Adventures in love,risk and romance: Navigating post-traditional social relations on Indian dating shows

Introduction

While media excursions into the wilds of love and romance in India have conventionally been the preserve of Bollywood film, soap operas and TV drama, in recent years Indian TV audiences have been exposed to a growing number of reality shows focused on dating, marriage and love relationships. Aside from the logics of media markets, the recent proliferation of reality formats concerned with love and intimacy, we would argue, speaks to a series of broader social and cultural shifts associated with (late) modern living in India. In Why Love Hurts, Eva Illouz (2012) argues that the study of romantic heterosexual love offers a privileged perspective from which one can gain an understanding of the process of modernity. Gender identities and gender struggles in the field of love, she argues, perform ‘the institutional and cultural core dilemmas and ambivalence of modernity’ (Illouz, 2012). Similarly, we would argue that reality television – a format that has flourished with the liberalisation of the Indian economy and the rise of the ‘new’ middle classes – offers particular insights into ‘modernity’ or at least into the shifting and competing ‘multiple modernities’ that we would argue characterise the complex and variegated Indian social and cultural landscape (Lewis et al., 2016).

For a number of Anglo-American scholars, the globalisation of reality TV speaks to the increasing dominance of an individualistic, consumer-driven ethos in which late modern selfhood is seen as endlessly malleable – a choice-based project to be worked on and invested in (Bignell, 2005; Miller, 2007; Ouellette and Hay, 2008). Central to this mode of choice-based enterprising identity is a performative conception of the self, an understanding of identity that is central to the confessional logics of reality television. On reality shows, the contestants are presented to the audience as ‘personalities’ and as sites of (potential) economic and brand value (Hearn, 2009), and as such can be seen as part of a broader and increasingly naturalised ‘economy of personhood’ within late capitalism (Skeggs and Wood, 2012: 12). Certainly in South East Asia, many TV schedules increasingly feature reality and lifestyle shows offering advice not only on how to survive in late modern capitalist culture but moreover how to invest in and promote a branded identity within the context of increasingly marketised forms of sociality (Martin and Lewis, 2012). Clearly in the context of India – a country marked by a high degree of linguistic, religious and cultural diversity as well as large differences in material and socio-economic circumstances – universalising claims regarding the rise of capitalist-inflected forms of individualisation need to be regarded with some scepticism and scrutinised via the lens of social and cultural specificity (Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase, 2009). Nevertheless, we are interested in the way in which particular kinds of lifestyle-themed reality shows in India may offer an insight into transitions and transformations in the nature of selfhood and interpersonal relations in a period marked by rapid economic liberalisation and a growing privatised, consumer culture and ‘new’ middle class (Fernandes, 2006). As we show in this essay, though, such transitions tend to be characterised by located or ‘vernacular’ engagements with cosmopolitan and liberalising impulses that are embedded in and emerge out of people’s affiliations with ‘morally and emotionally significant communities’ such as family and ethnicity (Werbner, 2006: 497).

To that end, this essay focuses on Indian reality shows concerned with romantic love and relationships and in particular shows concerned with how people navigate their way through dating and partner choice in a complex contemporary cultural landscape. Emerging from a larger study on lifestyle and reality TV in Asia (Lewis et al., 2016), the essay discusses a number of Indian dating shows and also draws on interviews with television executives and producers and household ethnographies conducted with reality TV audiences, from ‘middle’ middle-class white collar workers to more affluent upper-middle-class households. In many ways, the new and emergent middle classes have been positioned in Indian public life as ‘the sociocultural embodiment of India’s transition to a committed liberalizing nation’ (Fernandes, 2006: 30). We argue that dating shows offer a rich site for examining the complexity of ‘post-traditional’ relationships in India as they encompass questions of gendered identity, class, caste, social mobility and religion in a shifting socio-economic landscape. How then do dating shows navigate middle-class forms of gender empowerment and aspirations towards social and cultural fluidity while also negotiating the realities of ongoing gendered social and economic inequities and the continued cultural potency of religious and familial notions of duty?

Love and dating in India: a changing landscape?

Sociological thought largely treats matters of the erotic or romantic not as an innate expression of individual experience but as a condition structured by the contingencies of broader social relations (Foucault, 1979; Giddens, 1992; Luhmann, 1998). Speaking from a neo-functionalist tradition of theorising social systems, for instance, Niklas Luhmann argues that in our current modern context, where the functional differentiation of occupation or social role has increasingly superseded the stratified order of rank or faith that marked pre-modern times, formal systems of communication or mediation are what enable intersubjective understanding and coordinated social interaction. Like money, Luhmann sees intimate or passionate love then as a mode of communication, a system of erotic and emotional codes mediating between a complex anonymous external world and the individual psyche. That is, love acts as a medium ‘through which one can express, form and stimulate feelings, deny them, impute them to others’ (Luhmann, 1998).

