Upping the wedding game

Advertisement

Strap: A slew of celebrity weddings in the last few months are impacting celebrations around you too

Arushi Chaudhary

Indian weddings have always stood out for their larger-than-life festive fervour and opulence. Going above and beyond one’s means to extend hospitality to the guests has been the norm handed down generations, especially in the northern part of the country. Hence, the term ‘big fat Indian wedding’. However, in the recent years, this ‘big fat’ extravaganza has gone pot-bellied, as wedding ceremonies and celebrations continue to grow in their scale and grandeur.

This larger-than-life trend is no longer just restricted to the weddings of celebrities, business tycoons and politicians, what with their fairytale Italian villas, palaces of Rajasthan, and star-studded performances led by the likes of Beyonce. Its ripples can be felt in the cousin’s or friend’s wedding you attend.

Back in 2004, when steel magnate Lakshmi Niwas Mittal held a $60-million wedding for his daughter, Indians gaped in awe. The glitz and glamour of the three-week long fiesta was discussed in living rooms across the country as something other-worldly, unattainable. Today, when Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma or Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone tie the knot in dreamy Italian locales, young couples and their families want to follow suit with destination weddings of their own. When they see Beyonce perform at the Ambani wedding, they expand their already inflated budgets to add that celebrity quotient to their own festivities.

One cannot help but ponder over the role of social media and celebrity influence in adding to the opulence of weddings in India. Dr Henrike Donner, an anthropologist from the University of London, who has studied Indian weddings and marriage systems closely, weighs in, “The weddings of those in power have always been opulent. It is the relationship between aspiring middle classes and those in power, which has changed. While earlier conspicuous consumption was not commonly a marker of middle class identity, it is in an age of consumerism. Given that real incomes have increased and weddings are an occasion to display status, it is only natural that weddings become a matter of status competition. This is a marker of growing middle classes.”

Prashant Dubey, who runs Delhi-based wedding planning firm Elite Weddings India, agrees that celebrity influence play a key role in changing wedding trends in India. “Of course, celebrity weddings are aspirational for a large cross-section of people. The fact that people today have the spending capabilities and there are organised wedding planners who will create that dream wedding from scratch down to the finest detail also play a role in turning these aspirations into reality,” he says.

“One big change that we have seen in the wedding trends is the growing market for destination weddings. If a family intends to spend say Rs 1 crore on a typical mainstream wedding in their city, they don’t mind stretching that budget to Rs 1.5 crore, for a more intimate wedding celebration with about 200 guests instead of 1,000 in Goa, Thailand or Bali,” he adds.

Chandigarh-based Sam, who runs Grand Indian Weddings, a wedding planning company, also echoes a similar line of thought. “The influence of social media and celebrity weddings is immense. Today, young couples specifically ask for varmaalas like Virat-Anushka’s or want the colour theme from Ranveer-Deepika’s wedding replicated. Then there are dedicated platforms and apps you can turn to for inspiration. So the couples and, by extension, their families, have a very clear idea of what they want. And as long as they can have that perfect, dreamy wedding, they don’t hesitate in footing the bill, however astronomical.”

Tina Tharwani, co-founder of Shaadi Squad, the planners behind the high-profile, fairytale-esque Virat-Anushka wedding, agrees with the element of celebrity influence but feels that it has actually helped wean millennials off the fixation with larger-than-life wedding ceremonies. “The Virushka wedding had quite the opposite effect on couples. This is because there were no larger-than-life elements involved. It was a highly intimate affair of around 50 of their closest friends and family only. So while one may deem the wedding lavish owing to the canvas and the couples’ respective profiles, it was pretty much the opposite in reality. In fact, this phenomenon of intimate and close-knit weddings has been catching up among Indian celebrities, thus leading to this trend being set amidst the wedding market in the country,” she says.

“Celebrity weddings are now helping take the fixation onf‘Big Fat Indian Wedding’ away instead, and are influencing couples to make their weddings as personal as they desire. Their idea of the ‘perfect day’ has broadened to quite an extent, and they want the elements to be as detailed and personal as they can get. Moreover, couples now lay more emphasis on the experience of their guests, instead of stressing about the scale of the event. They want their D-Day to denote what they stand for, regardless of what it is expected to be,” Tina adds.

Another stand out feature of the way wedding landscape has changed over the years is that intimate ceremonies such as haldi, mehndi and sangeet, which were once just a family affair, have now turned into full-blown events. Weighing in on the trend, Dr Henrike says, “This expansion is fuelled by the consumer goods and services the wedding industry provides. Clearly, a number of more private lifecycle rituals have become important occasions for public display of wealth and influence and needs to be seen in the context of a wider commercialisation of rituals by those who can afford it.”

Why would even the most progressive, well-educated segments of society feed the monster of conspicuous consumption, even at the cost of long-term financial strain? “Being well-educated does certainly not make those sections progressive. On the contrary, they are driving a ‘retraditionalisation’ of society, which is partly responsible for the extensive and elaborate weddings we see. Not only have rituals earlier associated with only some select communities been adopted as part of what a proper Hindu wedding should be, but a lot of these additions make for a notion of a pan-Indian Hindu wedding, which is heavily commercialised. The costs are relative. A family may overspend, but such occasions may also enhance social status, which, in the long-run, benefit the couple and their family. So weddings are investments in social relations as much as celebrations of the status of the families concerned,” Dr Henrike concludes.