indian matchmaking | Stiletto Muse

In response to my last blog-post (“Indian Matchmaking: an entertaining reminder why I’m so anti-Auntie”), a few people pointed out quite rightly that Aunties are the product of a system. Often times, they themselves were treated badly or given little to no choices over their own lives, like being forced into marriages or forced to give up their careers. Often times, they still don’t have a lot going on in their own lives (hobbies, career, interests etc.), not because they are intrinsically dull or boring, but because they had to sacrifice so much of themselves just to survive in (certain large parts of) Indian society. So they spend their idle time meddling in other people’s business.

One friend asked “Is the Auntie really the villain here?”

I totally agree that a key feature of the Auntie phenomenon is it is a system that has been propagating down for centuries, not a random choice a bunch of individuals make.

But I also hold the view that being a victim does not preclude you from being a villain. Life is complex like that. We can each be good and bad, victims and villains.

The auntie is a villain

One irrefutable characteristic of systems is that they are made by people and the scene is often set by nature or the realities of the physical universe. Women have children, men are physically stronger (on average), and this sets the scene for some biases to start forming. But then on top of the natural biases, a sophisticated and extensive system of oppression is architected called “Patriarchy”*.

Patriarchy is enforced and handed down generation by generation by both men and women. If sufficient numbers of women protested and were like “WTF dude”, it would break. Why? Because ~50% of the population are women, and we are wives, girlfriends, sisters, daughters, businesswomen, teachers, bosses, leaders, voters and perhaps we are most influential on societal norms when we are mothers, the first teacher for nearly every human.

If mothers everywhere were like “You know what. I didn’t enjoy being treated differently from my brother growing up, I’m not going to do that to my daughter”, you’d see a massive change in the types of men of the next generation. I’ve seen this firsthand in several men I admire who are so wonderfully feminist, and I know their mothers had a large part to play in it.

So every Auntie, and every person, no matter how rough their life was, still had a choice. As one of my favorite poems by John Oxenham goes:

To every man** there openeth a way, and ways, and a way,
And the high soul climbs the high way,
And the low soul gropes the low.
And in between, on the misty flats, the rest drift to and fro.
But to every man there openeth a high way and a low;
And every man decideth the way his soul shall go.

So if you’re a woman who went through very rough times, and decide to pass it on, you picked the low way, or perhaps you made small improvements which I’d classify as drifting to and fro. On the whole, you uphold the system. You become a critical enabler and enforcer of it. You ensure the next generation’s experience mirrors your own or inches forward at a snail-pace (as has happened with large tracts of Indian society: change is happening, just so slow that it’s still going to ruin millions of people’s lives well into the 2070s).

Aunties, you have duality in your nature, and I have duality in my response to you too. You are both a victim and a villain. I have empathy for your victimhood and contempt for your villainhood.

*This blog-post would be much too long if I went into the multiple reasons and theories and speculations on why Patriarchy came to be the norm in much of the world. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s own is mind-blowingly beautiful literature (for the patient reader) and has some of my favorite explanations on this patriarchy nonsense we’re all in.

**or woman, obviously

The Netflix show “Indian Matchmaking” is highly bingeable and highly problematic. It serves as fertile ground for studying what is wrong with the Indian auntie outlook on marriage and life.

Firstly, definitions…who is an Auntie?

Aunties are Indian women in their 40s or older (not biological aunts necessarily). The matchmaker Sima Taparia in the show is an auntie. Akshay’s mother is an auntie.

Their common characteristics are being judgmental (about people’s looks, careers, dress etc.); being gossipy; being very interested in shaping the lives of others; presenting their opinions as facts, implementing regressive Indian stereotypes. Their hobbies include helping Indian women find a “nice Indian boy” and helping Indian men find a “cultured Indian girl”. This hobby includes the responsibility of maintaining rigid definitions of what it means to be “nice” (being an artist is not nice, you must be a doctor, engineer, lawyer or IT professional, for example) or “cultured” (tattoos are not cultured, for example).

Aunties can be well-meaning or ill-intentioned. Some are good-natured generally but just misled. Others are conniving and greedy, always looking out for their self-interest. If you want the classic version, Aunties can be spotted wearing saris, scouting for marital talent at social functions or at religious gatherings like Sunday temple. Some modern aunties have shunned the traditional Indian garb for western attire – but don’t be fooled, they can still be aunties. Like with all things, to know who you are dealing with, you must listen, more than you look.

Now with the definition laid out, let’s get to it! In this blog-post, I posit four key concepts that are the truth for many people of my generation, and pit them against the views that are interwoven into the fabric of the auntie worldview.

1. The length of a marriage or if it lasts has little to do with how good it is, and magic matters

Many episodes start with an old Indian couple sitting on a couch recounting their arranged marriage set-up and how they barely met before tying the knot and mentioning how they have been married many years.

If you heard if someone lived for 100 years, you might assume their life was magnificent. If you were then told that the person lived in miserable poverty or was imprisoned for a crime they didn’t commit for 75 of those years, you wouldn’t envy their life or extol it as an ideal life. Therein you see a fallacy many humans have to jump to conclusions without having the full facts. Without knowing what a life was like, knowing how long it was doesn’t help you evaluate it. The same fallacy of logic appears with regards to marriage. The response to “We have been married for 40 years” is generally awe and admiration. The marriage is seen as a success. Though you need far more information to call it so.

