A Postcolonial Investigation of Online Dating in Contemporary India

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This research will analyze the structure and use of online dating apps in contemporary India at the intersection of neoliberalism and postcoloniality. It will address their origins in Western technological cultures, and examine how these apps- based on Western norms- are re-appropriated in my home country, India. The approach of this study is interdisciplinary: applying ideas from media and literary studies, and foregrounding factors like sexuality, race and class in a postcolonial frame, the project will map the values and practices of app users, and examine the particular notions of 'romance', 'intimacy' and 'love' they contest and re-envision. Expanding existing knowledge of dating apps that is dominated by Western use experiences, I will develop new critical perspectives on platform technologies to understand how they are enmeshed in with culturally specific norms and values concerning romantic relationships mediated via home-grown dating apps. While digital dating is now revolutionizing romantic partnerships in smaller cities, traditional Indian culture has only prioritized love in arranged marriages. With a significant potential to destabilize the carefully constructed social matrix of the country, there is a need to articulate a postcolonial view of how dating app users are finding love within the socio-cultural constraints in India.Challenging the neoliberal technological system, this thesis will question the impact of digital colonialism that is found in multinational companies to homogenize local cultures to surrender their data to the developed world. Only a few studies have gone beyond the dominant Western 'technology consumption' framework to examine online dating from a postcolonial perspective. The aim of this study is to demonstrate how addressing neoliberalism and postcoloniality as entangled processes offers a powerful lens of insight to examine the implications of these emergent socio-technical phenomena, in ways that attend meaningfully to the values, culture and power relations at play in contemporary India.