Netflix's Indian Matchmaking Season 3 makes mediocre Indian men great again

It takes Sima Taparia — the transnational middle-aged marriage broker who vehemently believes that “matches are made in heaven” but single Indian women should compromise on earth — less than one episode to spew her first diatribe against single Indian women. Her choice of attack? Priya, an attractive and charming 35-year-old Indian-American woman looking for a potential suitor. As per Sima, the self-proclaimed top matchmaker from Mumbai, Priya’s personality can’t outsize her “disadvantage,” which is the cruel word she employs to refer to the fact that Priya is a divorcee. Even in 2023, Indian society prides itself on rendering the lives and minds of women — rich or poor, married or single, dead or alive — small and insignificant. In this moment, Indian Matchmaking enables Sima, an infuriating equivalent of a nosy, conservative relative who believes every woman should suffer because she once did, with the power to do the exact same thing.

What comes after is even more telling. Among her reasonable checklist of qualities that she would like in a match, Priya tells Sima Taparia that she would prefer a guy with a head full of hair. It’s a personal preference that she states explicitly to the matchmaker intended to service her needs, telling her that she doesn’t see herself. And yet, the first man that Sima presents to Priya is a balding, overgrown, overenthusiastic manchild who willingly raps about mathematics on the streets. To justify this micro-aggression, Sima eldersplains Priya the outdated lies viewers have become accustomed to hearing from her over the past two seasons. Things that are essentially a roundabout way of saying this: an unmarried woman is a liability no matter how successful or attractive; that her needs and wants will always be secondary; and there is nothing more dangerous than a woman who chooses to choose herself rather than settling down with whoever everyone else thinks is good for her.

Priya isn’t the only woman this season who refuses to lower her standards on Sima’s behest. There’s Rushali, the Delhi-based model making a re-appearance from the first season; Pavneet, a six-feet, chirpy PR and marketing professional from Delhi whose height is what I believe Sima personally clubs as a “disadvantage”; and Arti, an ambitious Indian American woman grieving the recent death of her father. Sima stares at all three women and tells them matter-of-factly to compromise, adjust, be content with a 50-60 percent match rather than a healthy 100 percent.

Besides Priya, who eventually starts courting Vim, a genial man with a head full of hair, Sima fails miserably in coming even close to finding a suitor who can be an equal match to either of the three women. Both Sima and the show’s makers forget about Rushali midway through the season. Arti finds herself an attractive fiance on a dating app after Sima tries convincing her to give a second chance to the man toward whom she felt zero attraction. After all, compromise is essential — especially when the rest of your life is at stake. Pavneet on the other hand, gets a recycled match: a filmmaker and poet who was rejected by Rushali in the initial episodes. Although the duo go out on two dates by the end of the season, it’s not hard to tell that the relationship is headed nowhere, much less toward a wedding. It’s telling that the only couple that gets engaged this season is the one where the two people met each other on a dating app. Surely, that should be enough of a warning bell for a show called Indian Matchmaking that centers around an elusive matchmaker bringing two people together. Defeating the show’s purpose is also the fact that the new season sees no marriages.

What the third season does see though is an abundance of bare-minimum man children being immeasurably hyped up by the makers and the show’s central protagonist. As was the case with the last two seasons, the burden of changing oneself remains squarely put on the women; the men on the other hand, continue to be entitled to their whims and fancies. Take for example, Vikash, the balding 40-year-old doctor who believes cringe-dancing at weddings is a personality trait and by all counts, has little to offer any woman. Vikash’s checklist is similarly entitled: he would like a Brahmin girl only because of the “community,” a polite shorthand presumably to disguise his own casteism. He would also like someone who can speak Hindi because he loves “Indian culture” even though he is a non-resident Indian whose love for Indian culture doesn’t seemingly go beyond dated Bollywood movies.

Of course, Sima doesn’t bat an eyelid at his demands, setting him up with the maximum number of matches in the season. The first woman, way out of his league, gets rejected because she is too young and doesn’t speak Hindi. When Sima actually sends him on a date with someone who can speak Hindi, he finds a problem there as well — her accent puts him off, as if it’s totally not unreasonable to demand a woman who speaks the language of the soil while sitting in an air-conditioned house in America. If anything, the third season of Indian Matchmaking, which continues to focus largely on Indian-American clients, reveals the diaspora to be a willing upholder of regressive practices.

There are double-standards in the way the show underlines the demands of Sima’s male clients and female clients. Nearly all of the participants featured in the season express their wish to find someone who is family-oriented. All the men expect their potential wives to be as caring and devoted to their families as much as humanly possible. The show paints that as a fair expectation only to reverse that when the women state that they would like their husbands to be integrated with their own families. In that case, Sima tells the women point-blank that they can’t depend on their families forever. Even the topic of physical attraction is seemingly assumed to be a man’s domain — on more than one instance, Sima admonishes her female clients for even rejecting a potential match because they’re not physically attracted to them. Of all the things women can’t have in the show, a satisfying sex life seems to be at the very top.

That is to say, the third season of Indian Matchmaking has really no reason to exist besides reminding us that mediocre men need to feel great as well. They too, have rights even when they might not have personalities or hobbies. The show’s structure is similarly dated — director Smriti Mundhra has nothing new up her sleeve. Even here, she repeats the same device of intercutting the proceedings with montages of older married couples defending the institution of arranged marriage, which till date remains a prime way to turn women into submissive props. Like the last two seasons, even the third season features only Hindu clients (it’s telling that the only Muslim character in the season isn’t Taparia’s find) and exists in an utopian world where arranged marriage remains untouched by decades of patriarchy, wealth, and caste and class hegemony. In fact, the most biting indictment against the show might just be Arti and Jamal’s coupling, an interfaith match made possible by a dating app — something that would not have made it on our screens if it was left upto Sima Taparia’s Indian Matchmaking.

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