Caste in the Time of Dating: Understanding Caste through the Discourse of Matchmaking

“You’ve got this” assures a musical video released by the dating platform Bumble in March 2022, as part of their integrated ad campaign in India. Featuring a young Bollywood actor it encourages users to make the first move. The language used here, and in much of the promotional material of Bumble and other global brands, is of simply giving it a chance – simply going on a date – with no allusion to marriage. More recently, ads have also been depicting non heterosexual/normative romances, a development following the decriminalisation of same sex relationships in India in 2018.

These trends among dating platforms stand in contrast to advertisements by matrimonial businesses targeted at families for intra ‘community’ or ‘arranged’ marriage, argued as the normative mode of marriage in India (Chawla 2007).

Parthasarathi and Agarwal (2024, 56-73) argue that platformisation, in the context of the Global South, institutionalises previously informal forms of sociability through a variety of ‘localisation’ strategies, both discursive and operational. The current study is interested in how dating platforms in particular operate within a larger discourse of matchmaking that users are embedded in – one that involves norms of gender-sexuality and caste, and kinship that provides the material basis for caste. This discourse includes the work of kin networks, caste associations and bureaus, individual agents, all of whom may be called upon to respond to an increasing presence of a seemingly non-normative discourse.

In this context, my doctoral study attempts to understand the landscape of matchmaking in an urban, yet non-metropolitan context of increasing migration among youth and apparent fragmentation of kin-networks. Bringing together critical discourse analysis and ethnography, the study asks: how is the discourse of matchmaking being organised around dating platforms? Subsequently, how can we understand caste and kinship through the discourse around matchmaking and sexuality today?