Online
Matrimonials and the Transformation of Arranged Marriage
in India
Seth, Nainika naina.seth@uah.edu
Patnayakuni, Ravi ravi.patnayakuni@uah.edu
Book chapter in Social Networking Communities and eDating Services: Concepts and Implications
Abstract
Online personals have been a remarkably successful in the
western world and have been emulated in other cultural contexts. The
introduction of the Internet can have vastly different implications on
traditional societies and practices such as arranged marriages in India. This
chapter seeks to investigate using an ethnographic approach the role of
matrimonial web sites in the process of arranging marriages in India. It seeks
to explore how these web sites have been appropriated by key stakeholders in
arranging marriage and how such appropriation is changing the process and
traditions associated with arranged marriage. The key contributions of this
study are in that it is an investigation of complex social processes in a
societal context different from traditional western research contexts and an
exploration of how modern technologies confront societal traditions and long
standing ways of doing things. Our investigation suggests that the use of
matrimonial web sites have implications for family disintermediation, cultural
convergence, continuous information flows ease of disengagement, virtual dating
and reduced stigma in arranged marriages in India..