“Richa has beauty, she has smile, she’s tall, slim, trim, educated, from a good family. I can give her, I think, 95 marks out of 100.”

The comments, made by Sima Taparia, the woman dubbed Mumbai’s top matchmaker and the star of the new Netflix reality series Indian Matchmaking, epitomise just why the show has sharply divided opinion in India.

For some, Indian Matchmaking represents an unacceptable normalising of the regressive standards forced on Indian women to in order to be seen as a “suitable” wife, while pushing the unspoken issue of caste under the carpet.

For others, Taparia’s comments are an honest and necessary representation of how arranged marriages really work in India. “Looks-wise, she’s OK, but she’s not photogenic,” says Taparia bluntly of another client. The prospects for women who are dark-skinned, overweight, or under 1.6 metres (5ft 3ins) are presented as bleak, if not a lost cause entirely.

The eight-part series follows Taparia as she attempts to find appropriate matches for clients both in India and across the world in order to set up arranged marriages, often on behalf of their client’s parents. It is a show set in a world of upper-class affluence, where Indian families can afford to hire Taparia’s expensive services and even fly her across the world to find them, or their children, a suitable match.

Arranged marriage remains prevalent in India. As Taparia says in the show, arranged marriage is just described as “marriage” while it is “love marriage” that is spoken of as outside the norm. Newspapers are still full of matrimonial adverts where women are reduced to three-line descriptions of their “fair skinned”, “accomplished” or “modern yet traditional” attributes.

Indian Matchmaking’s uncritical presentation of its clients’ “criteria” – usually fair-skinned women from a “good” family – has come in for particular criticism.

Critics have said the show perpetuates damaging ideas around colourism and caste – the Hindu system of hierarchy, which rigidly designates someone’s class and social status. Dalits, India’s lowest class, still undergo rampant discrimination and abuse in society while the upper Brahmin caste hold much of the power and influence. Cross-caste marriage in India can get you killed.

“Indian Matchmaking is really a cesspool of casteism, colourism, sexism, classism,” wrote one Twitter user.

Writing in the Indian Express, Ishita Sengupta said: “By cherry-picking its clients and assorting stories it wants to tell, by ticking boxes of caste, religion and class as imperative for an arranged alliance, Indian Matchmaking panders to the west gaze with complying obedience.”

Itisha Nagar, an assistant professor at the University of Delhi who recently authored a paper on skin-colour bias in Indian arranged marriages, described Indian Matchmaking as “extremely problematic”.

Having witnessed women around her be reduced to their appearance and humiliated in the exercise of finding a husband in an arranged marriage, Nagar said she found the show “sadly familiar on a personal level”. The repeated emphasis on “light-skin” accurately reflected what she had found in her own research into arranged marriages.

“This show deserves a trigger warning for Indian women: you really need to mentally prepare yourself for the kind of regressiveness you are going to come across, whether that’s horoscope matching, the kind of moral policing that women are shown to go through, and the stigma attached to women who already have children.”

Nagar added: “But the big issue with the show is the way that it presents all of this. When you put all these damaging ideas out there in the format of this show, you have given it a sense of legitimacy. We should be critiquing and interrogating these so-called ‘criteria’, particularly of women, not presenting them as acceptable and normal, and certainly not glorifying these superstitious horoscope practices.”

For Dr Suraj Yengde, Dalit scholar and author, the show was both to be celebrated for exposing the racial and caste profiling that is still so prevalent in Indian arranged marriages but also criticised for its failure to discuss caste, which is largely what underpins the whole system of arranged marriage.

“Arranged marriage is just a caste-maintaining institution and these match-making industries and aunties have a huge role to play in perpetuating these divisions in the name of culture, traditions, institutions etc,” he said.

Though it is never addressed, most of the families featured in Indian Matchmaking appear to be from an upper caste, and their determination to marry into a “good family” was, said Yengde, a thinly-veiled reference to caste.

“It’s good that this show has brought this out into the open, but I think it is a failure not to discuss how arranged marriage in India is all about maintaining caste and the purity of the family bloodline,’’ he said. “It’s definitely divisive though: nobody can watch this show without losing their shit.”