
Tuntun-obsessed childhoods, and there’s an exasperated slap he delivers that he
never verbally apologises for, but his non-verbal attempts to make up for it
felt more persuasive to me than Thappad’s. And I was as impressed
as Annie by his dowry-rejecting stance.