Drawing upon individualist and post-traditional conceptions of late modernity, Eva Illouz in her book Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Illouz, 1997) argues that the affective medium of love has become increasingly tied to the logics of the market. Not just a cultural commodity, romantic love has been reconfigured as ‘rational, self-interested, strategic and profit-maximising […] so that romantic relationships are conceived and managed in the categories of the utilitarian and instrumentalist ethos that lies at the heart of the capitalist economic system’ (p. 188). In the context of India, where romantic love, at least for the majority, is a relatively new cultural concept, ‘love relationships’ and marriage have long had an overtly calculative and planned dimension to them with relatives, match-makers as well as newspaper advertisements used to bring likely couples together. However, these arranged relationships, while partly tied to economic logics, have traditionally also been strongly tied to non-marketised concerns such as familial networks, caste and religion, as we discuss in more detail below (Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase, 2009).

With the growing influence of late liberal global economics and, to varied degrees, the cultural logics of liberal capitalism in India, however, the landscape of love and intimacy is becoming a site of struggle and negotiation between vernacular beliefs and expectations and marketised, romantic and consumer-based individualistic logics (Mazzarella, 2003). While arranged marriages still dominate, broader shifts in social and economic relations since the 1990s onwards, in particular the rapid growth of a new consumer middle class (India 2011), have seen a growing degree of contestation and renegotiation of conceptions of love and relationships particularly for sections of the more globalised ‘middle classes’ and those working in transnational labour circuits (Ramasubramanian and Jain, 2009 Given the pressures on young upwardly mobile Indian youth to negotiate a range of lifestyle, identity and value choices in the field of love, what kinds of norms and values are promoted by and modelled on contemporary Indian dating shows?

‘Real’ love on the Indian small screen

In recent years, one of the more prominent spaces where aspirational lifestyle and identity practices have been depicted and modelled in India is through reality and lifestyle programming from travel and food tourism to competitive game shows. Reality TV formats have made up a significant and growing slice of the TV pie in India for some time now, with the market really taking off after the huge popularity of the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire or KBC (Kaun Banega Crorepati), which first aired in 2000 and is currently on its tenth season. The past decade has seen the proliferation of a range of other reality shows in India from home-grown formats such as Indian wedding makeovers to adapted versions of international formats such as MasterChef India (2010).

In writing about Indian television, it should be noted that the Indian media landscape is highly complex and variegated (Sen and Roy, 2014). Following the deregulation of the TV industry and the explosion of satellite TV in the 1990s, India today has a vast and unruly TV market with hundreds of broadcast and satellite channels available to rural and urban dwellers alike. As Niret Alva, an executive of a major production house Miditech in Mumbai (he produced the Indian version of Idol) puts it, ‘India isn’t one market; it’s 5 or 6 different markets, simultaneously broadcast in different languages existing on a daily basis, changing every day’ (Interview, Mumbai, 27 November 2010). As Alva’s comment here suggests, India’s television markets must always be conceptualised in the plural; indeed we would suggest that the complexity of the TV landscape in India has given rise to what might be termed a multi-scalar market. That is, the Indian TV landscape is marked by multiple, autonomous and coterminous local, regional, ‘national’ and transnational industries, markets and audiences, shaped by diverse linguistic, cultural and socio-demographic variables.

In discussing reality shows aired in Hindi, our focus then is on a quite particular audience: middle class, northern and often urban. However, how these terms operate within the Indian context can be far from clear. Derné quite rightly points to the limits of Western researchers’ tendency to focus on the ‘middle classes’ in the setting of India (Derné, 2008). Furthermore, the notion of a coherent, upwardly mobile middle class is highly problematic in India and much care needs to be taken with how this term is used in the Indian context (Baviskar and Ray, 2011; Lakha, 2005). For instance, while disposable income may have risen considerably in India since 1990 and dual-income families are now a widespread urban phenomenon, there is much evidence of a growing gap between the poor and the increasingly wealthy urban upper middle classes, with the ‘new rich’ constituting a very small minority of the population (Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase, 2009). Nevertheless, as both Mazzarella and Fernandes have argued, what is central to the power of the consumer middle class in contemporary India is its function within the national imaginary and state apparatus as a hegemonic cultural rather than an economic norm – an idealised cultural category through which ‘good’ forms of cultural citizenship are associated with images of upwardly mobile Indians as consumers and participants in the global economy (Fernandes, 2006; Mazzarella, 2003).

