Right-Swiping Caste

Dating apps mirror real life where the caste of a person becomes a deciding factor in finding the right match

- Abhik Bhattacharya

SALONI*, who is in her mid-20s, could never imagine that the shadow of her caste identity would follow her in the world of dating apps until she started dating a ‘Tam-Bram’ (a short form for Tamil Brahmin) boy whom she ‘right-swiped’ seeing his ‘woke’ bio.

“In the bio, the guy wrote everything ‘progressive’—that he does not believe in caste, he is an atheist, politically moderate, and so on,” says Saloni. But gradually, as she started dating him, she saw different shades of him. “I belong to the OBC community. Whenever he got angry, he used casteist slurs to humiliate me,” she adds.

They continued dating for almost a year, and by the time the façade of his ‘wokeness’ vanished, Saloni managed to get rid of him. While the caste discrimination that she faced on the dating app OKCupid is quite prevalent and mirrors the everyday reality of society, what is confounding is that most of the apps promise a caste/class-less experience.

Most of these apps, including the recent favorite Hinge, leave the inclusion of surnames in the profile entirely to users. The help centre of Hinge notes: “If you create an account with Facebook, your last name will be added to your profile but it will only be visible when you match with someone, not when someone views your profile in Discover.”

While such efforts—of not letting caste take over one’s choice of ‘right-swiping’—are considered a step in the right direction, users feel that those who prioritise caste identity have ways to figure it out.