The Kama Sutra Diaries

by Sally Howard

  Anupam Mittal, the man behind Shaadi.com, tells us, ‘We overtook the newspaper classifieds, and the village matchmakers and pandits [religious teachers], oh, a decade ago.’

  We meet this urbane, dedicated bachelor in the rookery-like central Bombay offices of People Interactive, also home to relationship advice portal ShaadiTimes; social networking site Fropper.com; and Astrolife.com, an online astrology service provider.

  But it’s Shaadi.com that heads up this successful portfolio of online networking businesses. Mittal launched the site from his student bedroom in the US in the mid-1990s. Today, he controls 40 per cent of India’s US$1 billion per annum online matchmaking industry and has, at current count, arranged the marriage matches of two million couples of South Asian descent.

  ‘In some ways young Indians want the same things they always did,’ Mittal says. ‘They want companionship. They want a marriage that’s the union of two families…

  ‘But in other ways we, as Indians, have changed beyond recognition. Love-cum-arranged-marriages are more the norm. And Indian women are becoming more confident. They might not go to bars to pick men up; but they do want a say in finding their mate. Online matchmaking facilitates this. Whereas before, a local matchmaker would find them a husband from a handful of local candidates, now they have a vast canvas of potential mates across India… across the world.’

  In the last available figures, from 2011, 42 per cent of India’s 45 million internet users were signed up to a matrimonial matching site, from market leaders Shaadi.com and BharatMatrimony.com to more esoteric propositions, including a site dedicated to lovelorn eunuchs and one to Bramacharya celibates. This echoes the online matchmaking revolution in the West, where in 2011 statistics for the UK, one in five couples that marry will have met online. For many users in India, online matrimony will be their first experience of using the web; for other, sophisticated second-generation NRI users in the UK and US, the site represents an efficient way to seek out a pavaan, or homely, traditional bride.

  Mittal arcs his computer screen round on its tripod and scrolls through the latest additions to his site: a batch of disembodied male heads, with bright eyes and uncertain smiles.

  ‘What’s fascinating,’ he says, ‘is how much you can read by communities’ preferences. The Brahmins in rural Tamil Nadu, for example, only want a match from among the Tamil Brahmin caste, whereas Indians in the big metros are broadening their tastes. Here we can see the old, rigid caste preferences of thousands of years beginning to shift.’

  But the real sign of the times, he explains, is seen in the waning preference for non-resident Indians. ‘In the early days of Shaadi.com, grooms in the UK and US were still a hot commodity. All the girls wanted to marry a doctor in the UK, a tech guy in California. Today, all of that’s changed. If the future is in India, why does a young girl want to leave her family and go overseas? If you’ll excuse the acronyms, the NRI men have lost their USP.’

  To negotiate this imbroglio of market forces and cultural preferences, Mittal has trained a team of crack matchmakers, who are expected to speak a minimum of three Indian languages and to be up to date in the mercurial tastes of Shaadi.com’s clientele. Mittal walks me through the warrens of cubbyhole offices to meet 40-something Gayartri Kapoor, one of the most experienced of these new–fashioned cupids, a friendly, mumsy sort who’s wearing thick-framed spectacles.

  ‘This job gives me the goosebumps,’ she tells me, when I ask how she ended up in this singular twenty-first-century vocation. ‘For many of my clients I become part of the family; and I’ve been invited to so many weddings I’ve lost count. But actually, it’s tough. I need to be a therapist and an anthropologist rolled into one. Only this morning I had to spend an hour reading up on the beliefs of a specific sub-branch of unshaved Sikhs in the Punjab. Sometimes the client’s parents have put them on the site, so I have to gently explain what the internet means to nervous parents.’

  Indian parents do have cause to worry about the implications of this brave new matrimonial medium. In 2012, a US report found that one in three profiles on free dating websites are fake, with a further third being inaccurate to a greater or lesser degree. Much of Shaadi.com’s product development, Mittal tells me now, is geared towards rooting out fake or inaccurate profiles.

