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Accepted Paper:

The Indian online matrimonial market: changing patterns of marriage matchmaking  
Fritzi-Marie Titzmann (Leipzig University)

Paper short abstract:

The proposed paper looks into the diverse forms of engaging with online matrimonial media in India. An analysis of the matrimonial profiles offers a remarkable insight into the changing concepts of marriage, love and gender roles and challenges the dichotomy of arranged versus love marriage.

Paper long abstract:

For centuries Indian families sought help from relatives, marriage brokers and later newspaper advertisements to marry their sons and daughters off. They relied on kinship and caste networks, on marriage bureaus and on "word of mouth". However, the global media age has opened up a whole new world of possibilities and renders a new dimension to the Indian matrimonial market's medialisation. The first India-based websites dedicated to matrimonial matchmaking appeared on the World Wide Web in the late 1990s and the number of users has increased ever since.

The process of matchmaking undergoes crucial changes in times of growing medialisation and thus impacts society at large. Matrimonial websites provide a picture of the complexities of young Indians searching for life partners. An analysis of the matrimonial profiles offers a remarkable insight into the changing concepts of marriage, love and gender roles. Concepts like arranged and love marriage are put into question by the way how many young Indians engage with matrimonial media. In this paper, I would like to challenge the existing dichotomy of love versus arrange marriage which is still widely applied in societal, individual and academic discourses. The practice of finding a suitable match is being transformed by young users into "self-arranged" marriages blending traditional criteria such as religion or caste with individualistic expectations like personal compatibility. Simultaneously, traditional patterns persist. Parents appropriate new media as well in the process of fixing their children's marriages.

Panel P32
Marriage in South Asia: practices and transformations
  Session 1