The old fashioned  Indian wedding

I remember the days when wedding season was summer – the hotter the better as every Hindu wanted to get married on that specially auspicious day – Akshay Tritiya or the Eternal Night of Endless Happiness. It is said that anything started on that day was destined to last forever and ever and be successful at that. Hence it was a day chosen specifically to  begin a new venture or a business partnership, weddings included. So the Indian Wedding normally meant a hot day in summer when the mangoes were at their peak and sweat poured down your back in rivulets. 

Typically weddings started in the middle of the morning and got over just when your eyes couldn’t stay open any more. Then after a quick break the party continued into the sultry evening with what was known as the “Reception” where the bridal couple stood on a stage  flanked by beaming parents and waited to shake hands of lines of people who exchanged a gift of cash for a bottle of Coke or a cup of ice cream . At least that was all I remember being served at the weddings I attended as a child, where the highlight of the evening was the ignominy of having the youngest cousin retch violently in one quiet corner, after winning the bet of  guzzling the maximum Cokes and  hurriedly guzzling  gallons of ice creams before it melted down our chins and dripped onto our clothes.

From mangoes to gajjar halwa

Gradually when the joint family started dis-jointing and  people started valuing their holidays more than their families, preferring to take 6 weeks off at an exotic location rather  than mingle with cousins in the family homestead, wedding season shifted to the winter – especially when half the guests/family were Non-Resident and visited their hot and humid motherland while the rest of their  adopted countrymen froze in sub-zero temperatures overseas.  With December then becoming THE MONTH OF WEDDINGS, weddings changed from mangoes and ice cream to gajjar halwa and Bollywood. But with garishness becoming the norm, and Over the Top a changing paradigm,  it has become impossible to find a suitable venue in December. It has become equally impossible to find a wedding co-ordinator, a caterer, a valet service, a dance choreographer, a make up artist, and even  a florist to organise your wedding in December. Moreover by the end of December, the guests themselves are Weddinged Out after having spent the major part of the month in a traffic jam, dressed to the nines to  attend a wedding that got them tired even before they reached the venue, weddings are being shifted to late January – early February

A late Winter wedding or an Early Spring wedding

The advantage of a wedding at this time of the year is that the Northern parts of India which has December temperatures that freeze your brains if they don’t actually kill you, warm up a bit and in the Southern parts, temperatures still have a while to go before they    begin to sizzle. Besides with a gap of about 2-3 weeks, most guests are looking forward to another round of weddings and actually attend them with renewed enthusiasm. 

Funding a Wedding

Apart from the change of seasons, wedding funding too has undergone a sea change. 

Today I attended yet another Gujarati wedding where  the couple had arranged their own match. I digress a bit, but last year while waiting for Anna Shetty to register her marriage at the Municipal Office, I actually saw a young girl answer the question : What kind of marriage as ” Love Marriage” rather than indicate the rites  under which the marriage was solemnised.

It’s strange but the term “love marriage” very rarely promotes love between anyone other than the besotted couple.Both the weddings I had attended recently faced vehement parental opposition . In last week’s wedding  the girl’s side  were against the marriage because even though the boy was acceptable, his parents were not ,while in today’s wedding the boy’s family were just not comfortable welcoming a girl from the chawls into their normal,upper middle class family.

The fall out of  parental opposition is the unilateral funding of the wedding celebration which is traditionally borne by the girl’s family –  expenses which comprise providing transportation and accommodation to the groom’s party, hosting the entire wedding and sometimes even funding the honeymoon! So when the girl’s family went to town last week with their daughter’s wedding it wasn’t surprising especially since they were the richer family and definitely one of Mumbai‘s super rich. But while the parents washed their son-in-law’s feet with milk and honey, tongues in the audience were already wagging whether the boy would hitch his star to his father-in-law’s and become what is derogatorily known as the “house husband” or if the young bride would share kitchen duties with her mother-in-law in their  modest two bedroom home. 

At today’s wedding, the groom’s mother watched the proceedings with admirable stoicism while the bride’s parents went through the function which was funded entirely by the groom’s side!!! 

(It was the groom’s sister who told her mother that as long as the girl was from a lower strata it won’t cause problems as her brother need never visit her parents’ home – the problem she says arises when the girl has to come down from her ivory tower princess-like existence and live with her in-laws in the village!)

With so little love between families why go through the farce of a traditional wedding at all? If you care so little for your parents’ approval, love or blessings why go through the sham of a traditional wedding with one side reluctantly funding it all?