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As the second season drops, series creator Mundhra acknowledges the criticisms and talks about matchmaking in the 21st century.

Smriti Mundhra has always wanted to work in the film and TV business. Mundhra — who was born and grew up in Los Angeles and in Mumbai, India — has also always wanted to mainstream stories from her own diasporic culture.

Straight out of high school, she landed an internship with Spike Jonze at Propaganda Films, and he later hired her as a production secretary on his first feature film, Being John Malkovich, in 1999. She worked her way through feature after feature on the production side, learning the ins and outs of filmmaking with the express goal of someday producing and directing her own projects, ones that spoke to both her people and the universal themes that so many human stories carry. And in 2017, she directed for the first time: an indie documentary feature called A Suitable Girl, starring Sima Taparia, a prolific matchmaker from Mumbai.

Shortly after the release of her film, Mundhra sold Indian Matchmaking to Netflix, and it premiered on the streamer in 2020 to mostly stellar reviews. On August 10, the show comes back for its second season, and we’ll again see the premier transnational matchmaker — Sima Auntie as she is respectfully addressed on the show — try to help single millennials around the globe (hopefully) find their perfect match. After all, it worked for Mundhra. She’d conceived of the show idea eight years earlier when she went through the same steps some participants on the show go through, with Taparia as her own matchmaker.

“I just thought that this world was so rich for unscripted TV,” says Mundhra, who pitched the show pre-Netflix, pre-streaming, pre-unscripted, when it was still reality TV with Real World, Road Rules, and Big Brother dominating that space. “I was consistently told it was too niche.”

But thankfully, the gatekeepers of this industry are changing. More women and more people of color are in the corner offices, streaming has opened so many more doors, and while there certainly isn’t parity yet, these movers and shakers are the ones saying yes to some of these “too niche” projects. And really, let’s hope that “niche” is a term that will become less dirty as each year goes by and as each show like Indian Matchmaking becomes a critical and popular success.

“We need to have conversations [that shows like this elicit],” says Mundhra of the obvious controversy the idea of arranged marriage can spur. “Otherwise, by pretending that everything is perfect and progressive and inclusive, that’s not the reality of the world we live in. It’s certainly not the reality of this specific world that’s built around the marriage industry. No matter which culture you look at, it’s not fair, it’s not inclusive, and it’s built on this self-selecting sense of tribalism.”

Mundhra claims that she and the other producers of Indian Matchmaking have always tried to be honest about arranged marriage’s shortcomings or pitfalls by not masking it. She adds, “It would have been very easy to scrub out the references to skin tone or to religion and caste, but we deliberately left all of that in because that’s the reality of the world. I’m glad that people got angry about it because it got critical conversations going. People who would’ve never been talking about these issues were talking about it.”

Here, the writer/director/producer Zoomed with Shondaland from her home in Los Angeles to talk about all things matchmaking, including the different needs of each generation, why we see only affluent Indians on the show, bringing South Asian stories into the mainstream, and the shifting universality of storytelling.

VALENTINA VALENTINI: In 2018, did you hear a lot of the same excuses from 2010 when trying to get Indian Matchmaking sold?

SMRITI MUNDHRA: Well, I only took it to Netflix. I had a general meeting with Bela Bajaria, the head of unscripted at the time, and she’s an Indian American woman like me. She told me they were looking to do more in India — it was just before they launched there — and I showed her the same tape that I had pitched around eight years prior, and I didn’t have to pitch it anywhere else. She immediately wanted it. Though it would be interesting, in hindsight, to know what the market would’ve said at that time. But Bela could see beyond the language-barrier stuff, the multicultural stuff, and see the universal themes. I don’t know what the response would’ve been if I pitched it around to a bunch of executives who maybe couldn’t see that. Of course, now everyone’s like, “We would’ve loved to do that show!” But hey, hindsight is 20/20.

VV: It feels like this was a real moment that helped to break down that “it’s too niche” barrier. Has it always been your goal to get stories of South Asian people, and women in particular, into the mainstream media?

SM: Always. Absolutely. I pull from the South Asian experience and perspective because it’s my own; I’ve been steeped in and thinking about it for as long as I’ve been alive. But really, the goal is to mainstream the perspective of the global majority. Whether that’s women, people of color, South Asian people — who, by the way, I think are on track to become the global majority by next year, with India’s population becoming the largest in the world. We’ve accepted for a very long time that the perspective of white men and white people is the norm. But white stories are actually a minority, not only in the United States, but on the planet. My goal is to mainstream the rest of our perspectives and voices. I’ve always wanted to tell these stories because I saw that they were both universal and specific, and human in the most profound way. But I was always told it was too niche. I think now we’re starting to see a shift where culturally specific stories are being seen as universal by others as well, and are not considered niche. I’m just excited to be able to ride that wave.

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VV: Is this niche/not niche opinion something you’ve heard from the viewers of Indian Matchmaking? Anecdotally, it’d be interesting to learn what you’ve heard from either side of the opinion spectrum.

SM: It was no surprise to me that the show was going to be met with a healthy amount of controversy. There is such a dearth of stories from our perspective that when any one thing breaks out into the mainstream, it inevitably feels like it’s representing all of us, and that can never be true. There are 1.3 billion of us on the planet — there are how many different religions, languages, perspectives, et cetera in that number? But it can feel that way, right? And it can piss some people off because they’re like, “That’s not my perspective,” or “That’s such a narrow perspective.” Because there is a small number of the people who have access to develop, pitch, and sell shows, a lot of it comes from a very narrow slice of the South Asian perspective, which is mostly upper middle class, probably Hindu. Also, Indian Matchmaking has themes that are prevalent in our culture and in our communities that are talked about internally, but the show has externalized all of it; it’s held a mirror up to things that are wonderful about our culture but also the things that are problematic about our culture. I think one of the most telling comments that I heard from somebody was something like, “I love the show, but I’m just mad that white people are watching it because now they know all of our s--t!” [Laughs.]

