Touring the online matchmaking platform: A study of the “sado-ritual syndrome” with a special reading of Shashi Deshpande’s The Binding Vine

Abstract

ABSTRACT Eligible bachelors and bachelorettes trust matchmaking services reverentially and sometimes go across the seven seas to meet, communicate, romance, and understand their chosen one. Platforms like Jeevansathi.com, Shaadi.com, and Bharat Matrimony promise to help them make the right marriage decision and get along for true compatibility. However, they have also contributed to the growing politics of “Sado-Ritual Syndrome” against the female population. Such matchmaking platforms work to convince both parties to manipulate each other with Western matrimony features such as a salaried male partner, a grand wedding, monogamy, multilingualism, and preferences based on profession and class. Shashi Deshpande, in her novel The Binding Vine, written in 1993, has elaborately addressed these features to critically investigate how sex in heterosexual marital relationships strips the wife of choice, respect, and agency by making the husband’s ejaculation the major responsibility of the wife. This paper attempts to expose this ideological system of matchmaking and its role in building people’s otherness encouraging them to treat human beings as options.