A match made in heaven - “Indian matchmaking” in contemporary times (original) (raw)
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Film is a world of narrative influences and borrowed aesthetics; it is easy to trace the lineage of almost any modern style to its country of origin. Current directors must battle the predictability that comes with over 100 years of established genres by creatively mixing ideas from different eras and areas. Bollywood is a genre founded on this intermingling, using in equal parts several established Hollywood genres. Even with its Western influence, Bollywood has emerged as a national cinema inseparable from Indian culture and identity. In more recent years, however, its audience has shifted to include a more global, specifically a more Western, consumer base. As one of the most recognizable international film genres, exactly where do the hallmarks of Bollywood cinema fall in relation to Western aesthetics, narratives and audiences? Many Indian directors, including Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding, 2001) and Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham, 2002), have attempted to address this issue by acknowledging the impact of Western colonialism and the resulting diaspora on Indian families and their values. Nair and Chadha accomplish this by mixing elements of the “old,” Indian tradition, with the “new,” globalization, resulting in the translation of Western values onto Indian screens. Monsoon Wedding and Bend It Like Beckham both act as officiants between these two cultures, granting Western audiences “unmediated access to a heretofore hidden and unknowable world,” through the cinematic trope of the chaotic wedding and its inevitable culture clashes.
An "Arranged Love" Marriage: India's Neoliberal Turn and the Bollywood Wedding Culture Industry
Communication, Culture & Critique, 2009
In the last decade of the 20th century, coinciding with India's economic deregulation, the Hindu wedding became a core attraction in popular Indian cinema. Weddings in real life, in turn, became more elaborate organized by a wedding industry, which professionalized and commodifed work that was previously done by an informal economy or outside of it by members of the family. Evoking the Frankfurt School, this paper locates the big wedding as a product of the emerging Bollywood culture industry and its ideological redefinition of nationalism/citizenship as both acts of consumption and the re-enactment of patriarchal and caste-based identities. Challenging the explanatory power of the notion of hybridity and its rejection of ''totalization'' narratives, the paper asks for a reconsideration of the meta-narratives of class and gender, capital and patriarchy to understand the ways in which global capital is most intimately experienced and lived.
Gurinder Chadha and Mira Nair' s films define diaspora as a diaspora space where women are portrayed as change agents. This paper explores how Chadha and Nair provide a different representation and possibilities for South Asian women in the diaspora in the description of arranged marriages and interracial love relationships so that they present pioneering female characters that subvert orientalist misconceptions about the South Asian Subcontinent and South Asian women. By so doing, this essay confirms how Chadha and Nair' s selected films propose new postcolonial models that promote the construction of new roles for female characters in cinema that challenge the racial and gender inequality suffered by women in the United Kingdom, the United States of America and the South Asian Subcontinent.
Offering audiences a romanticized interpretation of Indian life, the images in Bollywood films present the viewer with loving and supportive families, beautiful wedding rituals and a "happily ever after" point of view that does not quite measure up to the societal realities of life for millions of Indian women. Juxtaposing themes and images from three popular Bollywood films against current attitudes towards women in Indian society, this paper will analyze the issues surrounding women's choice of marriage partners, the high cost of weddings and dowries, female infanticide, and the violence too often suffered by women and girls in India through dowry-related abuse or murder. This paper will also examine the question of whether the Bollywood film industry and its highly revered actors are attempting to alter awareness regarding these issues in the larger Indian society. . B o l l y w o o d I m a g e s | 2
Offering audiences a romanticized interpretation of Indian life, the images in Bollywood films present the viewer with loving and supportive families, beautiful wedding rituals and a “happily ever after” point of view that does not quite measure up to the societal realities of life for millions of Indian women. Juxtaposing themes and images from three popular Bollywood films against current attitudes towards women in Indian society, this paper will analyze the issues surrounding women’s choice of marriage partners, the high cost of weddings and dowries, female infanticide, and the violence too often suffered by women and girls in India through dowry-related abuse or murder. This paper will also examine the question of whether the Bollywood film industry and its highly esteemed actors are attempting to improve awareness through films and public remarks, which address these issues present in the greater Indian society.