  Despite this fact, we apparently instinctively trust online matches. Research conducted in the US finds that Western couples who meet online typically move in with each other earlier: at seven months into the relationship, compared to 18 months for couples who meet by other means. Perhaps for the same reason, their relationships often dissolve more quickly than unions forged by more traditional means: a poor average of eight months.

  So what, I ask Mittal, are the preoccupations of Shaadi. com’s users?

  ‘The girls will say they’re modern but homely, with white or wheatish skin,’ he says. ‘And of course the men are always several inches taller on the internet than in real life; many more of them have PhDs than we know graduate from Indian colleges with the same. But what they don’t know is that we use complex probability algorithms. So if we have a spike of 6 ft tall Indians, we know that something is amiss.’

  As well as tackling the mendacity that appears to be endemic among matchmaking website users in East and West alike, Mittal sees it as his business to update outmoded marital practices.

  ‘Dowries are still a big problem for India,’ he continues. ‘Officially the practice of exacting a large dowry is illegal in most states. A few years ago there was a spate of high–profile dowry murders, where men had killed their brides within months of marriage, when they had the dowry in their hands. So many states brought in statutes to ban large dowries, or to ban dowries completely. Of course, the reality is that the dowry tradition continues, and its consequences can be extreme: female infanticide by parents who can’t afford the dowry for a daughter; families going bankrupt because the price of trousseau gold has quadrupled.’

  Despite the dowry practice being outlawed, related crimes are routine in India, with researchers estimating that between 25,000 and 100,000 women a year are killed over dowry disputes. Many are burned alive in a grisly form of retribution that intentionally echoes the practice of sati, the ritual self-immolation of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre.

  In early 2012, Shaadi.com decided to tackle the issue in a novel way. It created an internet meme called ‘Angry Brides’, inspired by the fad Facebook game ‘Angry Birds’.

  ‘It’s a game accessed, in the same way, through Facebook,’ Mittal says. ‘Players control a many-armed bride who can hurl shoes, veggies, even knives, at dowry-seeking targets. It’s great fun!’

  Before Dimple and I leave Mittal and Kapoor to tend to their 40 million-plus lonely hearts, I ask them where I’d rank, in India’s largest love shop, as a 5 ft 9 in, 30-something single white woman.

  Kapoor’s lip curves into a lopsided smile. ‘For a first marriage you’d have a problem with age, of course; and your height, too. Perhaps a divorced man in one of the big cities?’

  ‘It all depends,’ laughs Dimple. ‘What are your chapattis like?’

  We head on to meet another character who could only have emerged from the preoccupations, in love and lust, of modern India.

  Vikas Sharma, a long-time private investigator for Bombay-based security provider Topsgrup, works a beat that Anupam Mittal’s algorithms cannot reach. Sharma is India’s premier and self–styled ‘love sleuth’, making a good living researching the veracity of the advertisements of India’s homely girls and their 6 ft suitors.

  ‘For a couple of decades, I’d been doing the usual PI work,’ Sharma explains, over coffee at a business hotel in Sahar, near to Bombay’s international airport. ‘Corporate stuff mainly, researching corrupt employees for their bosses, that kind of thing. It was in the mid-2000s that I began to get commissions for matrimonial work, usually parents looking into potential sons-in-law, sometimes the bride or the groom themselves.’

  Sharma falls
silent while the waiter pours three coffees from a steaming cafetière, then he continues. ‘Early on I had this guy in Pune who was engaged to a girl in Bombay. They’d been matched online. He said he was this hotshot businessman and he’d met his bride-to-be a few times in Bombay, with her parents. He’d taken the whole family to a car showroom, put a deposit cheque down on a Mercedes. Next time he did the same with a flash apartment – took his new bride to see it, put down a deposit cheque of several lakhs.

  ‘Thing was,’ he continues, ‘it was just for show… all the cheques were bouncing. I found this out from following his trail around the property agents and showrooms, and through two weeks of surveillance in Pune. He was playing all of these girls from rich families off against each other, looking for a bride with a dowry big enough to pay off his gambling debt.’

