ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we examine online (OTT or ‘over-the-top’) media to unpack the manner in which caste has been rendered (in)visible and (ill)legible in cultural productions portraying Indian marriages. These OTT productions, which include Amazon’s Made in Heaven and Netflix’s The Big Day and Indian Matchmaking, have been launched during a historical moment marked by a precipitous rise in caste-based violence in India. Yet, in contrast to an earlier moment when paradigmatic films like Achoot Kanya (1936) and Sujata (1959) directly confronted the fraught relationship between caste, gender, and sexuality, caste is an absent presence in these OTT portrayals. We focus on the Netflix series, Indian Matchmaking, to unpack how, despite the fact that it is rarely explicitly mentioned, caste is always present in discussions of skin colour, ‘community’, and the discourse of the ‘good family’.
This is striking given that caste remains one of the most unbreachable boundaries in marriage in India and across multiple Indian diasporas. Indian Matchmaking is particularly significant in how it renders (in)visible and (il)legible the transnational travels of caste: it brings to the fore the complex relationship between racialised chromatics and gendered formations of kinship in Indian American spaces.
