‘Indian Matchmaking’ Creator Smriti Mundhra Puts A Spotlight On The Marriage Industrial Complex of the South Asian Diaspora

Smriti Mundhra has been steadily working in Hollywood for the last 20 years as a director and producer with an eye on social justice issues, both within the South Asian diaspora as well as America at large. In 2018, her documentary A Suitable Girl about arranged marriage in India premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, where she won the Albert Maysles Best New Documentary Director award with her filmmaking partner Sarita Khurana.

Mundhra’s next high-profile documentary about a Ferguson activist-turned-state representative called St. Louis Superman was nominated for an Academy Award last year. This week, Mundhra is premiering a new Netflix show, Indian Matchmaking, which follows Mumbai-based matchmaker Sima Taparia.

Decider spoke to Mundhra about the behind the scenes of Indian Matchmaking, the focus on social and racial justice within her work, and how she’s leading the change for diversity in Hollywood.

DECIDER: We spoke when you were promoting A Suitable Girl, and Indian Matchmaking is also focused on the wedding industry in India. That seems to be an area of interest that you keep coming back to. What keeps drawing you back to that topic?

SMRITI MUNDHRA: For one, it’s sort of a dominant center of focus for a lot of South Asian people, generally. Marriage and the culture we get married in is a very defining, coming-of-age thing for a lot of South Asian people. It was for me in my 20s: I kind of went through this whole process of doing the matchmaking thing at the helm of my mother. But this mission to get me married — the Shaadi.com, the matrimonial ads, all of it — out of that experience, and wanting to process how I felt about that is why I made A Suitable Girl with my directing partner. That film was really from the perspective of young people. I think it’s as much of a coming-of-age story as anything else, about young women in India going through the process with their family.

But there was this whole other side of things that are complementary, a side of things that we didn’t explore in A Suitable Girl and that I had been familiar with having been through all of these matchmaking steps. The service industry that’s built around trying to get young people married and find them life partners…has its own fascinating world, a marriage industrial complex. Indian Matchmaking is very different from [A Suitable Girl]. It’s much more lighthearted. It’s much more about the mechanics of the matchmaking industry, as told by Sima, who is this Indian matchmaker. I think that, alone, can reveal a lot. The way we prioritize certain things, commodify certain things. The language we use within our culture and our community to find a life partner can be very revealing — as revealing as the eternal journey of young women.

Yeah, absolutely. I found it to be really relevant, and I haven’t even personally done any formal matchmaking myself. But the conversations that are happening, they’re so relevant to basically what, I think, every Indian person goes through. Sima herself is a really interesting person to have at the center of it. I love that everytime she enters a room, she introduces herself as “Sima from Mumbai.” I laughed at how repetitive that was, it was great. How did you find her, specifically?

So Sima and I have known each other for 15 years now. She’s a preeminent matchmaker in my community, Rajasthani Marwari. In certain communities in India, everyone knows who she is. She had approached my family because she had a certain diligence in keeping track of the friends and friends of friends — who has an eligible boy, or an eligible girl? So when I hit my mid-20s, she knew my family and so she was like, “Oh, they have a daughter. She’s not married, let me try.” That’s how I got to know her. I was living in New York at the time [and] I was living a totally different life that didn’t quite conform to her usual practices or the world that she operated in. Since then, her scope of her work has dramatically expanded. But I just was so curious to meet her, and I found her so…disarmingly charming. She was also horrifyingly blunt. She’s very honest — she is who she is, and she’d never try to be someone she’s not. Her world view is straightforward in that way, and I found that refreshing.

When I met her, I wasn’t like, “Oh, this is the person who’s going to find me a husband.” It was like, “I want to create with this person. I want to make a film about her.” That was really the origin of our friendship, of our relationship. Like I said, A Suitable Girl ended up being much more from the perspective of the young women, which is what our intention was. But I knew that [Sima] was an amazing character in her own right, and deserved a platform in which she could fully flower in. This was the perfect opportunity to do that.

How did you decide which subjects would be featured throughout?

