Where the Personal is Political
If shows like Indian Matchmaking want to showcase narratives of dominant-caste men, may they be narratives of discomfort, repentance, and accountability, and not one of pride and honor because we know all too well that endogamy, seen in Indian Matchmaking, is about preserving caste honor, and honor-based killings, witnessed in Sairat, is about reclaiming caste honor.
What makes such scandalous relationships alive, nourishing and evocative, though being abhorred and precluded, is not just its sporadic triumphant out-turn but its repeated tendentious happenings. There are people who have engaged and are engaging in such tendentious acts. Inter-cultural and inter-caste relationships are socially explosive love affairs. In them lie the potential to wreck external standards of morality, in them lie the potential to transform and reform love and desire, in them lie the potential to subvert hierarchical arrangements, in them lie the potential to cause social friction, and in them lie the potential to effuse healing and solidarity.
