I cringe as I write this. I can’t believe I am contributing another piece to the most over-discussed phenomenon on the internet –Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking. It is not particularly good television, but remains widely watched and hotly debated. It has been covered by not just almost all major and minor national publications of varying repute, but also by the international press in The New York Times, BBC Culture, The Atlantic, and The Baffler.
The show has been rightfully criticized as patriarchal, casteist, colourist and orientalist. In fact, many viewers have argued that Netflix has committed irreparable damage by producing a series which largely glosses over the foundations at the heart of arranged marriages, namely, caste endogamy and patriarchy. However, despite the in-depth critique the show has attracted, Indian Matchmaking is strictly low-brow. While watching it, I was incredibly aware that not only was it problematic, it was also mediocre and predictable. But I still found the series inexplicably entertaining. What did an international audience see that was so watchable in the show and why have we been consuming it with such relentless fury? Yours truly finished a season in one night of non-stop, breathless hate-watching.
I decided to write this piece because I wanted to investigate why I subjected myself to this. The endless flurry of memes and think pieces are a mild reassurance that, at least, I am not the only one who indulges in some occasional cultural masochism (no to kink shaming!). Clearly, there is a quality to the show which makes it entertaining, in the same way I would be stimulated by a somewhat funny meme or three-minute viral content on the internet. It would be unremarkable if it wasn’t so deliciously…cringe. Indian Matchmaking is top quality cringe content. But what makes it cringe and why do we watch it?
An illuminating study of cringe as an affect and genre has been provided to us by the brilliant YouTuber, philosopher and activist, ContraPoints aka Natalie Wynn. She believes that cringe, when it is aimed at someone else can carry multiple connotations, but a consistent pattern seems to be the audience’s shame on behalf of the person because of their lack of self-awareness. Multiple commentators describe watching the show while half covering their eyes or being unable to keep looking at the screen because of the vicarious embarassment they felt for someone else.
Indian Matchmaking, to my mind, is a prime example of cringe comedy and how the genre’s conventions both, emphasise and ellide, the questions of patriarchy, caste and class. Humour is a remarkably ambiguous emotion, as it automatically elicits multiple meanings. Susan Sontag wrote almost 60 years ago that ‘To talk about Camp is therefore to betray it’; the process involves drawing our attention to its excesses. Similarly, to talk about cringe is, in many ways, to betray it; I write this to explain the joke. After all, what makes something cringeworthy is in its reception, not its essence.
For something to be cringey, content and audience are inseparable.
In an episode discussing the show in their podcast, State of Theory, Anindya Raychaudhuri and Hannah Fitzpatrick wonder, who are the kind of people who decide to appear on a dating reality show/documentary?
Well, let’s analyse some of them.
For instance, let’s consider the meme-able moment where the nouveau riche jeweller, Pradhyuman, serves liquid nitrogen makhana or fox nuts as amuse bouche to Sima Aunty (more on her later) and his seemingly ecstatic mother, who enjoys the dish in gastronomic rapture. Are we laughing at Pradhyuman’s failed attempt at coming across as tasteful or at the bizarre things rich people do? Perhaps, a little bit of both.
Another participant in the documentary who became a source of the internet’s collective fascination and horror was Akshaye’s mother, Preeti. Preeti claimed to have developed a high BP problem as her son remained unmarried at the ripe age of 25. Preeti says multiple times that she wants the girl to be ‘flexible’ and follow her rules if she is choosing to live under Preeti’s roof. This could have been downright obnoxious and terrifying to hear for a prospective daughter in law, but for the well-heeled audience watching this moment on their 500 rupees a month Netflix subscription, this is hilarious. Her use of the word flexible conjures up a variety of images –from acrobatic to sexual. The moment she demands that her elder son and daughter-in-law have their first child only after Akshaye is married doesn’t strike as a chilling example of a mother-in-law exercising patriarchal control over the elder daughter-in-law’s reproductive agency but instead makes us laugh because of her complete lack of self-awareness. ‘Cringe is failed seriousness’, remarks Wynn. What are these moments if not that?