  ‘He had his eyes on the prize,’ Dimple laughs. ‘That’s a very old idea in Indian matchmaking, as my mother would tell you.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Sharma. ‘But what I didn’t expect was the extent of these cases. Now since 2010 I mainly undertake matrimonial work. And in 80 per cent of cases the party who employs me has very good reasons for their suspicion. Usually the groom has lied about his job or educational achievements. Sometimes the bride is divorced and has kept this fact from the groom.’

  For a fee of US$100, Sharma offers his clients an investigation package that includes internet research, as well as old fashioned on-the-ground surveillance and photography. He promises to illuminate, as his company advertisements put it, ‘social reputation, family background, business status, vices, medical and education history and past broken/ unbroken marriages’.

  Our coffee cups drained, Dimple looks thoughtful. ‘Let me tell you,’ she says, ‘in my mother’s day there was a local matchmaker, a very good one. She matched my parents, and my grandparents before them, and she made it her business to know all of the dirty laundry. There was this rumour that she used to go through the rubbish of the families she was matching.’

  ‘Of course, you can see my work in the same way as the old village matchmakers,’ Sharma responds, smiling. ‘It’s the same thing, on a bigger scale. I’m that man in the shadows, searching the garbage for India’s dirty secrets.’

  As we leave him and begin one of the daily rate negotiations of a taxi fare with another of this breathless twenty-first-century city’s entrepreneurs, I consider this portrait of the new internet union. Clearly, the new world order is offering never-before-seen freedoms to young Indians empowered, for the first time, to seek their own marital match. But it’s also created a world in which our online identities are flexible, and often outright fallacious, and enabled a boon for fraudsters pushing scams to lonely, sometimes desperate people looking for love online.

  The full implications of the crashing together of the world’s online and offline love lives has yet to play out, in either the East or the West. It will take a generation before the ramifications of this paradigm shift in the way we meet and marry are understood – what this networked world might mean for our pursuit and expressions of love and lust. However, perhaps there are reasons to be cheerful about this parallel universe peopled by chameleon personalities and love-lorn souls. According to a 2005 study, ‘Identity Recreation via Internet Dating’ by Jennifer Yurchisin of Iowa State University, there are advantages in this tendency of internet dating sites to turn us into character chameleons.

  ‘We know that, compared to conventional methods, internet-dating services perform poorly in terms of matchmaking and long-term relationship formation,’ says Yurchisin. ‘What we find is that much of the popularity of internet matchmaking is in the process. Posting profiles and responding to feedback to emphasise certain aspects of our personality is a powerful tool in learning who we are now – and who we have the potential to become.’

  16 | TEN THOUSAND BIG, FAT INDIAN WEDDINGS

  The notion of romantic love has erected impassable barriers between us and the classical past, or Oriental present.

  —CS Lewis, The Allegory of Love

  What are the sins of my race, Beloved,

  What are my people to thee?

  And what are thy shrines, and kine and kindred

  What are they gods to me?

  Love recks not of feuds or bitter follies,

  Of stranger, comrade, or kin,

  Alike in his ear sound the temple bells

  And the cry of the muezzin.

  For love shall cancel the ancient wrong

  And conquer the ancient rage,

  Redeem with his tears the memoried sorrow

  That sullied a bygone age.

  —An Indian Love Song, Sarojini Naidu, 1917

  There’s a commotion of banging, crashing and yelping going on outside the brass-studded teak of the Bombay villa door. Inside that same door, Dimple and I are arrayed in our finery. Dimple is in a rainbow of gem-studded pink and teal; I wear the vibrant red dress and pink-red dupatta she’s coaxed me into, inducing me to cast aside the shalwar kameez that serves as my first line of defence against wandering Indian hands.

  The lavish racket, just reaching its crescendo of arhythmic drumming after 45 minutes, is our host’s bharat: the kick-off of a Hindu wedding ceremony, derived from a Sikh tradition, where the groom’s wedding party, headed by his young male companions, ceremonially march to the bride’s door in an inversion of that Western tradition of the bride walking down the aisle.

