Last week, I caught up with the rest of India and pressed play on Indian Matchmaking, Netflix’s viral show on arranged marriages. The show follows Sima Taparia, “Mumbai’s top matchmaker”, as she sets up lonely hearts living in India and the US.

A few minutes into the first episode, Ms Taparia reveals the high stakes of marriage for the richest families in the world’s second-most populous country. “The two families have their reputation and many millions of dollars at stake,” she says in a matter-of-fact tone, before spelling out the criteria for successful union to viewers: “In India you have to see the caste, you have to see the height, you have to see the age . . . then I match”.

Caste was not mentioned first by accident. The show kicked off a debate on the fundamental role of caste in modern India that dominated my Twitter feed and WhatsApp messages. On the surface, Indian Matchmaking seems like pure escapism, with some of its privileged protagonists dripping in diamonds as they attempt to marry happily while simultaneously pleasing ambitious parents. But the advice proffered by Ms Taparia, a husky-voiced, pragmatic sage with countless matches under her belt, on what constitutes a good fit, cuts through the froth. Ultimately the show is a reflection of an uncomfortable reality in India today.

Caste is a complicated concept described in the Encyclopedia Britannica as a form of hierarchical social order practised by Hindus in south Asia that is “upheld by a complex cultural ideology”. At the top sit the Brahmins, traditionally priests and intellectuals, and at the bottom the Dalits, formerly called “untouchables” who performed “polluting” work such as slaughtering animals and cleaning waste.

Although caste discrimination has been outlawed in India, just 5 per cent of Indian marriages are inter-caste, reported the India Human Development Survey in 2014, while 20 per cent of urban households said they still practised “untouchability”.

The matchmaking show, released during the Black Lives Matter movement, and after Unilever announced it was rebranding its Fair & Lovely skin lightening cream in India, was predictably polarising.

Sumeet Samos, a 27-year-old rapper who identifies as a Christian Dalit, described the controversy as “performative wokeness”. When Mr Samos goes home to his village in the state of Orissa, he still has to eat, drink and sleep in spaces segregated from upper castes. He says the divisions may not be as obvious on the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus in New Delhi where he studied, but they are just as pernicious. “I’ve stayed in Delhi for eight years and met hundreds of upper caste friends, I have never been to any of their family houses,” says Mr Samos, “when university life is over, they go back to their life, I come back to my life”.

Caste is the great contradiction of India’s proud democracy, the largest in the world. Dalits make up 16 per cent of the population — more than 200m people — but social progress has been limited. Caste still pervades professional life. In response to a boardroom stand-off, the former chief executive of the IT outsourcer Infosys, Vishal Sikka, referred to his own caste in a warning: “I am a Kshatriya warrior, I am here to stay and fight.”

The system has been continued by Indians working overseas, says Hari Bapuji, management professor at the University of Melbourne who researches economic inequality and caste in the corporate world. “It affects life in every way, from what people eat to who they hang out with to what jobs they can get,” he says. “If you look at all the upper management positions, particularly board positions and CEOs, most of them come from the Brahmin caste and Vaishya caste, who conducted business.”

Since its release less than two weeks ago, Indian Matchmaking has been in the top 10 Netflix India charts, often hitting the number one spot. By the end of the first series, though, none of its protagonists are married. 

To Ms Taparia, that outcome has nothing to do with her criteria. Rather, it is a matter of destiny. “My efforts are meaningless if stars aren’t aligned,” she says. Maybe that view is what makes the show so difficult to watch: it makes no apologies for the way things are.

stephanie.findlay@ft.com