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In Kolkata, the capital of West-Bengal in eastern India, Ghataks, or the traditional matchmakers, have long helped make arrange marriages within caste groups. Ghataks maintained family registers and lineage histories curating alliances by meticulously balancing caste affiliations, class aspiration, and family reputation (Majumdar 2009). In Kolkata, as well as in wider India, marriage is perceived as an alliance between two families binding them in a lifelong obligation. The potential brides and grooms are believed to be inexperienced in taking such a life-defining decision. Central to community reproduction, marriages are arranged and closely overseen by parents, often with help from extended family and advice from matchmakers (Sen 2025).  

If colonial modernity heralded the advent of print technology in the nineteenth century, the internet revolution a century later announced the arrival of online technology, both impacting the modes of matchmaking in many ways. Where matrimonial advertisements in newspapers modernised matchmaking, matrimonial websites, modelled after international dating apps, revolutionised matchmaking. Newspaper matrimonial columns may have enjoyed a broader reach than Ghataks but online matrimonial websites have a global reach that transcends national borders (Sen 2025). In contemporary times, Ghataks have been supplanted by the precise efficiency of these online matrimonial platforms existing alongside newspaper matrimonial advertisements.

Funded by the National Killam Trusts of Canada, my ongoing postdoctoral work on Kolkata’s marriage market unmasks these platforms as being far from impartial channels of human connection. Based on my ethnography in Kolkata (December 2025-August 2026), I argue that despite the promise of a modern, ‘scientific’ approach to seeking partnership, these digital interfaces are not dismantling old hierarchies; instead, they are automating them.  In the digital age, these platforms act as what I call, ‘digital Ghataks’. They sanitise age-old prejudices of upper-caste supremacy in the Hindu Bengali matrimonial landscape under the veneer of technical optimisation and compatibility. My work illustrates that they actively shape everyday romance and intimacies by turning traditional prejudices into software code.

The ‘digital Ghatak’ operates through a series of backend processes that filter, rank, and curate human beings based on deeply entrenched hierarchies. When we conceptualise these websites as automated architectures of endogamy (marriage within the caste), we can discern how caste is not disappearing in the face of technological progress. Instead, it is rendered invisible through the sanitising language of lifestyle compatibility, merit, and culture, reinforced by the sleek, high-tech aesthetic borrowed from international dating sites. For instance, when users filter searches for a ‘good family background’, a coded proxy for caste purity, generational wealth, and upper-class respectability, they are not just expressing innocent personal preferences. Instead, they are participating in a system that revives nineteenth century social hierarchies. Ultimately, these digital tools actively monitor and enforce caste-endogamy, proving that centuries-old social divisions can thrive inside automated algorithms even within one of India’s most liberal metropolises.

The technical architecture of these sites often relies on collaborative filtering and predictive matching, which are largely designed to show users profiles that resemble those they have previously engaged with. If a user views a profile that shares their community tag, the algorithm learns this preference, reinforcing a feedback loop that restricts exposure to diverse social backgrounds. This is not merely a technical limitation; it is an ideological construction that values similarity as the highest form of matrimonial success. By centring this similarity, the platforms inadvertently, or perhaps intentionally, reproduce the same exclusionary practices that characterised the Ghatak’s work. However, such practices are exercised under the guise of an objective recommendation engine. The user is encouraged to believe they are making an individual choice. In reality, they are largely directed towards an endogamous outcome that the system has pre-selected based on their own caste affiliations as well as the desired caste alliances stated on the profiles.

To understand the matrimonial platform of today, however, one must first confront the colonial genealogy of the Bengali marriage market. Colonial Calcutta, British India’s first capital, was the earliest to embrace western modernity and proclaim itself as the vanguard of India’s liberalism. Eventually, the postcolonial city’s middle-class intellectuals fanned the idea that West Bengal had risen over the politics of caste-loyalties that ravaged wider India. However, colonial Calcutta was not a site where tradition simply withered away. Instead, it was a crucible where the reformist agendas of bhadralok (gentlemen) intelligentsia reshaped caste-endogamy into ‘modern’ parameters of marital choice. The fundamental architecture of caste remained conspicuously unchallenged even as respectability, domesticity, and companionate marriage were championed by the elite. Caste was neither abolished nor defended; it was rendered invisible, masked by the language of culture, refinement, and ‘good family background’.

The sustenance of this self-conjured caste-exceptionalism, is reinforced by a deafening silence on caste discrimination in the digital space. They perform the same function by sanitising the rigidity of caste by folding it into a wider array of supposedly more ‘modern’ variables, educational parity, career prestige, and lifestyle compatibility. By analysing matrimonial advertisements and platform engagement patterns, we see that inter-caste marriages remain difficult, frequently inviting familial and social resistance. As my research documents, lower-caste individuals, even when they achieve professional success, often find that their merit is dismissed as an ‘undue benefit of reservation policy’ by potential upper-caste in-laws. The matrimonial platform provides tools for upper-caste families to steer potential grooms and brides towards endogamous matches without ever having to explicitly state their prejudice. The platform provides the veneer of modern, secular, and meritocratic choice, while the underlying code enforces the preservation of caste boundaries, effectively borrowing the ‘fun’ appeal of international dating to mask the exclusionary work of caste maintenance allowing familial intervention in congruence with individual preferences.

Marriage remains the most profound site for the reproduction of social inequality in India. When we remain blind to the politics of digital matchmaking, we ignore how systemic exclusion is being computationally reinforced in the twenty-first century. My work aims to bring these deep, persistent fault lines to the surface, to challenge the pervasive myth of ‘caste-exceptionalism’ which often obscures the reality of social stratification in West Bengal. By foregrounding Kolkata as both a colonial and postcolonial urban space, I seek to demonstrate how caste preferences are embedded in marriage markets. These platforms are not passive tools. Instead, they are active agents in the construction of social hierarchies, governing our intimate lives in ways we have yet to fully understand or critique.