Since there's so much interest in my earlier #IndianMatchmaking tweet, here is a much more informative one on the realities of the marriage market amongst Indians. I summarize some key papers below, starting with those on caste & class. (1/n)

Banerjee et al. (2013) find big preference for in-caste marriage amongst urban spouse seekers. Women's families are willing to trade off on men's education to marry in-caste & men's families are willing to trade off on self-assessed women's looks: https://economics.mit.edu/files/4114  (2/n)

Dugar et al. (2011) study responses to fake marriage ads for men in W. Bengal & find that (1) higher‐caste responders discriminate against low‐caste men, (2) men from low-caste group get more responses from high-caste women as their monthly income ↑ https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1288987 (3/n)

Ahuja and Ostermann (2016) study actual correspondence b/w potential partners on a matrimonial site (w/ a focus on female respondents) & find that the higher the caste of a person, the less likely they are to be interested in intercaste marriage: https://tinyurl.com/yyay4a4z  (4/n)

Ahuja and Ostermann also find caste policing is not as strong if it holds the promise of upward mobility for income or caste. However, SC women from middle or lower income brackets didn't feel they had the status endowments to inter-marry whereas higher income SC women did (5/n)

Lastly, Ahuja & Ostermann find that even amongst upper caste ind. who didn't say they cared about caste, they strongly preferred OBCs over SC matches. Unless a groom was very educated and had good career prospects, it was rare for UC to match with Scheduled Castes (6/n).

Some, however, argue that an increase in family incomes from modernization in caste-based societies lead to an increase in dowry payments that accompany inter-caste marriage (see Anderson 2003: https://economics.ubc.ca/files/2013/05/pdf_paper_siwan-anderson-why-dowry-payments-declined.pdf) (7/n)

On colorism, Utley Jr. and @SandyDarity (2016) study how matrimonial ads for 1 day in Sunday Times. They find men are much less likely to mention their own skin tone, if at all, but women reported theirs 40% of the time (but only if they were fair): https://tinyurl.com/y2ugkwvd  (8/n)

Subramanium and Jain (2009) also study >1000 matrimonial ads. Many interesting results. For one, they find that men are more likely to announce their own financial stability (rather than seek it in women) whereas women are the opposite: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01292980903072831 (9/n)

Subramanium and Jain also find that ads by men were likely to expect and mention seeking physically attractive spouses (26% of ads) than ads by women (13.7%). Similarly, women announce their "thin" weight much more whereas men seek it in a spouse much more (10/n)

Lastly, women (33.4%) were sig. more likely to announce their own fair or wheatish skin tone. Ads by men (16.1%) were also significantly more likely than ads by women (5.3%) to seek partner with fair skin (11/n)

Jha & Adelman (2009) study matrimonial websites and find the same gendered skew. They also study reported success stories by websites and find that these photos consistently had lighter-skinned brides than grooms and featured no dark-skinned women: https://tinyurl.com/yy62ap4x  (12/n)

These are just some of the studies on caste, class, and colorism in Indian marriage markets - all under heteronormative assumptions, of course. There are many more significant issues. Skewed gender ratios make women vulnerable to migration & at times, trafficking. (13/n)

Dowries & related violence remains a persistent issue. Women's ability to work & the expectations of them after marriage often crush any dreams of independence (see Sarita Khurana and @SmritiMundhra's A Suitable Girl as an example). (14/n)

Mindless shows are fun and all but these are the convos that must go along, along with continuing research on the impact of marriage on caste, class, gender attitudes, economy, and politics (15/15).