It’s connubial bliss for a 21st-century India, where, by some estimates, 90 percent of marriages still classify as “arranged”—in other words, established on factors other than mutual love and attraction between the bride and groom. What those factors are, exactly, has changed as the country has, but the crux of the matter remains constant: if you’re an Indian woman, it’s statistically likely that your parents will choose the man with whom you spend the rest of your life.

More than 22 million Indians—around one of every eight who use the Internet—use the country’s matrimonial sites, according to a recent review of India’s Internet Economy Watch Report. In June, the Delhi-based Economic Times valued the online matrimony market at around 5.1 billion Indian rupees (roughly $81 million)with an annual growth rate of 30 percent: a rose in the snowdrift of the Indian economy, whose recent erratic nature has shaken everything from exchange rates to onion prices.

For those in the West, it probably isn’t particularly surprising that Internet matrimony is one of India’s most lucrative and omnipresent online industries. A few years back, a media psychologist named Srividya Ramasubramanian examined 24 American and British films about India for the prevalence and portrayal of certain tropes and saw little more than a country “consistently portrayed as backward, uncivilized, savage, and traditional.” The Western notion of “Indian-ness,” Ramasubramanian writes, is predicated upon a sense of Occidental superiority, complicit with a sort of “cultural imperialism… by establishing Indian peoples as inferior and incompetent who need to be civilized.”

Ramasubramanian’s study qualitatively confirms that the India offered to us in the West is an India of “inept subordinates” who deserve either our scorn or sympathy. It is a caricature consisting of the most cartoonish and visceral stereotypes—child marriage, bride burning, snake charmers, etc.—that reinforces the idea of the country as a pitiably primitive slum, especially when it comes to Indian women.

The movie Slumdog Millionaire presents female love interest Latika’s sexual slavery as an inevitability of her birthright as an orphan. Bend It Like Beckham finds its central conflict in the struggle between Jess, our 18-year-old British-Indian protagonist, and her traditional Sikh parents’ ideas of womanhood and marriage.

“It’s just culture,” says Jess, who the movie leaves us to assume has never been to India. She later concludes that the only way to deal with Just Culture is to get farther from it, heading, naturally, to America.

I made my Shaadi.com profile as an American in New Delhi, where I have been since June, who has watched from both places as this caricature of a backwards, misogynistic India evolved over the last year from comedy fodder to a target of international criticism. This happened after one night last December, when five men drank whiskey in south Delhi and boarded a local bus, where, joined by the driver, they used iron rods to sexually penetrate and fatally maim a 23-year-old physiotherapy student heading back from a movie with her boyfriend.