The faults in our stars - II

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.

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.

These realities that reality TV apparently can't deal with appear constantly in our filmi fiction. The Hindi film and OTT industry has, in recent years, revelled in weddings as sites of ugly social revelations. From Mira Nair's 2001 Monsoon Wedding (MW), to Bittoo Sharma and Shruti Kakkar in 2010’s Band Baja Baraat to the rather posher Tara Khanna and Karan Mehra in 2019's hit OTT series Made in Heaven (MiH), our fictional content is positively chock-a-block with the planning of weddings. Weddings, as anyone who's organised one knows, are not just logistical nightmares but sites of social drama. Runaway brides have been with us since DDLJ, but there have many more since (MW, Tanu Weds Manu, Three Idiots, Shuddh Desi Romance to name just a few). More recent crises have included secretly gay grooms (MiH, also Shubh Mangal Zyada Savdhan), cross-cultural wedding negotiations (Vicky Donor, 2 States), an immature groupie bride who sleeps with a celebrity right before her suhaag raat and an uber-genteel IAS groom emerging as cowardly dowry-seeker (both MiH).

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.

That Indian weddings are social and financial negotiations is becoming clearer and clearer in Hindi films -- and any deceptions at the time of signing can later make the contract radd. In Bala (2019), the Tiktok-famous bride (Yami Gautam) marries Ayushmann Khurrana for 'love', but when she learns his floppy hair comes off at night, her love turns to be skin-deep, too. In Motichoor Chaknachoor, Athiya Shetty’s tall, fair Annie (urf Anita) believes Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s Pushpinder is employed in Dubai. When it turns out, post-shadi, that the Dubai job is long gone, Annie’s only reason for marrying – Pushpinder or anyone else – crumbles, and suddenly she can only ses that he's shorter than her, and darker.

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. 

But what’s refreshing about these comic plots is that they’re honest about Indian marriages, showing them as exactly the fat-shaming, skin-colour-obsessed, dowry-driven transactions that they are -- but also as the inescapable structure within which most Indians must seek whatever agency they hope to have. Even the conventionally attractive and wonderfully sassy Annie in Motichoor doesn’t feel free to actually refuse an arranged marriage – so her only leverage is in rejecting rishtas. And with no other way to see the world, she decides a foreign-located husband might as well be her ticket to ride. Age, looks, jobs and dowries are openly treated as chips to bargain with -- but how else is one to play if arranged marriage is the only game in town?

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30 Aug 2020.

The faults in our stars - I

My Mumbai Mirror column: the first of a two-part column.

What can Indian Matchmaking -- and other recent takes on the arranging of marriages -- teach us about ourselves? 

A still from A Suitable Girl, the 2017 documentary made by Smriti Mundhra, who has directed Indian Matchmaking

It's been exactly a month since the reality show Indian Matchmaking (IM) took social media by storm. Indian-centric content, even when it's on international streaming platforms, rarely attracts non-desi audiences. IM broke through. Several non-Indian friends and acquaintances on my Facebook and Twitter timelines seemed as hooked to watching matchmaker Sima Taparia from Mumbai attempt to find suitable marital partners for her clients in India and the diaspora -- deploying not only her own social knowledge and networks, but also a battery of face readers, astrologers and life coaches. That realisation, that the rest of the world was watching 'us' with a mix of horror and fascination, was probably what resulted in Indian viewers displaying so much anxiety about the show's portrayal of realities that no Indian can be unaware of. The most obvious of these social facts is that marriage in India remains first and foremost a kinship alliance between families, and that therefore what must be 'matched' -- much before any individual preferences come into play -- is the caste and socio-economic background of the two people concerned. A second social fact: the patriarchal, patrilocal norms of North Indian upper caste society mean that the girl must be the one who leaves her family for her husband's home – by extension, leaving her existing life for a new one. As Taparia puts in early in the show, “In India, there is marriage and there is love marriage.”

Taparia, with her lines about fate and the alignment of the stars, has become an easy-to-mock target, the subject of many a Sima Aunty meme -- while at least two of the women she fails to find matches for, the Houston-based Aparna and the Delhi-based Ankita, have emerged as underdog heroines, being increasingly interviewed and feted for holding firm against Taparia and another matchmaker called Geeta, who labelled them “inflexible” and “negative”.

Watching the show, though, I felt like Taparia's clients were really a bit of a double act. The India-based families were all from traditional North Indian business communities, like Taparia herself, and seemed within her sociological comfort zone -- while the US-based diasporic candidates represented a much wider spectrum of professions and backgrounds – Guyanese, Sikh, Sindhi and Tamil Americans from Houston to Chicago, including lawyers, a motivational speaker and writer, a dance trainer, even a public school teacher.

Naturally, these two sets of clients had very different requirements and expectations. Someone like Akshay, the younger scion of a Mumbai-based business family who was only marrying because of his mother's insistence that 25 was way past marital age, may have mouthed a few platitudes about wanting a mental match with his partner, but anyone who watches the show can tell that any prospective wife for him would first have to meet his mother's requirements – in order to be able to effectively replicate her. Taparia's job in this scenario is finding a suitable daughter-in-law to fit into a large business-oriented joint family – which is a rather different requirement from finding someone who fits the psychological and professional expectations of an independent mid-career professional like Aparna.

As Taparia says early on, “In India you have to see the caste, the height, the age, and the horoscope.” How the system usually works is expressed in a rather revealing sentence from the father of one candidate: “Pradhyuman ki dedh sal ke andar dedh sau file aa chuki hai”. The subtitles call them “offers”, but the way Pradhyuman's father puts it -- “Pradhyuman has received 150 files in one and a half years” -- really tells you what Indian matchmaking usually feels like: a bureaucratic process, no less competitive and standardised than a job application. It's Taparia, in fact, who tries to bring a new personal touch into this database-driven arranged marriage scenario. But it isn't easy to get rid of the old.

Indian Matchmaking's director Smriti Mundhra (daughter of the late Jag Mundhra, who alternated between US-based exploitation films and women-centric Indian films like Kamla and Bawander) has known Sima Taparia for some years now, and has filmed her in more vulnerable circumstances. In her 2017 documentary debut A Suitable Girl, made over seven years, Mundhra tracked Taparia's real-life quest for a groom for her own daughter Ritu. An MBA whom we watch engage in a spontaneous appreciation of the merits of Macro versus Micro Economics with another female client of her mother's, Ritu is often silent on camera while her mother speaks avidly of her marriage. But she also speaks candidly to the filmmaker about knowing that she must marry soon. She does reject many candidates before agreeing to wed Aditya, who apart from meeting her parents' economic and caste criteria, has an MBA like herself and “is witty”.

The second young woman in A Suitable Girl is Dipti Admane, who works as a pre-primary school teacher. Touching 30, her inability to find a suitable match despite years of scouring the newspaper matrimonials has propelled her and her parents to the edge of depression. Commentators on Indian Matchmaking have singled out Nadia and Vinay's first-date discovery of a shared dislike of ketchup as a flimsy hook upon which to hang a potential relationship. The 'boy' who comes to see Dipti remains utterly silent while his mother makes sure Dipti can run a house and calls her job “good time-pass”. But all an excited Dipti marks after their departure is that he likes sweet lime juice -- like she does -- and that his birthday is the same as hers.

The second part of this column will appear next week.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 16 Aug 2020