It came down to going through [and] contacting every single person who was her client — she’s got 500 clients — and seeing who would be willing. This is typically a very private process for people. Nine out of 10 people we talked to — more than that, nine and a half [out of 10] people we talked to were absolutely not interested in going through this process for a TV show. But we did find some who were interested, and had something to say and wanted to bring this process into the light. So those were the people we ended up casting for the show. For me personally, it was important to be as representative as I possibly could be with the diaspora. Because I know matchmaking can be very singular, from one very specific lens. I wanted to make sure that we had as much representation as was reasonable and that we possibly could push for in the series. It was important that we had people from all different kinds of families, from different cities, who had different ideologies, so we could really start to dig into what this means, and what we prioritize, culturally, when it comes to marriage and matchmaking. That’s how we came to the task. [But] ultimately it came down to who was willing and game to go through this process on camera.

I did find it notable that there was a Guyanese client, and one of the characters had a difficult backstory about his parents. It was striking that we were talking openly about things that, in Indian culture, sometimes get swept under the rug. On that note, was there ever any discussion about featuring same-sex couples, or is that not really in Sima’s wheelhouse?

To be perfectly honest, it’s not really in Sima’s wheelhouse. Sima is growing and experimenting every day. The thing she’s most passionate about is her work. Whereas when I met her 15 years ago, she was almost completely working with Punjabi, Marwari, Rajasthani, and Gujarati families…basically people she knew. Since then, as her business has boomed and more people have come to her for her services, she’s expanded. She’s like, “Well, if I can do this with this kind of family, why can’t I do it with this kind of family?” Essentially, it’s just about understanding what people’s priorities are, and trying to match them with like minded people. It’s entirely possible that the scope of her clientele expands into same-sex couples, and all different kinds of people. But it’s just that’s not where she was when we started filming the show. But hopefully there’ll be a Season 2, and maybe there will be even more of that.

Another thing that I found interesting is that there were some moments where it felt like some of the clients and some of the clients’ parents were reinforcing some old-school views — specifically about skin fairness and gender roles at home. I’m curious what the conversations were behind the camera, when you were editing and thinking about the storylines. How did you and your filmmaking crew feel about those topics as they came up?

One thing that I credit everyone — from our cast to our amazing showrunner, J.C. Begley, the rest of our producing team, and also Netflix — is that they were not trying to shy away from any uncomfortable conversations. They said, what’s real is real. We’re not going to prod and push our cast to sensationalize anything, or bring up anything that’s not authentically part of their process or their experience. If they bring things up, if they talk about certain things…we’re not going to go out of our way to hide anything. I think that’s really important. Even though this is sort of a lighthearted dating show, I think it can reveal a lot. My hope is that it will spark a lot of conversations that all of us need to be having in the South Asian community with our families — that it’ll be a jumping off point for reflections about the things that we prioritize, and the things that we internalize. The reason that I felt very comfortable bringing this series to Netflix…was that they have a good reputation of not sensationalizing. This is not like a reality show on cable TV, where you have to find the villain, you have to find the victim. We really were focused on creating an environment where people felt that they could be their authentic selves and providing enough context so that nobody was carrying any specific burden themselves.

I know you have so many other things that you’ve been working on. Congratulations [on your] Academy Award nomination for St. Louis Superman, that’s incredible. How did you come across Bruce’s story at Ferguson? What about it, in particular, drew you to focusing a whole film on him?

I read about Bruce in a newspaper article from a local St. Louis newspaper. It was a profile on him, talking about his journey from activism into elected office. It was very much a retrospective profile. Everything that you see in St. Louis Superman [is new content] I captured, so I didn’t know it was coming. But there was just something — similar to how I felt when I met Sima — that immediately leapt out at me when I read about Bruce. There’s something captivating about this person [and they] clearly have a lot to say and a lot to offer, and could be a great vessel through which we can understand more systemic issues.

When I met Bruce, not only did he confirm those views, but it was just one of those gifts that you get in life, where you meet somebody who’s so remarkable, and so open and giving and charismatic. I was just so lucky that I was able to make a film on him. Every credit, every success that that film has had, that goes to him, because you couldn’t make a bad film about Bruce. He’s just that great [of a] human being. I think the best tool, as a filmmaker, is to find people who can be those vessels who can reflect back to us, or challenge our notions about the society and the world we live in. If you can do that and get a great team around you, the rest is great.