  As India’s wealth and confidence have burgeoned, so too have the pomp and vociferousness of the bharat. Today it can last up to three hours, with grooms arriving amid the bedlam on horseback; or, in a faddish new take on the tradition seen in the north of India, with the groom’s party arriving atop quad roller skates. The competitive exhibitionism of the twenty-first-century bharat has led to the attendant phenomena, much bewailed by the Indian press, of bharat pickpockets and wedding crashers, the latter slipping into high-society wedding parties unseen in the brouhaha of the whole event.

  Inside the villa door, Dimple and I stand on a tomato-red velvet carpet, dappled by the light of decorative lanterns, strung above and ordered at great expense from an avant-garde Bombay designer. We are serving chiefly decorative purposes, standing as we are in an area reserved for the out-of-town guests invited to exhibit the bride’s cosmopolitanism and wealth, at the tail end of a patient guard of honour of family and friends.

  As we stand here, tens of thousands across India are doing the same thing: glossily dressed wedding guests, neurotic parents and nervous newlyweds. Today is one of the season’s most auspicious days for marriage, just one of a handful of dates against which Indian families clamour to book caterers and pandits, hoping to give their sons and daughters the best chance, astrologically speaking, of marital bliss.

  Some of these thousands of couples will be like the young pair soon to be united by this opened door: a love-cum-arranged-marriage of a Western-educated couple, keen for a starring role in India’s twenty-first-century success story. Others will never have met each other before their wedding day, the bride’s head humbly bowed in silence and subordination beneath a heavy red ghoonghat. Still others will have chosen their own spouse online, an idea that would have been unconscionable for most Indian families even just a decade ago. Hundreds of these couples, perhaps thousands, might divorce in the years ahead, as the modern Western focus on individualism and self-fulfilment takes deeper root in India’s ancient soil.

  The heavy doors are thrown open to a flourish of drum roll, and the wedding party, in its peacock plumage of bright silks, trails into an extravagantly fitted-out wedding hall. I gaze at the young couple now established on the stage for the first of the interminable ceremonies and blessings that characterise the Hindu wedding. They sit there humbly: bride pretty and patient, dripping in gold ornamentation; groom in a finely wrought kurta. I wonder how their love life will be in the years to come: more satisfying than mine, to date, as a woman from the contracepted, post-revolution West? More satisfying than Dimple�
��s gruesome experience of conjugal copulation?

  In these months of my sexploration, I’ve come to understand that Indians and Britons both are sharing our marital beds with the spectres of a moralising past. Yes, the British Empire planted itself in India with ‘theological force’, but it spread its venereal diseases with as much brio as it did its sermonising, and it devoured India’s ancient erotica with more success than it spread the biblical word as to sexual propriety.

  So I’ve learned that, for all of our contraceptive pills and 24/7 porn, the Western sexual revolution isn’t the epilogue we Westerners often, and arrogantly, think it is; certainly not the end game in the immemorial tussle of boy-meets-girl. Western girls look at breast augmentation as a means to an end for a career in glamour modelling and the final prize of a football-playing spouse. Many Western, net-porn-bombarded kids are growing up as ignorant of the interrelationship of sex and love.

  We were told we could have it all; but somehow, somewhere, we were had.

  So as India takes its first, awkward steps towards its societal and sexual revolution, I hope that something of the optimism Dimple and I have encountered during our subcontinental sexploration becomes real – that India’s sexual revolution will be infused with its ancient myth and spirituality, and with the inheritance of the great Indian love stories.

  In the complex and beautiful courtly love literature that bloomed in North India during the late Middle Ages, Krishna is not the priapic eve-teaser we met earlier, but a paradigm of elegance and etiquette, a refined courtier and a consummate lover. In epic poems such as those of Keshava Dasa of Orcha (1555–1617), poet at the court of Rajput chief Vir Singh Deo (in modern-day Madya Pradesh), Krishna and his lover Radha become models for human lovers in their quarrels, their separations and reconciliation, and their candidly described sexual ecstasy. In these old stories the pathos, fury and laughter retain their power to speak to us today, and, in many ways, put the sanitised love stories pedalled by both Bollywood and Hollywood in the shade.