For centuries, families in India relied on private and community networks, marriage brokers and later newspaper advertisements and marriage bureaus. An ongoing internet boom has led to matrimonial websites as a new and increasingly popular medium of seeking a marriage partner conquering India’s and its diaspora’s marriage market since the late 1990s with millions of users. New media is becoming a central factor in the rapidly growing multi-million-dollar business of marriage matchmaking in the Indian context.

But the phenomenon is not only interesting from an economic point of view. The presentation will focus on how an ‘Indian’ marriage market has created a transnational media sphere in which notions of identity and ‘Indianness’ are negotiated. By targeting diaspora audiences explicity, the Indian matchmaking industry supports an inclusivist agenda that is consistent with the efforts by the Indian state. Creating a matrimonial market for the ‘global Indian family’ corresponds directly to the image of the ‘Globo-Indian’ or the ‘New Indian Woman’ which represent role models that are modern in outlook and lifestyle but culturally rooted in Indian traditions. While promoting transnationality, matrimonial media serves simultaenously to strengthen regional and religious communities. Not a counter trend of globalization but more an aspect of it, media regionalization is observable on many levels. In the context of marriage matchmaking, the consolidation of regionally and religiously defined (transnational) networks is also based on conventional marriage rules, e.g. marrying inside one’s caste or outside one’s village. Thus, media globalization serves not an exclusively ‘new’ agenda but reinforces existing patterns as well.

The presentation will provide an overview of the transnational dynamics of the Indian matrimonial market and the way users appropriate matrimonial websites to construct their subjectivities in accordance with or countering circulating role models. Furthermore it will explore the links between political discourses and the market’s development.