Even a participant like the successful lawyer, Aparna (who is, somewhat confusingly, both reviled and seen as a woke feminist icon by sections of Twitter), is constructed to seem completely missing any sense of self-awareness by the producers. She doesn’t seem to know (or mind?) that she comes off as, for the lack of a better word, deeply un-chill, when she cannot fathom why her date could want to take a relaxing 10-day vacation. Unlike the awkward and shy men on the show like Pradhyuman and Akshaye, Aparna is impressively confident but absolutely unconscious of how her judgmental approach maybe off-putting to her dates or the audience.
‘There is something shrill and desperate about Aparna,’ I think. She makes me cringe so much that I cannot bear looking at the screen sometimes when I see her on that date with Srini. Is it because I worry that I see some of myself in her? ‘But I am not THAT chatty and not THAT aggressive.’, I tell myself.
One could argue that Aparna doesn’t want to be liked, but she clearly does, because why else would she be using the services of a match-maker to find a suitable partner among a sea of men? While the men (and us) may have mixed opinions, it is clear that Sima, the matchmaker in question and the protagonist of this series, doesn’t like her. In fact, Sima specifically doesn’t like her because Aparna is too ‘finnicky’, ‘negative’ and needs to learn to ‘compromise’.
Sima’s highlighted hair and jet-setting career never take away from the fact that she is a deeply traditional woman who, by her own job description in Episode 1, matches men and women of the same caste and keeps their rich parents happy in ensuring a smooth transfer of generational wealth. Her now trademark introduction (“Hello! I am Sima from Mumbaaai”) to her meme-able, trite advice on compromise, kundlis and the alignment of stars, everything about Sima screams ‘AUNTY!’. Aunties are, as a trope in South Asian millennial culture, an endless source of comic fodder. The trope about aunties is that they are regressive, petty and gossipy. Sima is regressive by our standards, her concerns with domestic bliss seem inane and petty in a world with dangerously rising COVID cases, temperatures and right-wing authoritarianism, and her one-on-one chats with the camera, where she dwells on the participants personalities, feel like she might as well be gossiping with us in the intimacy of our drawing rooms.
The makers of the show are hyper-aware of this reception and their audience. Films like The Room or Gunda are pioneers of the ‘so bad that it’s so good’ genre, but as a connoisseur of trash, I can confirm that Indian Matchmaking is a noteworthy experimentation. It employs a layer of meta-theatricality to the proceedings on screen. The camera captures the joke. The participants don’t know the joke. The audience laughs AT this ironic asymmetry. The camera pans for a few extra seconds every time something eye-rollingly awful happens on screen; I want to both dig a deep hole and hide in it forever but am also unable to take my eyes off the screen lest I miss the next display of human terribleness. Even the seemingly progressive arc in the series with Ankita, the young entrepreneur, is steeped in artifice. We are told every few seconds that she is ‘modern’ and ‘aaj ke zamaane ki ladki’ (girl of today’s age). ‘Modern’ girls don’t find it easy to get matches and Ankita abandons her search for a suitable boy in the most predictable fashion. The lesson here is that Ankita partnered with herself. Lol, okay.
In the closing moments of the show’s final episode, we are introduced to Richa, who is ‘slim, trim, fair, beautiful and from a good family’. Sima guesses that Richa should have the upper hand when it comes to choosing boys. Richa, however, has a lengthy list of criteria that her future partner should fulfil, ensuring that the matchmaking task will be a cumbersome one for Sima Aunty. The list starts innocently enough (a love of cooking, travel etc.). It rapidly transforms to the hilarious (‘basically he should just be like me,’ Richa exclaims) to becoming downright sinister. Richa wants a ‘fair-skinned’ boy, ‘not too dark’ and then she adds ‘any caste is okay as long as they’re…’, and the camera cuts to Sima’s exasperated but polite expression. The sentence never gets completed, but the implication is that Richa doesn’t want to marry into a lower caste family. Again, we see a character completely unaware of how she is being perceived by Sima and the audience, which is the key element of humour here. We are invited to laugh, but should we be laughing at this?
Who is watching Indian Matchmaking?
