If you spent a lot of your time during quarantine on Netflix, then you wouldn’t have missed the popular reality show, Indian Matchmaking. The show became much talked about and also received a lot of flak and criticism for a number of reasons ever since it was shared on the portal. The show, which outlines how an Indian matchmaker gets couples together came under fire for its promotion of South Asian stereotypes and for promoting rishta culture. The culture of setting couples and their families up has been perceived as backward.
The show was also slammed for the fact that none of the relationships in the show remained intact after it ended. And now, one of the cast members of the show, Aparna Shewakramani opened up in a candid interview in which she highlighted that the show was edited in a way to fit a certain narrative which was different from what was actually happening. She opened up about her first meeting with the matchmaker, Seema, and mentioned a number of things that were not shown to the audience.
“I remember when I first met her, we were sitting down and she asked me, ‘What do you want in a boy?’ and the viewers don’t see this but I actually said two things. I said I want someone really laid back, quiet and introverted and she looked at me and said, ‘No’,” Shewakramani recalled. She went on to add that audiences were instead shown that part in which she had to explain herself to Seema after receiving a ‘blank’ reaction. “So I am thinking there’s a language issue. So I try to tell her what I want and that’s what the audience sees. I thought, if I say it in enough ways, Seema will understand. But it wasn’t about that. Seema had her own ideas and she wanted me with someone jolly,” she said.
Aparna further said that she was under the impression that the show was going to be a docu-series about Indian matchmaking as opposed to reality TV. “We all have to think about the way we consume television. It was created for us as entertainment. People think it’s true but it’s not. It has everything to do with the archetype they created,” she said. She also opened up about the incident on the show in which her mother refers to her first suitor as a loser.
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” My mom calls him a loser and everyone thinks that it’s because he had a podcast and we cared about that. I don’t care about that. What happened off camera was that he was really hurtful to me. He said some really disrespectful things. My mother got really mad. I was crying that night. I almost did quit the show that day,” she said.”It’s interesting that you lose your own voice in your own story,” her interview concluded.