Author Chetan Bhagat, in an advertisement for Shaadi.com

(This is an essay from our print quarterly ‘Online-istan’. See more from the issue here.)

Eds: All Shaadi.com users’ names have been changed to protect their identities.

On 17 May 2013, a few days after I joined Shaadi.com, the matrimonial website came up with a ‘Love, arranged by Shaadi.com’ campaign, with writer Chetan Bhagat at its helm. Both of the campaign’s ads showed a newly married, English-speaking couple, at ease with each other, learning to understand love between themselves. Towards the end of the ads came Bhagat, the paperback messiah of Indian English who, speaking in Hindi, invited everyone to join Shaadi.com to arrange life partners for themselves: “Un bees laakh logon ki tarah! Like those two million other people!”

It’s remarkable how two men with no personal history of arranged marriage – Bhagat’s 2009 novel was a semi-autographical bestseller, based on his love marriage, while Anupam Mittal, the flamboyant 39-year-old owner of Shaadi.com, has never been married at all – came together to ‘fix’ marriages for young Indians through this electronic portal. If that sounded like an unintended, trifling irony, it was only the first of many I was to witness during an odd stint at this, the “World’s Largest Matrimonial Website”.

Filtering soulmates

Sonali Bose’s profile was among those I remembered from my first few days on the site. It wasn’t the most uncommon – or the most outrageous – of them all, yet there was something about the carefully studied ‘About Me’ description that evoked a quintessentially upper-caste attitude when it came to marriage: “Important: Although, our family does not believe in [the] traditional caste system (having an inter-caste setup ourselves),” it said, “[w]e are looking for an alliance from non-quota families / boys (No SC/ST/OBC).” This last caveat, for the uninitiated, was designed to deter those from the Scheduled Castes and Tribes, as well as the so-called Other Backward Classes.

Sonali, 28, in search of a groom, was no simpleton, and appeared unaware of what this extraordinary discrimination entailed; she had a cosmopolitan upbringing in an elite Delhi family of managers and advisors to the government. Her profile mentioned that she was presently working with the Planning Commission of India, where she prepared “strategies for the five year plan”. Of her parents, her “father is Bengali Kayastha and mom a UP-Brahmin,” themselves entering into an inter-caste marriage three decades ago.

Sonali seemed clear about her electronic bridal mission: “Where are you working?” was the first thing she asked me, in the website’s chatroom, in reply to my initial pleasantries. I had a similarly upper-caste profile, similar age, working in a related sector, whose proposal she must have deemed fit for her shortlist. The next question: “Parents settled in Delhi?”

For someone new to this portal, and someone who can sometimes be hopelessly 1.0, such transactional conversation irked me. When I voiced my concerns, she responded that these “tough questions” were necessary, and needed to be addressed at the beginning of the conversation itself. She suggested I should have been better prepared.

Preparation was clearly important at Shaadi.com. Reeti Khanna, a 22-year-old actuarial consultant working with Ernst & Young in Gurgaon, was an “open minded, down to earth”, liberal Punjabi girl, who didn’t have too many guarded preferences. She was doing extraordinarily well with a seven-digit package, and often went partying with her all-girl crew to places like Goa, where they wrote “We Rock” on sands and clicked jovial photographs of themselves hugging one another. Contrasting somewhat with the Punjabi bridal ideal of a mannequin-thin, tall figure, Reeti was short, and had, until very recently, been fairly overweight.

She seemed clear about her electronic bridal mission: “Where are you working?” was the first thing she asked me, in reply to my initial pleasantries

Reeti’s pictures on Shaadi did not betray any excess weight, of course, though with prior information, one could see how the pictures had been choreographed to hide it. But Reeti had hit the gym some time back, and toned herself up. She was “[n]ot in a hurry but eventually I will [be],” she said, when I asked her about marriage. She spent time here so she could develop a pool of potential partners from which she could, eventually, choose the best bet. “Not yet,” she replied, extrapolating with sad emoticons, when I asked if she had found anyone interesting through the site.

But, as I learnt to wade through the architecture of the portal – its search engine, through which I could send ‘Interest’ requests to a diverse set of transnational profiles; the ‘premier benefits’ (a euphemism for paid-member facilities), through which I could email, chat, or make phone calls to members I most liked – I realised that my journalistic curiosity was becoming a personal limitation.

Not only was my profile unremarkable: 26, 5’6”, wheatish, New Delhi, Brahmin-Bhumihar, Madhubani, Maithili (an obscure Bihari, really!), my partner preferences didn’t really conform to the norms I witnessed on the pages of other members. I hadn’t mentioned the importance of family in my profile, nor a preference for the ideal Indian traits, often summed up by the bovine expression, ‘traditional with a modern outlook’. Nor had I suggested a partiality towards a particular caste or region. I simply stated that the girl should be liberal and well-read – whatever that meant – along with a few other inane preferences. A restricted, six-week timeframe also meant that I displayed what was perceived – in the protocol of the marriage market – as desperation: it was often I who approached, mostly by email, prospective brides or their families, rather than being chased by the other side.

All of which amounted to deviating from what was the norm on this portal: My profile was suspect, an enigma – very often “chosen to be responded to later”, which usually meant rejection, on account of being incompatible or unimpressive.

Matrimonial websites are a predominantly Southasian enterprise, and combine two extreme concepts. On one hand is the internet, which was envisaged by its creators as a method of ruthlessly questioning, disrupting and updating old institutions with new ideas and information. On the other, the arranged marriage system, which had always been a communal institution: A patriarchal artefact built around a network of families and relatives who have for centuries sought to reproduce caste purity, class privileges and the hierarchies of gender. Marriage in this context was designed not so much as a union between two individuals as a relationship between two families. Any private, individual notions of romantic love – if intended at all – were meant to be a happy by-product of marriage.