Drawing on their arguments, we would suggest that reality television has become a prime space in India for the promotion and embodiment of aspirational ideals around lifestyle and identity. Importantly here, ‘middle-class’ aspirationalism in India is not purely about class and economics but rather involves a complex negotiation with shifting cultural norms around identity and social relations. For instance, it is important to recognise that while Indian television increasingly depicts cosmopolitan images of romantic love, casual relationships and dating, the gap between these images and the reality of relationships on the ground in India is still quite large. The idea of dating itself, that is, of having a casual relationship with a member of the opposite sex that hasn’t been pre-arranged by one’s family and that may not necessarily end in marriage, is a relatively new concept in India. In ethnographic research that Tania Lewis and Kiran Mullenhalli conducted with middle-class viewers of reality and lifestyle TV in Mumbai in 2011, while many of the households they spent time with watched reality-based dating shows, they often expressed amusement at the ‘unreality’ and ‘over-the-top-ness’ of such shows and the perceived loose morals and dubious motivations of the contestants featured. However, despite their criticism of what they saw as reality TV’s performative excesses and its preoccupation, particularly on shows like Big Boss (2006), that with ‘extreme’ lifestyles and values, our discussions revealed a distinct softening of attitudes to relationships and marriage among parents, while younger interviewees emphasised the importance of marriage based on love relationships, albeit approved by the family.

Sony made one of the first forays into the field of romance with the big-budget marriage reality show Kahin na Kahin Koi Hai (2002, ‘There is someone somewhere for you’) hosted by Madhuri Dixit, the most famous Bollywood actress of the time. Simulating ‘real-life’ matchmaking practices for arranged marriages, a candidate and his or her family met and interacted with three different suitors and their families in each episode. The programme received poor ratings and was discontinued after the first season. More recently, Indian TV has seen a flourishing of dating and marriage shows on youth-oriented channels which, after realising the limited appeal of American pop music–based shows for Indian audiences, caught onto the global boom of the reality format while also turning to localised Indian content and tapping into urban youth culture. Their success has to do not only with the fact that these are niche products directly aimed at the more liberal younger audience demographic, but also the intrigue, satire and melodrama of these shows appealed to audiences more than the straight-laced and somewhat cloying portrayal of marriage matters evident in Kahin na Kahin.

Here, one of the contemporary shows mentioned by many of the households in our Mumbai study (usually in dismissive terms) was Splitsvilla. Aired on MTV India since 2008 and based on the American dating reality show Flavor of Love (2006–2008), the show features a mansion full of young men and women, who compete in a date-and-dump world to make alliances with each other in order to stay on the show and win the final cash prize. With more mass appeal for a general Hindi-speaking audience rather than middle-class youth audience, the more vernacularised Swayamvar (2009–2012 ‘Bride’s Choice’) features hopefuls vying to win the hand of a featured celebrity through talent and compatibility tests. A faux revival of a mythic practice of royal matchmaking where a princess would choose her spouse in a courtly competition between princes, the show bears strong similarities to the American format The Bachelorette (2008). Another popular show much discussed (and often loathed) by Indian audiences is Emotional Atyachar (2010–2015), an Indian version of the US format Cheaters in which people suspicious of their partner’s fidelity volunteer the partner for a loyalty test. Along with Emotional Atyachar, Indian TV also features a range of shows aimed at ‘testing’ relationships. Perfect Couple (2011) is an Amazing Race–style travel adventure format where the couple’s success depends on the two people’s intuitive connection and mutual compatibility. Meanwhile, in Love Lockup (2011), a dysfunctional couple (usually minor celebrities) is locked up in a house under 24-hour surveillance to sort out their differences.

While reality shows in India interrogate all aspects of love and relationships, from cheating to marriage, we are interested in shows on the lifestyle and entertainment channel Channel V that attempt to negotiate ‘new’ modes of romantic relationships, particularly in relation to dating and/or choosing a partner, within the specific context of social and familial relations in India. A key youth-oriented lifestyle programmer in India along with MTV India, Channel V (owned by STAR India) has almost 40 million viewers every week. What is particularly interesting about the channel is its attempt over the past 5 years to target a broader viewership beyond the upper-middle-class urbanites who were once its target audience. Since 2012, the channel dropped music programming altogether and, in line with similar shifts in MTV programming worldwide, now focuses on a mix of drama, reality and chat shows, all of which target ‘youth issues’. Channel V’s dating shows are our main focus here, as we would argue they offer an exemplary lens into shifting social relations in the context of the growing role of market logics and liberalised consumer identities in India. However, while these shows bear all the hallmarks of ‘Western’ reality TV, they are, at the same time, strongly localised in terms of their negotiation of and embeddedness in familial and cultural logics. The romantic reality genre can thus be seen as embodying a complex negotiation of liberalisation and ‘modernities’ in the Indian context. The glossy shows offered up by high end programmers like Channel V are characterised by aspirations that are not purely global or Western but represent a kind of located cosmopolitanism, where a playful reflexive and outward looking ethos is ‘coupled’ with various social, familial and cultural affiliations.