It seems like your career is really focusing on projects around social issues. Is that a motivated decision or are those just the stories that you’re drawn to?

It’s a combination of both. Those are definitely the types of stories that I’m drawn to. For me, as a filmmaker, every film is an exploration. It’s a way for me to challenge even my own preconceived notions and things that I’ve internalized and taken for granted. Every film is that, and it just so happens that the things I find most urgent to explore and talk about and amplify are social issues. I think you can explore these larger cultural conversations through pop culture as well, which is another reason I’m proud of Indian Matchmaking. On the surface it’s a fun, lighthearted dating show. More people are going to watch that show than will watch anything else that I’ve ever made and I think it can get up to talk about colorism and stigma, divorce, the whole men and women debate, [the evolution of] traditions— all those things. I think that’s an amazing thing.

The pressing issues that are important to all of us these days are where my eyes and my heart gravitate. But I like that we can explore these things through serious documentaries or more interesting pop culture shows. [My next project is] a docuseries about mainstream Bollywood. But really, it’s a look at how India evolved postcolonialism through the lens of Bollywood. There is still a deeper message that we try to dig out of the entertainment.

That sounds awesome, I can’t wait to see that! In general, how do you think that film plays a role in education? Especially when it comes to these social and racial justice initiatives.

I think film [and entertainment at large] is hugely important. For many people it is an education, whether we like it or not. That’s why we have a huge responsibility as storytellers to make sure we’re being accurate and representative about the stories we tell. For most people, what they see on TV and at the movies and hear in music, read in books and are taught in school, is going to be their only exposure to communities outside their own. If you only see Black people depicted as drug dealers and criminals and gang bangers; if you only see Latinos as drug dealers and migrants and victims; if you only see Muslims depicted as terrorists — that’s what’s going to be in your subconscious every time you pass a Black person on the street, or sit next to Muslim person on an airplane. It’s really important to have a variety of voices showing a broad swath of the experience of different communities. We can’t just be defined by our trauma, our worst stereotypes, or the Western lens on us. We have to be able to define ourselves in pop culture. That’s what people are going to learn.

We sometimes try to separate. We’re like, “I’m just making a film. It’s not my job to educate.” But we are educating, whether we like it or not. The fact that The Help was the number one trending movie at the height of the George Floyd protests — that’s what people are going to to understand, and process, and learn about racial relations in America. So we better have more out there.

As Hollywood continues to go through this reckoning with diversity, do you have a criteria of who you work with on these films? Or do you mainly just tap into people you know?

As a woman of color who’s been in the industry for 20 years, who has been on the outside looking in until very recently, it’s a process to even understand and recognize [the power of my platform]. But I do have a platform. And I do have some leverage. Because I’ve been working in the industry for a long time and I’ve networked with a lot of amazing filmmakers who happened to be people of color, it’s easy for me to go to a well of talented people of color representative of the types of stories I’m trying to tell and bring them aboard. I’m practicing asking for that. It’s not always easy and instinctive, because when you’re a person of color in the industry, you’re in the mindset of, “Oh, I’m so glad I’m even here.” It takes a minute to be like, “Wait a minute. I can do more.” That’s definitely my focus now: to make sure that every project that I work on, I use it as an opportunity to bring more people [of color] on the inside and provide as many opportunities as I can.

One thing that I’ve definitely learned is to know my lane. Even though I’m a person of color, my experience does not mean I’m equipped to tell the story of any person of color. There’s got to be a balance. I have other projects that I’m working on [where] there will be co-directors and producing partners and things like that, that are very representative of the communities that I’m amplifying. I hope that one thing that we learn from all of this — we’ve been going through this reckoning, like you described — is that it shouldn’t just be people of color who are doing this work. We all have to do this work and make space. We’re going to be a better, stronger, and more resilient industry for it.

Radhika Menon (@menonrad) is a TV-obsessed writer based in New York City. Her work has appeared on Paste Magazine, Teen Vogue, and Brown Girl Magazine. At any given moment, she can ruminate at length over Friday Night Lights, the University of Michigan, and the perfect slice of pizza. You may call her Rad.

Watch Indian Matchmaking on Netflix