The large-scale social and geographic mobility of the last few decades, however, has rendered the communal nature of marriage and caste weaker, especially in urban areas. With traditional kin networks either distant or unavailable, it has become harder for families to find suitable partners for their children. Initially this led to the advent of brokers and classified advertisements, which catered to the city-dwelling, upwardly-mobile, English educated middle-class. Matrimonial websites first appeared in India in 1997.

Both Anupam Mittal’s Shaadi.com and its competitor, Murugavel Janakiraman’s BharatMatrimony.com, emerged from personal encounters: Mittal had dealt with a sly matchmaker who was attempting to ‘match him off’; Janakiraman established his website after he was unable to find a girl for himself through traditional avenues.

These websites were no path-breaking innovations. Inspired by dating websites in the West, they simply tailored their designs to cater to Indian needs: community; sub-castes; horoscopes; even that other Indian obsession, skin tones. A 2008 research paper by Archana Sharma found that the early version of Shaadi.com had the various sects of Islam and Christianity listed as castes. It also said that, while this version had many Brahmin sub-caste categories from which users – who were mostly upper-caste – could choose, the only lower castes the website recognised were called OBCs.

With Indian sensibilities in place, it was then just a matter of time before these sites started growing exponentially. The genius of Mittal and Janakiraman lay in handing the platform to an upwardly-mobile middle class, by using technology to serve an important social function.

The most common pattern I observed on the site was as follows: After joining the website, the individuals, or their families (who managed the account on behalf of their children), filtered for their most binding preferences – religions and communities, income, physical features, etc. From this narrow pool of profiles, they further shortlisted profiles on an individual basis, depending on whether they liked the other information (location or social status, for example). Finally, they were left with those who were to be contacted, via the website’s inbuilt email, chat, or – as the parents often preferred – phone calls. Such filtering, of course, suggests that new technology is being employed to reinforce the oldest Indian hierarchies, myths and stereotypes.

“[The websites] pose themselves as neutral,” sociologist Anuja Agarwal told me, “but they are commercial enterprises” and “would do anything that maximises their revenue.” Even though “people had always been predisposed to marrying within their own castes,” she said, these websites end up facilitating the rigidities because of the ease with which a large pool of data could be accessed on the web. “[The m]arket co-opts everything that serves its interest.”

Webcastes

“We are looking only for Rajputs if u read the prfile . thanx fr ur intrst,” the lady at the other end replied. It turned out the profile was managed by a Chicago-based computer engineer on her younger sister-in-law’s behalf, herself an engineer working in Pune. They were “strongly looking for [a] Rajput/Khatriya” groom who also had to have a “good sense of humour”. I was surely disqualified on the first account, but still pushed to see if things went any further: Wouldn’t they consider someone who could provide regular bouts of original humour, but was from another caste?

“Sorry but No.”

“But why?” I asked. “Answer only if you want to.”

“goodluck for ur search!” she said.

What was a lot more revealing to me, though, was that a surprisingly low number of profiles from my own feudal, Brahmin sub-caste had shown any interest in knowing me. After all, I thought, I am well-educated, had mentioned decent (if somewhat inflated) annual earnings, and also had writerly pretensions. Many rejected my advances straightaway, while the total number of requests I received stood at precisely one.

My requests, when they were accepted, were often from castes ranked below my own – from the OBCs and SCs – or from like-minded, mostly upper-caste girls, who had posted their own profiles, and, having hovered around 25 years of age, hunted for men in the post-work hours and on weekends.

In my journalistic pursuit, however, I sometimes ended up offending those with ‘lower-ranked’ profiles. “Our family has no such [caste] issues,” Sunita Yadav, a 27-year-old Hindi journalist from Noida told me, alleging, “looks like you are more worried.” I slowly learnt that the acceptance of the profile itself was meant to be a tacit approval on other matters, too.

Kirti Mandal, 27, who categorised her community as “Others”, worked as a store manager with a retail-mart in Indore. She briskly undertook her managerial duties even as she chatted to her prospective life-partners. “yaar i jus hate this cast n creed thing in india,” she told me. “i also remember ppl asking about my caste n gothra n ol dat stuff,” she said, “i tol thm i actually dnt knw abt it…n honestly i do not hv ne idea…n [I told them] if u do blv in such things i am not the one for u.”

After joining, the individuals or their families filtered for their most binding preferences: religions and communities, income, physical features, etc

My personal experiences reflected findings in a research paper by political scientists Amit Ahuja and Susan Ostermann. Their statistical results showed that all other factors – income, wealth, height, skin tone – remaining the same, one’s position in the caste hierarchy was negatively correlated with ‘boundary-crossing’ behaviour – which, to simplify, means that a larger percentage of prospective internet brides from the scheduled-caste category were interested in marrying into higher-caste categories than was the case vice-versa. This behaviour, they argue, is based on the principles of exchange: marrying into a higher caste helped lower castes escape the stigma of their status; for upper-castes, on the other hand, unless the groom had very good career prospects, caste lines were almost never breached.

“It’s unlikely that upper-castes wouldn’t find someone from their community who would also meet other [filter] criteria such as income,” said the sociologist Agarwal. “Emphasis on caste,” she said, is therefore “mostly a high-caste thing.” Sociologist Patricia Uberoi has similar views: “Same-caste marriages may also be prevalent because of [their promise of] bigger dowries, and status.”