About

This research develops an interdisciplinary framework informed by postcolonialism and media studies to investigate how Western dating apps are (re)appropriated in the Indian context and how traditional Indian cultural values are embedded in the design of homegrown dating apps. The study will look at the online dating apps in Indian technological culture – taking factors like gender, religion, caste, and class into account and examine how these factors formalize (or not) societal inequalities, specifically for users in regional cities. Building on adjacent studies of dating apps that have been conducted from postcolonial perspectives (Cabañes and Collantes, 2020; Cabalquinto and Soriano, 2020; Das, 2021, Madan & Jain, 2019; Chakraborty, 2019; Nair & K, 2020), this project aims to foreground the transition that the emerging homegrown dating apps are generating in smaller towns by adopting Western elements of dating to carve out a market share.

By situating this project within the media tech industry in India, this research will also foreground how techno/data colonialism (Simmons, 2015; Couldry and Meijas, 2019; Singh, 2021) is rooted in the context of longstanding technological imbalances of power between the relationship of the West and the non-West and why forming online relationships is still viewed as taboo within the dating app ecosystem in India. While a large number of studies on dating apps focus on user experiences and app interface dynamics within the Western world, I situate my analysis in contemporary India to demonstrate a nuanced understanding of how online dating apps are marketed and reformulated by local vernaculars to suit the nation’s cultural tastes in defining something as special as ‘love’. The research will adopt a qualitative methodology to provide a complex picture of online dating in India where traditional values and power relationships in romance and coupling are being redefined. 

The current growth of digital technologies in India begs the question of how these issues should be tackled in the first place – a nation where people often use these technologies in substantially different ways to adapt to local constraints without knowing how their data is gathered, used, shared, or even stored. In an attempt to properly construe contemporary data relations through the lens of postcolonial and media studies framework, the present study of homegrown dating apps will allow me to interrogate the ‘colonialism’ of big West tech companies that drive the development and acceptance of digital technologies in our lives. Data colonialism as a concept allows this study to take important reminders into account – that postcolonialism and media studies represent significant sources for appreciating the long durée of a complex interaction of how post-colonies like India fit into the contemporary consumerist media economy, where “media spaces are extremely heterogeneous and access to them by diverse populations is grossly unequal” (Shome, 2017).