Comment

Once not too long ago the USP about our dear ancient land was the rope trick, the elephant, and occasionally, a maharajah taken out of moth balls and plonked on an elephant, both man and animal on show. These days, it’s the Great Indian Wedding. Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding may have launched a million Indian weddings a few years ago. Droves of firangis and NRIs have flocked here to say ‘I do’. Inspired, perhaps, by the Bollywood-led hullabaloo, Elizabeth Hurley and part-time Bombay boy Arun Nayar just went round some sort of fire in Umaid Bhavan in Jodhpur.

Don’t worry, dear reader, this column is not about the Hurley-Nayar nuptials. It’s about wedding-as-performance. Make that also wedding-as-ramp for all our guys and dolls and their mamas and papas to strut about in their new stuff. Not long ago large numbers assembled round the mandap during traditional Indian weddings, primarily to stand witness to the fact that the couple had actually married. Of course, the ‘guests’ were mandatory at many Indian weddings before marriage certificates and civil weddings came into the picture.

But marriages today take the cake, ejecting suavely the holy out of holy matrimony. The reigning mantra is convenience; we are in the age of the practical. Witness this: recently at a wedding in Hyderabad, the bride’s parents decided that nobody so painstakingly-attired should sit on the ground; aching knees and other sundry joints may have been a consideration. Mini-sofas were squeezed into the mandap, and placed in their midst was a coffee table. On it was a small pot with a little fire burning in it. The couple went round the coffee table for their pheras.

A wedding in a Delhi gurdwara went one better. A half hour into the ceremony (the granthi was reading from the Guru Granth Sahib, and mind you the marriage was far from solemnised) the mother of the bride got up, got into her car and left, saying that she had to “buy some booze” for the evening cocktail reception. Her reasoning, as she informed stunned family members, was that there was no need to worry since the priest had started, the bride and groom were in place and the pheras would happen without a hitch. What was more important was the fact that it would be a disaster if the wrong kind of wine was served that evening.

Perhaps even more brazen was a recent wedding during which the bride’s parents abandoned the fire around which the couple to be wed and the other set of parents sat, listening to the priest conducting the ceremony. They nonchalantly stepped off the exquisitely decorated mandap and mingled with the guests, lingering longer with the VIPs (politicos and corporate honchos) before getting back to the marriage ceremony at the climatic point when the bride and the groom were about to become Mr and Mrs so-and-so. It was a convenient interval during which they paid obeisance to the gods on earth before returning to those above.

Priests are rapidly becoming more practical, too. Many have begun to translate the slokas and their “sermons” into English. In one wedding I just attended there was more English than Sanskrit in the ceremony. Foreigners now swell the wedding guest lists — either friends of the bridal couple, employees of their parents, or intercontinental wedding-hoppers. The big fat Indian wedding is the Next Big Thing in our globalised world.

Weddings are also coming-out occasions, to flaunt the latest, the most expensive and the blindingly bright. The sparkling sari reigns. Embroidered with stones, a few as big as the Ritz, these saris flash louder than the chandeliers. I just wonder how the women thus draped can sit down and not cry ouch. I asked a young woman how these bejewelled saris could be cleaned. She looked at me as if I had come from another planet, before telling me, most condescendingly, that she took her sari off as soon as she got home so that she could wear it once more. What was left unsaid was the fact that this sari would be “retired” — banished to the wardrobe of her ayah. I strongly hope marriages have longer shelf lives.

Email: jain_madhu@hotmail.com