I knew that that kind of controversy was coming, and honestly, I was excited for it. But by and large, I think people loved the show and felt that it was an honest reflection of our culture and community, our values, both good and bad, plus it was entertaining, something that families were watching together, debating in their family WhatsApp groups and stuff. I got so many screenshots of those! Grandparents and parents relating to some characters, young people relating to other characters. I didn’t engage with the bad faith arguments about the show, but there were a number of very thoughtful critiques, and if you look back on my social media history, I engaged with them, and did the panels, and made myself available for their articles because I think some of them were critiques of the show and some of them were critiques of the culture, but the conversations are valid — we need to be having them. I wanted the show to be a springboard for a lot of those conversations, so it made sense to engage with the most thoughtful and insightful of those critiques.

I hope the takeaway is that stories about brown people, people who have been marginalized by the mainstream media, can be universal. I think this show really proves that.

VV: One thing that’s been interesting to see is this common thread between all participants: They only want to move forward with a match if that “spark” is there. That’s quite different from how matchmaking used to be, and we see it in the interviews with the older generation, where they say they met their partner for 10 minutes and then got married, and then they fell in love years later. Can you explain the evolution of matchmaking as it pertains to this very big shift?

SM: There has been a huge shift, and it’s been part of Sima’s evolution too, learning how to deal with and address the needs of a new generation. This younger generation has become far more individualistic. It’s the biggest change amongst South Asian people from my mom’s generation to my generation and then even more so to those who are younger than me; there’s way more focus on individual wants and will than there was in previous generations. That’s why you see those older generations saying they met for like five minutes, and their families already vetted each other, and so they were happy to get married. The lifestyle was different back then too — usually the woman would get married and move into her husband’s household with his parents and siblings, so things that were more important to her might have been: “Am I going to be comfortable in this new environment and this new household? Will I have to change my diet or religious practices? What holidays will I celebrate?” And “Do I connect with this person?” was secondary. That spoke to a mindset of people who were oriented towards becoming part of a community as opposed to following their individual will, which is much more prevalent now.

But I hate the flattening of this conversation because there are benefits and drawbacks to each side, right? In a previous generation, the marriages lasted longer, and there are a lot of people who are very happily married because their priorities were and are different. And they like to brag about the low divorce rate, but they don’t talk about the fact that it’s much harder and more stigmatized to get divorced if you’re of a previous generation, or harder for women to work, and things like that. That is all different in this new generation, but as a result, we have more wanderlust too when it comes to dating and relationships. You don’t need someone who can just satisfy your basic human needs; you need someone who can be an intellectual peer and a spiritual companion and sexual partner, and those things are difficult to pin down with biodata.

VV: In both seasons, we’ve seen fairly wealthy Indians on the show. They have more than enough resources to find a spouse and fund a huge wedding. I am sure there is a less affluent side to matchmaking. Is that something you’ve talked about showing?

SM: Sima represents the upward mobility of a lot of Indians, the growth of the middle and upper middle classes. So, her clientele are people who can afford an elite matchmaker. She doesn’t pretend to be egalitarian in that way — the needs are different, especially in India, between families with different socioeconomic backgrounds.

VV: So, you’re saying it would be a different show entirely with a different matchmaker?

SM: Totally, yeah. There are tons of matchmakers in India; there are ones who focus on specific communities — the Indian Jewish community, divorcees, widows, the Parsis community, which is on the brink of extinction. So, a community like that, their priorities are different; it’s about keeping that lineage alive. Throughout my time being immersed in this world, I’ve met with dozens and dozens of matchmakers, and Indian Matchmaking is a lens into a very specific world. Sima is a very specific type of matchmaker for a very specific type of community, so to combine all of that into one show that’s anchored by Sima would feel false. We’re not trying to just check representation boxes. I hope to make many more shows about matchmakers in India because there’s a huge opportunity there. But this is the show we’re making now, and that’s the world we’re in.

VV: What do you want audiences to take away from this show?

SM: On a more existential level, I hope the takeaway is that stories about brown people, people who have been marginalized by the mainstream media, can be universal. I think this show really proves that. But we need dozens, hundreds, thousands of more stories like this. Because there’s no one show that can purport to represent 1.3 billion people on this planet. And it shouldn’t have to. This show captured the hearts and eyeballs of so many people, not just Indian people, so I hope that the people who are making decisions about what gets the green light notice that. Shondaland — what better example of proving how universal the stories and the perspectives of people of color are? But we need to see more of that, and we need to allow ourselves to live in all of our complexity. I think immigrants in the U.S. and their stories are just now starting to emerge in more authentic ways. There is a huge cultural shift from one generation to the next, and I think that there is a real opportunity to show the nuance of what that means. It means that it’s not the white male or female lead that’s the universal story. I hope there is increasing space for our perspectives.

Valentina Valentini is a London-based entertainment, travel, and food writer and also a Senior Contributor for Shondaland. Elsewhere she has written for Vanity Fair, Vulture, Variety, Thrillist, Heated, and The Washington Post. Her personal essays can be read in the Los Angeles Times, Longreads, and her tangents and general complaints can be seen on Twitter at @ByValentinaV.

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