The same false logic is applied to statistics about how less likely arranged marriages are to end in divorce. These statistics have little to do with how good a match your family was able to make and much more to do with the higher willingness to compromise and lower expectations people have going into such a marriage (their individual happiness is less important to begin with) and the much higher stigma associated with divorce in the type of community that does arranged marriages.

Wives may find their conversations with their husbands flat and uninspirational, be neglected emotionally, have their careers stifled, be sexually unfulfilled, be beaten even, but won’t dare leave for the shame and stigma associated with divorce. Men may find their wives have none of the same hobbies they do, find their conversations mundane or uninspirational, be sexually bored, but won’t dare leave because of the stigma and sense of “failure” surrounding divorce.

Hurrah for a marriage just because it lasted 40 years? No, thank you. We’re more intelligent than to clap for things we don’t know enough about.

2. Marriage is for yourself, not for the family

The origin of marriage across the world and across cultures was economic and political. It was a social safety net (the man has to provide for the woman once she is married to him) and an institution that formed the basis of property rights (by making it more likely that any children a man is raising are indeed his own and thus he feels good passing his property to them after his death). It was also a means for families to control their bloodline for generations – maintaining “caste” or economic class (rich people marrying other rich people).

It was not about love, excitement, companionship, friendship, sexual pleasure and spiritual fulfillment. Those were happy accidents when they occurred.

But now in 2020, for most economically independent men and women, marriage is about love, excitement, companionship, friendship, sexual pleasure and spiritual fulfillment. These are no longer happy accidents but the core reasons why you would marry someone. Of course, marriages and relationships evolve over time and some of these variables may diminish with circumstances like health or age, but there’s got to be magic in the beginning at least!

Many of the matchmaker aunties unfortunately can’t even understand these criteria let alone accept them. They still see marriage as a duty to society, not as something you do if it increases your happiness as an individual.

Akshay’s mother in the show epitomizes this view with her comments about how his marriage is a top priority for her. His marriage is just a puzzle piece in her life.

“Everything needs to be in order and your brother and brother’s wife can’t have a child until you are married” she says (paraphrased)

“Those are separate issues” he says quite rightly (paraphrased)

“No, they are inter-linked” she admonishes him (paraphrased).

Akshay’s mother’s desire for control is common among Indian aunties unfortunately. They want to control the fate of two generations down from them – they want to control who they marry, where they go to school, what job they do, what they have for breakfast, what they wear. If these aunties lived longer, they’d want to control even more generations! I’m surprised they don’t outline in their will how every single girl to marry into their household needs to fit their rigid criteria and water the flowers on their grave-shrine every day.

Accepting you can’t control much in life and especially that you can’t control the thoughts, desires and feelings of other humans is a key part of being an adult. In this regard, Aunties seem to not really be adults.

3. Everyone should explore their sexuality in whatever way feels comfortable for them, the default assumption should not be that everyone is straight

For clarity, I am not saying everyone needs to go sleep with the same and opposite genders. Of course not! But there is a certain level of exploration and contemplation that is healthy for everyone and that degree varies for each individual. Each individual should have the freedom to explore as much (or as little) as they want. I have many straight (or towards the straight end of the spectrum I should say) girl-friends who have gone on a date with a girl or kissed a girl as an experiment. But in the Indian auntie outlook, it doesn’t even cross their mind that someone could be bisexual or lesbian or gay or asexual. Large facets of reality are just missing from their worldview!

PS Y’all know which character on the show inspired this thought. I’m not saying he’s gay (we don’t know) but it’s astonishing that being non-straight-sexual is not even explored or considered as a possible explanation for why someone might have rejected 150 girls and claims to feel no attraction to any girl he’s met!

4. Colorism is straight-up racist and damaging. It’s not just a light-hearted aesthetic preference

In the show and in real Indian life, people casually comment on people’s dark complexions as if it’s something terrible and someone’s “fair” complexion as if it makes them akin to a goddess.

In her book “Good Talk”, Indian American author Mira Jacobs recounts her trip to India and her aunties commenting on how she was so much darker than the rest of her family and her dad reassuring her later “Don’t listen to them, you’re a pretty girl”. She observes with amazingly precise self-awareness: “That was how I learned dark meant ugly”.

The more references to color are thrown about in common discourse, the more it becomes ingrained in people’s minds that it’s a key aesthetic dimension.

What’s more fascinating to me personally is that despite their obsession with light skin, Indian aunties are also adamant on marrying Indians only to other Indians. They’re not even logical in carrying forward their own bias to its logical conclusion of preferring the palest white person!

Closing thoughts

This show is a total mine-field and study into the Indian Auntie psyche. I’m sure there are many more observations to come, but those are the four big thoughts I had so far. Of course, other cultures also have many similar problems. The human desire to control more than we can and should is universal. Succumbing to colonial views of beauty is to some degree a natural outcome of centuries of oppression and of the masters looking one way and the owned looking another way. These are hard things to overcome. But to overcome hard things is also a part of being an adult human.

Aunties spend a lot of time and energy posturing over you as the wise, old guardians of society, calling you beta (hindi: child) well into your 30s . But really, Aunties are the ones that need to grow up.

Spoiler alert for below!

None of the couples matched on the show stayed together!