Performing desirable selves: aspirationalism and risk in the dating arena

A central and recurrent concern in many reality dating shows is, on one hand, with the presentation of self (an issue that of course comes to the fore in the dating market) and, on the other hand, with social status. A key point to note here is that, in the context of India, the very act of going on a date is in itself an assertion of a certain kind of modern cosmopolitanism or worldliness. Given that many of the contestants on dating shows come from lower-middle-class and provincial backgrounds (despite often representing themselves as urban and upper middle class), their appearance on such shows represents a clear statement of aspirationalism. Thus, while these shows often gesture towards romantic notions of love and finding ‘the one’, much of the focus is on how contestants present, package and add value to themselves on the dating market, with a fairly nebulous notion of ‘classy-ness’ constituting one of the main parameters by which many contestants judge each other. The latter question of course becomes harder to judge away from the familial space of matchmaking and within the relatively democratised and performative arena of mediatised dating, which leads, as we will see, to much anxiety.

Two popular examples of reality dating shows that we want to discuss here are Channel V’s Dare2Date (2009–2011) and LoveNet (2010–2011), both of which offer playful and self-knowing takes on ‘looking for love’ in contemporary India. The most famous of these dating shows, Dare2Date, brands itself as an ‘anti-mush, anti-romance show’, employing a humorous reality format in which contestants are matched up with complete opposites of their ‘ideal date’. An educated, English-speaking woman from Mumbai is thus paired with a nouveau riche man hailing from a rural political family, who arrives at the date in a limousine with his driver; a free-spirited, non-resident Indian man born in the United States is matched with a docile middle-class girl who does voluntary social work.

Hosted by VJ Andy, a British-born Indian actor who has also been a contestant on the Indian version of Big Brother, the show’s humour derives from often marked differences in social status and cultural background. Shepherding the couples through their unlikely dating encounters, VJ Andy is positioned in the show as a kind of ironic matchmaker or cupid; well known as gay in a country that in 2013 once again restituted a British colonial law from 1861 making gay sex a criminal offence (overturning the Delhi High Court’s legalisation of homosexual intercourse in 2009), he embodies a certain kind of post-traditional progressivism for a new generation of Indian youth. As such, he bears something in common with the queer hosts of Western reality shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003–2007) where the five gay lifestyle ‘experts’ attempt to induct style-challenged straight men into the joys of metrosexuality (Lewis, 2007) or what Jay Clarkson (2005) terms ‘consumer masculinity’. Dare2Date also reflects Queer Eye’s concern with making over the self; here too, poorly presented contestants undergo style improvement sessions in a salon or boutique to measure up to the datee’s expectations.

Like Queer Eye, Dare2Date to some extent does challenge norms around love and gender in India (although in a very tongue-in-cheek fashion). The possibility of meeting – never mind dating – people from diverse social backgrounds is challenging in the context of India’s complex social relations. Furthermore, the show presents an imagined universe in which women and men are able to choose their life partners free from the constraints of family or community. The intense social pressures on and moral policing and surveillance of women, their bodies and sexuality, that marks the broader social ecology of India, are largely absent from the world of reality TV romance. This may in part reflect the emerging realities for a small urban female elite in India who live in a relatively more liberal environment, but for the most part it suggests an aspirational ideal far from everyday realities. Dare2Date in this sense celebrates a kind of imaginary choice-based individualism within a purported free market of love. As Misha Kavka (2004) has argued, however, in an article on the ‘queering’ of reality television, the ‘excessive’ display of highly personal ‘information’, ‘emotion’ and ‘visibility’ played out in these shows creates ‘a precarious balance between the status quo and its destabilising elements’ (p. 222). On one hand, Dare2Date turns love into a risky adventure and a space of play, potentially challenging social mores around relationships. On the other hand, as a role model for viewers and a mediator between broader community concerns and the world of television, VJ Andy can also be seen as policing social norms, particularly around class. While playing the innocent bystander, VJ Andy subtly eggs on the contestants to act more and more outrageously, with his ‘victims’ often talking themselves into a quicksand of hilarious self-deception. When contestants make a social or cultural faux pas, Andy invariably responds with a tongue-in-cheek comment, shooting an incredulous look to the camera, with sarcastic comments appearing in on-screen thought bubbles emphasised by a recurrent graphic image of his jaw dropping.

