Matchmaking in Middle Class India

This book is an extensive and thorough exploration of the ways in which the middle class in India select their spouse. Using the prism of matchmaking, this book critically unpacks the concept of the 'modern' and traces the importance of moralities and values in the making of middle class identities, by bringing to the fore intersections and dynamics of caste, class, gender, and neoliberalism. The author discusses a range of issues: romantic relationships among youth, use of online technology and of professional services like matrimonial agencies and detective agencies, encounters of love and heartbreak, impact of experiences of pain and humiliation on spouse-selection, and the involvement of family in matchmaking. Based on this comprehensive account, she elucidates how the categories of 'love' and 'arranged' marriages fall short of explaining, in its entirety and essence, the contemporary process of spouse-selection in urban India. Though the ethnographic research has been conducted in India, this book is of relevance to social scientists studying matchmaking practices, youth cultures, modernity and the middle class in other societies, particularly in parts of Asia. While being based on thorough scholarship, the book is written in accessible language to appeal to a larger audience.

• strategies of matchmaking
• individualisation of the Indian middle classes
• neoliberal’ middle class
• marriage market in urban India
• professional matchmaking services
• experiences of love
• gender asymmetries in matchmaking
• marriage and modernity
• matrimonial agencies
• matromonial websites
• matchmaking and class structure
• new middlemen in marriage industry
• family involvement in spouse selection

• Associate Professor, Sociology, Jindal Global Business School, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, India

  Parul Bhandari

Parul Bhandari is Associate Professor, Sociology, at the Jindal Global Business School, O.P. Jindal Global University, India. She completed her PhD from the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, UK. Thereafter, she held a Post-doctoral Fellowship at the Centre de Sciences Humaines (Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities, New Delhi), the South Asia research centre for the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). She was also a Visiting Scholar at St. Edmund’s College and the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, UK, and has held Guest Faculty positions at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics (DSE), University of Delhi and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi 

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