Gender, Cinema, Streaming Platforms. Chakraborty Paunksnis, R., Paunksnis, Š. (eds) , 2023
Indian Cinema has as a ‘key arbiter’ of popular culture in the subcontinent corroborated notions of identity, values and gender. The Hindi film heroine as a protagonist in Bollywood or ‘mainstream’ hindi narratology post 2010, is a distinct extrapolation of a country’s changing socio-cultural, economic and political inflections. The ‘female led’ cine-narratives while redefining gender roles and responsibilities, question and explore desire in a patriarchal society struggling with layers of power renegotiations. The success of women-led commercial Hindi films has also revealed the potency of the multiplex to host alternate narratives and the vibrancy of global Indian audiences. The twin entanglement of a ‘neoliberal governmentality’ and instrumentality in appropriating this new form of feminism as discussed by Gill & Scharff, (2013) along with ‘post feminist’ influx from the west as daily engagement with brands, products and celebrity rhetoric has endowed contemporary directors to boldly interpret desire and sexual fulfillment in cinema for an aspirational youth emboldened with the neoliberal narrative. Simultaneously, Video on Demand (VOD) platforms like Amazon Prime and Netflix are extending portrayal of desire with the advantage of an uncensored yet formidable space of the aspirational middle class with access to technology. Representation has moved beyond challenging stereotypes to recast the young techno-savvy urban female as liberated, open to satisfying desire and hugely skeptical of marriage. Located within these new feminist realities is sisterhood and the female buddy film. These narratives explore the intertextuality of patriarchal repression with the conventional coded and un-coded messages as well as bold, blatant and unseen private moments, which were if at all depicted, in independent cinema. Sisterhood within heterosexuality is being reinterpreted as a symbol of empathy within an unvoiced constituency. Specific films juxtapose the metropolitan global woman with invested agency and attempt to represent diversity of the ‘other’ as she extrapolates the meaning of freedom in a hybrid post feminist space. This paper examines the portrayal of desire and self-fulfillment in context of marriage in the mainstream Bollywood film, Veere di Wedding (2018) in context of feminist film criticism, auteurship, reversal of the gaze, and ‘competitive femininity, perfection and imperfection’ (McRobbie, 2015). It also delves into the dynamics of production ideology of Hindi mainstream cinema, distribution and spectatorship vis a vis the millennial.
The fault does not lie in the stars. Indian Matchmaking and gender representations
JumpCut, 2022
The fault does not lie in the stars. Indian Matchmaking and gender representations by Ishita Tiwary In the summer of 2020, in the early stages of the pandemic, like many others I got even more hooked to binge watching as a way of coping with the uncertainty and the stress of the world around us. I discovered a new-found appreciation for and morbid fascination with reality television. One such show, which seemed to be generating headlines, was Indian Matchmaking (2020/dir. Smriti Mudra) on Netflix. It was also the show that I had earlier been most resistant to watching. Because its narrative featured a "suitable girl" whose parents were on the lookout to get her "settled," the show's premise seemed to hit too close to home. Born and raised in South Asia and currently residing in North America, I found myself surprised that everybody around me not from that region seemed to be obsessing about the show and bombarding me with queries about the arranged marriage process in India. With my curiosity now piqued, going against my own instincts, I grudgingly start watching Indian Matchmaking. My first impression of the show was how particular phrases were often used-"the girl has to be flexible," "she should adjust, compromise," "willing to be flexible, compromise," "Isn't marriage compromise?" These statements presented the thesis of the show wrapped in a glossy aesthetic. It has a mise-en-scene that highlights the lives of the uber-rich. It is either set in India, or it shows the tall skyscrapers in the United States where privileged immigrants reside. Cinematographically, it uses soft focus and soft lighting to frame the mid-shot talking heads. The aesthetic gives a veneer of glamour to the practice of arranged marriage. As I noted, I was resistant to watching Indian Matchmaking. For many of my friends and me, the show was painful to watch as it reinforced the status quo of gender and caste hierarchies, was obsessed with the "fair skin" of a prospective match, and seemed to villainize the highly successful, independent women on the show. The show served as a manifestation of an institution that my friends and I actively work to resist, despite the intense familial pressures we face. Curiously, or rather frustratingly, many of my non-Indian friends in North America loved the show and were puzzled by my resistance to arranged marriage as they found it a reasonable mode of dating and finding a match. This reception startled me, and made me go back to look at the coverage of the show in India. Going through the news coverage and social media, it was clear that many women found the show triggering in the way it reduced representations of intelligent, ambitious, successful women to a set of stereotypical adjectives and how it glorified arranged marriage as a harmless, quirky alternative to dating. Reception of the show in India was one of horror, at least amongst the small progressive elite. When discussing the show online, they circulated the hashtag #cringebinge. [1] [open endnotes in new window] One of the male contestants, for example, Vyasar, admitted that the show was "painful to watch" in the way it discussed and represented the women on screen.[2] The show's refusal to address caste was also noticed by commentators. It was noted that by, "coding caste in harmless phrases such as "similar backgrounds, "shared communities," and "respectable families," the show does exactly what many upper-caste Indian families tend to do when discussing this fraught subject: "It makes caste invisible."[3]
Indian Cinema: Making Departure from the Stereotypical Presentation of Women in Nuptial
The Creative Launcher
In the late 20th and 21st century various movements took place which challenged the stereotypical notions of gender in society. #MeToo movement gave a momentum to the society where people started talking about any kind of violence, sexual assault and harassment against women. Many government policies and laws were framed and implemented to provide equal opportunities to women in every field. Vishakha Guidelines and Internal Complains Committee are made mandatory at work place and education institutions to assure a safe and healthy environment for females. Now the issues brushed under the carpet for long have been brought into light. Issues which were considered taboo even to talk about are now discussed on public forums and academia, penned down in literature and projected in media and cinema. Women and their concerns and point of views found space in popular cinema and were acclaimed too by the critics as well as spectators. Bollywood has made deviations from the stereotypical port...