Date 2 Date, like East-Asian variety-style TV shows, features a dense soundscape of extra-diegetic ‘boing’ noises and boisterous humour connoting the playful nature of the show (Lewis and Martin, 2010) and implying ‘we’re all in the same boat’ in the weird contemporary world of dating. Andy’s cutting judgments and satirical remarks (presented with a nod and a wink to the audience) are seldom about a contestant’s character flaws as individuals, but rather are concerned with flaws or misjudgments in their self-presentation. Whether this relates to their mispronunciation of English words or outlandish claims to being a fashion model, his ‘critique’ tends to relate not to personality but to concerns around the performance of social identity and in particular the possession or lack thereof of a kind of ‘upper-middle-class’ cultural or performative capital, or what Illouz (1997) terms in relation to love relationships ‘communicative capital’ (p. 287). Despite its humorous premise of dating ‘the other’, the idealised ‘connection’ on Dare2Date has little to do with what Illouz describes as the ‘agapic’ release and loss of self that goes with giving oneself up into a relationship in a disinterested manner (Illouz, 1997). Instead, the thought bubbles that appear beside the heads of both Andy and the hapless dating couple on Dare2Date as they size each other up suggest that contemporary love in India has become a site of endless interpersonal and reflective scrutiny, with contestants and audience members alike called upon to view themselves as marketable commodities, albeit in a ‘market’ that is in reality highly structured by implicit classed, caste, ethnic and gendered norms and expectations.

Channel V’s reality show LoveNet also explores the question of performative selfhood, but from a different angle. The premise of the show is to set up real-life meetings between people who have developed a ‘relationship’ on Internet chat portals. Offering cautionary tales from the world of online dating, the show reveals the facades that people create online and in particular exposes people who have pretended to be better looking, more educated and wealthier than they really are. As Zulfia Waris, the Channel V executive who conceptualised this show, puts it to us,

The concept was … do you really think the person you have been chatting with for the last few years is what he is. He says he is from Bombay, living in Malabar Hill, has a swanky car, green eyes and looks like Richard Gere. Come, meet him, he actually lives in a small by-lane in Bombay, in a little 2 by 2 room, he doesn’t speak English, he translates it by typing, and he has been romantically involved with not just you but 5 others, meet them too. (Interview, Mumbai, 30 November 2010)

Channel V’s LoveNet draws on elements of MTV’s Room Raiders (2004–2009), a trashily tongue-in-cheek dating show in which three contestants have their rooms ‘raided’ by a single male or female, who then chooses to go on a date with them based on the contents of their room. While a much ‘straighter’ dating format, the main part of the show in LoveNet also consists of a detective-style investigation, where both the datees and host snoop into the private lives of the other person, looking for ‘clues’ as to their ‘real’ lifestyles and selves by talking to their friends and family and examining personal belongings in their bedrooms. In the final section of the programme, the dates meet each other for the first time, with the meetings not surprisingly often ending in confrontations. In an attempt to present themselves as morally and socially superior, each person reveals evidence about the other while the show’s hosts decide which person has represented themselves more falsely.

The projection of a self so integral to the notion of dating thus forms the main theme of LoveNet. As on Dare2Date, this is portrayed as a highly calculative process and the contestants are encouraged to critically scrutinise rather than woo one another. Instead of testing the potential romantic affinity between the two people in real life, the show unravels the claims that people in online portals make about their looks, wealth and status. As such, the programme appears to offer a critique of dating and of the kinds of enactments of selfhood increasingly required within the context of increasingly alienated and privatised social relations. The show’s message is thus somewhat ironic, given that the format itself requires that participants perform various modes of emotional interiority for the viewing audience. As the show’s title LoveNet suggests, the realm of dating is portrayed here not so much as a space of freedom but as a combative arena of risk and mistrust where people are not what they seem. Dating here becomes an allegory for the challenges and anxieties of dealing with a modern world of shifting social relations, with the show offering a rather conservative take, in particular, on social status, gender and relationships.