Lets circle back now to the people who are laughing at this. Young South Asians and their non-desi friends overwhelmingly constitute its audience and have catapulted Indian Matchmaking into becoming an international sensation. The makers, very carefully, use diasporic and Indian participants to draw in a whole variety of viewers (This doesn’t take away from the fact that everyone is Hindu, except one Sikh woman, Rupam). Reetika Kalita tweeted: ‘It would be amiss of us to believe that this ironic obsession with the show has only emerged as an unintended consequence. This product was designed very carefully keeping in mind an audience that would necessarily reject it but in finding so much material in it to reject would in fact become consumed in it as a culture. On the surface, it represents everything we (should) love to hate: patriarchy, casteism, classism, heteronormativity. But consumed as we are in this hating, we forget where we actually are: in a consumer capitalist society.’ This phenomenon, where the producers of such content bank on their success by predicting the audience’s contempt, is rare in Indian pop culture. But they are deviously aware of how obsessive hate can become. It is not that hard to comprehend why some people become full-time professional social media trolls. I mean, here I am, writing this piece!
Even though the show initially seems like it, Indian Matchmaking is not satire. Satire’s role is instructive; if Indian Matchmaking were a satire on arranged marriage, it would mock the institution, but instead it mocks the culture we live in and the people who participate in it. Do we need a glossy series that will probably give 10x more business to the likes of Taparia, and starts with sweet video interviews of oldies still in love with their partners, to tell us that arranged marriages are not as regressive as one might think? Probably not. The narrative logic behind the inclusion of story lines like those of Nadia and Vyassar is that the audience is supposed to see that matchmaking process doesn’t differ that much from navigating the modern dating pool. While that insight is useful in recognizing how matrices of privilege shape our ‘liberal’ worlds, it doesn’t acknowledge that arranged marriages are uniquely intertwined with the family, which is inseparable from institutionalized caste endogamy and patriarchal subjugation. Satire is on a subject, we cringe at an object. Thus, cringe is an ambivalent cultural mood exemplified in the banal –a comedy of manners.
The moment I started watching this show, I agonised over the fact that this flagrant display of casteism, gross Indian masculinity and overall trash desi behaviour was now worldwide. ‘Ugh don’t let white people see this, it confirms everything bad about this country.’, I thought to myself. I felt something similar when I watched Never Have I Ever and its flawed representation of Indian culture, whatever the hell that even means. It is only as I write this that I wonder why that bothers me so much. I am reminded of a moment three years ago, when I am sure my cheeks turned some shade of pink (well, as much as my significant melanin levels would allow) to betray my mortification and mild horror when I realized that my British friends were aware of Baahubali and Makkhi, thanks to Reddit. They gleefully showed me compilations of the most over the top action scene cuts from Indian cinema and while I tried to sheepishly laugh, I felt only burning embarrassment. The worst of Indian popular culture is out there on the internet for EVERYONE to consume. So, this incredible cult of angry men on Tik Tok are not just for me and my Indian friends to laugh at, but they are out there for the whole world to make fun of. Cringeeeee.
Hopefully, no Western viewers in their right minds will view this show as an accurate portrait of middle-class Indian culture. Except when it comes to how uniquely troubling our version of patriarchy is, how normalised classism and casteism are, how completely inept the average Indian male seems to be at talking to or relating with women. Sorry, forgot about that part.
But what is this second-hand embarrassment that we are experiencing while we try to intellectualize our obsession with this bizarre phenomenon called Indian Matchmaking? Wynn opines that this is a kind of in-group cringe called the ‘A-log Theory of Morbid Cringe’ wherein we ‘form obsessive and addictive contempt for people who have traits in common with us; people who make us uncomfortable because we see something of ourselves in them.’ We can unabashedly laugh at the people who populate the world of online South Asian meme-able and cringey content (from Pakalu Papito to the lady who begins each video of herself with an affable ‘Hello friends! Chai peelo?!‘) and be protected by our class privilege from ever being seen as one them. But now, with Indian Matchmaking’s international viewership, the moment we realize that someone could perhaps club us as identifying with this representation of our culture, we shudder. A thoughtful piece by Vanya Lochan asks us to ‘chuck the cringe and notice the nuance’ in the show’s representation of patriarchy, class and caste privilege. I propose an alternative –the cringe is the nuance you need.
Bare bones 