However, as on Dare2Date, the participants on these shows often do have a rather more aspirational approach to dating, particularly in the case of men. The young men on the show, who hailed from both lower and middle-class backgrounds, often derided behenjis (or ‘sisters’, a derogatory term for more provincial, working-class, Hindi-speaking young women) and expressed a preference both for girls who don’t cook (i.e. are of high social status) and girls with some sexual experience. The desire for a cosmopolitan, non-domesticated girl here was underpinned then by aspirations to date someone from a class above one’s own. This amalgam of class and desirability was articulated slightly differently by the young women. Their ideal man was someone who was not a gawaar (yokel), but was ‘decent and classy’, thus indelibly blending the desire for someone who had the requisite cultural and economic capital to be so. Thus, in one episode with a young man who pretended to have money and cultural capital, the show’s host and his proposed upper-middle-class date laugh at the English language course materials they find in his flat. When this is brought up in the final confrontation, he retaliates by commenting on his upper-class date’s messy home: ‘not only do you not do domestic work, you can’t even supervise the maid properly’.

While Dare2Date and LoveNet on the surface present humorous and playful takes on looking for love, a deeper reading suggests a rather more ambiguous take on the state of contemporary love relationships in India. Rather than embracing the perceived ‘freedoms’ of romance, the two shows portray the dating realm as something that has become a calculative space of exchange in which selfhood is packaged, bought and sold. As the shows’ ‘buyer, beware’ message suggests, these programmes in some ways offer a critique of marketised relationships and of the notion of selves as brands. At the same time, however, the shows themselves valorise a particular kind of interiorised, critical and performative self (Skeggs and Wood, 2012) – the savvy and reflective middle-class subject embodied by figures like VJ Andy and the attractive cosmopolitan hosts of LoveNet. But what role does this performative and reflexive positioning play here? We would argue that this playful self-knowing mode of identity is offered up as a means of negotiating the tension between the ongoing hegemony of ‘traditional’ ascribed modes of identity in India associated with class/caste, ethnicity and gender and a ‘post-traditional’ self associated with consumer-based individualisation. As Angela McRobbie (2004) has argued in an essay on the status of post-feminism in Western popular culture, the refiguring of selfhood in so-called liberalised societies can be seen as being marked by a ‘double entanglement’ (p. 255). That is, she contends, media discourses and anxieties around contemporary self-formation tend to be characterised by ‘the co-existence of neo-conservative values in relation to gender, sexuality and family life […] with processes of liberalisation in regard to choice and diversity in domestic, sexual and kinship relations’ (McRobbie, 2004: 256). As Henrikke Donner’s work on middle-class Indian women and media representations of the family likewise suggests, gender and middle-classness are being remade in ‘the contexts of globalisation, post-liberalisation and neo-liberal ideologies’ in India but in ambiguous and paradoxical ways (Donner, 2012). Thus, while she notes the ‘increased significance of privacy, conjugality and individualism among urbanities’, she points out, for instance, that ‘patrilocal residence, arranged marriages and lifelong unions still constitute normative discourses, and are often reinvigorated’ in middle-class urban life and in and through Indian media depictions of family and relationships (Donner, 2012: 181–182). In this context, ‘queered’ figures like VJ Andy stand in for the ‘troubled’ social and cultural space of middle-class urban India –a space of complex ‘double entanglements’ between traditional selves and enterprising subjects.

Legitimising romance: families, dating and post-romantic relationships

The trials and tribulations of the young contestants on Channel V’s dating shows then speak to the broader anxieties of a new and emerging generation of Indian youth negotiating a very different India from that of their parents. While their parents’ generation was raised in extended patriarchal family structures, many Indian youth are now exposed to a range of different models of living and conducting relationships. Nuclear and dual-income families are on the rise and a growing number of young, educated, urban Indians experience significant geographical mobility. At the same time, as Donner notes, although the outward form of families in some ways may be shifting, the family continues to play a strong role in Indian social relations, with familial-based socialisation still a central part of identity formation (Donner, 2012). In turn, while upper-middle-class Indian youth tend to be more socially mobile and engaged with friends and peers outside of the family context, in many ways the family is still more important than peer culture in India.

Given this context, the shifting cultural mores around love and relationships foregrounded by shows like Dare2Date have unsurprisingly led to significant inter-generational tensions and a sense of anxiety and risk for both parents and youth alike in relation to questions of love and partnership. Here, dating shows like Dare2Date and LoveNet are particularly interesting as they represent an imaginary space outside of the logic of family where peers (the audience, other contestants and the hosts) play an important role, although family members are also sometimes called upon on these shows, as on LoveNet. As we’ve argued, however, while these shows focus on partner choice and performative selfhood in the marketised space of love and dating, they exhibit considerable unease about the kind of ‘post-traditional’ turn implied by the individualised ethos of dating.

Here, we want to discuss two other Channel V shows, Date My Folks (2011) and Love Kiya to Darna Kiya (2011) (‘why fear when you love’), which attempt to negotiate the slippery terrain of contemporary love by bringing elements of the familial-arranged relationship back into the dating equation. Date My Folks, a spinoff from the success of Dare2Date, offers a very different take on romance to its counterpart, inverting the dating format with a parent of the datee (usually the mother) going on a date of sorts with two prospective candidates while both the datee and VJ Andy secretly watch the proceedings via a hidden camera. The date, usually held at the candidate’s house, involves some sort of activity where the candidate tries to give the parent a glimpse into their lifestyle, impress them with their skills in some activity and convince them of their suitability as a love match for their child. Hosted again by the ubiquitous VJ Andy, the parents featured on Date My Folks are depicted as fair and generous types who are keen to find a suitable match for their child. They also invariably claim that they can make a better choice of partner on behalf of their child who might be swayed by superficial qualities rather than the social background, character and ‘values’ of prospective partners.

The show opens with the parents listing their criteria for an ideal partner, which are then contrasted to the datee’s expectations. The device of cross-cutting interviews with family members and the datee often highlights their conflicting values and ideals. At the date, family members ask probing and highly personal questions about their attitudes towards relationships and moral standards in matters of love. The show’s narrative comes to a close with a final date in which the parents watch their child (again via a hidden camera) on a date with their chosen candidate to assess their affinity.

In an article on arranged marriage and American television, Shilpa Davé (2012) analyses some mainstream US TV shows where the custom of arranged marriages associated with South Asian immigrants has been co-opted as a viable strategy for long-term partnership for White Americans. In her words, this phenomenon indicates that Americans are beginning to ‘reconsider the popular commercialised dreams of finding romantic love on one’s own’ and are instead turning back to love matches that are instigated or approved by one’s family. Davé claims that this co-option of South Asian-American practices in the US context challenges ‘normative views that depict Indians as foreign, strange or culturally distant, instead representing their customs as being compatible with American cultural practices’. In certain ways, we see a kind of reversed version of this on Date My Folks where the contestants on the show embark on the new cultural practice of dating, a practice particularly associated with the United States, that is, however, considerably reworked, with the anxieties associated with the transgressive act of finding love through dating attenuated through family supervision and surveillance.

While much of Date My Folks is played for laughs, the issue of reconciling individual choice with parental authority takes a rather more serious, if melodramatic, tone on another popular Channel V show called Love Kiya to Darna Kiya (‘why fear when you have loved’). Shot in a low-budget, vérité style, in this show people in serious long-term relationships, even marriages, confess to their parents their secret relationships and try to reconcile them to it. As Channel V puts it,

Why is love treated like a crime? Why do we hide it from our parents, from society, from the world? [Channel V] are putting an end to this. How far is too far? How much does your relationship really matter? Is your family a price you’re willing to pay for it?

The show thus depicts itself as dealing with both sides of the equation in terms of taking into account the concerns of families and couples alike and, in the ilk of American philanthropic reality shows like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, purports to offer a kind of positive intervention in people’s lives (Ouellette and Hay, 2008).

The format of the show is structured as follows: the couples first bring their parents for a visit to the city on a pretext and surreptitiously introduce them to their partners without initially revealing who they are. After meeting and interacting via a social activity, such as a shopping trip, and once the couple feel that the parents have had ample time to know and judge the partner, the final meeting for the ‘big reveal’ is set up. Both the couples and their families congregate at a set location where the couples subtly open up the discussion and reveal their situation to their families. When their children confess to serious relationships or marriages, the results are often highly dramatic, invariably leading to confrontations and sometimes even violence. In their introductory profile in the beginning of the programme, couples often voice their fears about their parents’ objection to the social status and/or caste/religion of their partner, and this is often the primary reason for their concealment of the relationship. At the moment of confession, we often see their fears proven correct, as the parents on the show express concerns about the non-compatibility of the relationship, whether based on caste, regional background or religious difference. Thus, while the parents often argue that they like the chosen partner as a person, they nevertheless, more often than not, see social background as an insurmountable barrier. In one episode, a father hits his son after he confesses his relationship with a divorcee, while in another a mother strongly berates her son and forbids him from seeing a girl of a different caste before being finally reconciled to his choice. As the programme emphasises, while some families may show some degree of acceptance of fleeting romantic entanglements, on Love Kiya to Darna Kiya the parents ultimately consider the decision of marriage as rightfully theirs to make, with social considerations of marrying within the same social rank – whether of caste, region or religion – still carrying significant weight.

While Date My Folks and Love Kiya to Darna Kiya are very different styles of reality programming, they both address head-on the social and cultural upheaval associated with shifts to individualisation and choice-based consumerist identities. For a new generation of Indian youth, particularly those hailing from the urban middle classes, partner choice is increasingly being shaped by individualised and psychologised concepts such as ‘personality’ and notions of ‘compatibility’ rather than older family-based criteria such as caste and religion (Titzmann, 2011). It is now not uncommon for children from more ‘liberal’ Indian families to challenge their families’ partner selection (Ramasubramanian and Jain, 2009). These growing ‘freedoms’, at least for the economically and socially mobile, are reflected in the increasing mediatisation of the domain of love, not only on television but also on the Internet in India. As Titzmann’s work on the online matrimonial market in India shows, marriage websites have been on the rise since the late 1990s with most of the online matchmaking sites being in English, indicating a privileged niche group of users who are young (18–35 years old), tertiary-educated and urban (Titzmann, 2011). However, as on the reality dating shows discussed here, while these ‘new’ forms of matchmaking represent a growing emphasis on individualised partner choice, they also reflect a concern with managing the ‘risks’ associated with non-familial matchmaking, in particular the fear of being paired with someone socially or culturally incompatible. Thus, newspapers like The Times of India, along with matrimonial sites like SimplyMarry.com, offer a range of swayamvaras (self-chosen spouses) categorised along linguistic/caste lines, for example, Brahmin or Punjabi swayamvaras. Shows like Date My Folks and Love Kiya to Darna Kiya thus reflect an attempt to recognise and to a certain extent negotiate an individualised ‘free market’ of love, but as the invariable not-very-happy ending of Love Kiya suggests, it is familial concerns that tend to rule the day.

Conclusion

Our preoccupation in this article has been with the vagaries of modern love in contemporary reality dating shows on Indian television. We have discussed how the act of dating serves as a site of considerable tension around liberal notions of individualisation as it unleashes a concept of love weighted with notions of freedom of partner choice, personality, emotional compatibility and non-marital sexual relationships. The two sets of Channel V programmes we have analysed here speak in rather different ways to the growing marketisation of love (Illouz, 1997, 2012) and the rise of choice-based consumer identities in India. We have seen the dating subjects on Dare2Date and LoveNet undertake emotional labours of personality cultivation and branding in order to project idealised images of themselves within a ‘free’ market of love implicitly structured by social status and forms of emotional capital. As we’ve suggested, despite outwardly appearing to offer fairly ‘liberal’ takes on love and dating, at their heart these shows have a rather more troubled relationship to shifting classed and gendered social mores in India. On the other hand, on Date My Folks and Love Kiya to Darna Kiya we see attempts at legitimising, or at least reconciling, ‘new’ modes of partner choice but within a familial setting where older conceptions of caste relations and kinship duties still dominate. Here, dating on Indian reality TV functions both as an aspirational ideal and as a marker of negotiated or multiple modernities, highlighting distinctly localised ‘variations from Euro-American models in the visions of modern selfhood and citizenship television projects’ (Lewis et al., 2016).

In a study on MTV India’s ‘empowering’ images of feminine freedom, Cullity and Younger (2004) found that while many young women spoke of an increasing sense of choice being available to middle-class women in India, this was accompanied by significant anxieties in relation to negotiating new ‘freedoms’ around sex and dating with significant family pressures, alongside a recognition of the ongoing structural realities of Indian forms of sociality dominated by familial relations. As Titzmann points out, 90 percent of Indian marriages can still be seen as ‘arranged’ marriages of some kind, even if this increasingly represents a continuum rather than an opposition between love and arranged marriage (Titzmann, 2011). In such an environment, reality dating shows like Love Kiya and Date My Folks, in which the parents are as much the focus of the show as the lovers, offer more nuanced, engaged and dare we say it ‘realistic’ insights into the state of contemporary love in India. Certainly, they are rather more upfront about the ongoing structural constraints on love relationships in India, a situation that is played for comic effect on Date My Folks, while on Love Kiya these social structural realities are figured in individualised and psychologised terms as psychodrama. These shows, like much contemporary lifestyle and reality TV in South Asia, offer popularly inflected insights into the risks and ambivalences and social upheaval associated with negotiating modernities, whether of state socialism or late capitalism, while also offering negotiated solutions of a kind (Lewis et al., 2016). Both Date My Folks and Love Kiya can be seen as quite literally attempting to ‘marry’ an individualised ideology of choice, romance and associated late liberal notions of ‘freedom’ with the material realities of familial-inflected social relations in India.