by Ira Trivedi
Given the nationwide ostentatious, almost vulgar, spend on weddings there have already been efforts to regulate excess in weddings. Last year Kuruppasserry Varkey Thomas, the Minister of Consumer Affairs, suggested implementing a government cap on the number of wedding guests and the number of dishes that could be served, in response to the government’s concerns.198 To many it seems unethical that in a country where so many people are starving, such opulence should be allowed to go unchecked. There are also concerns about food that is wasted. In Assam, a Guest Control Order allows a maximum of a hundred guests at weddings. In Pakistan, where similar pomp and show is part of weddings, a government order has been passed which allows only two dishes to be served at all weddings. In 2004, the Jammu and Kashmir government passed an order restricting the numbers of people served at marriage receptions to 250 in the case of a vegetarian and 200 for non-vegetarian cuisine.199 Unfortunately, the order was stayed by the High Court as people worried that these restrictions would hinder the growth of the wedding market and that the entire economy might stall as a result.
At a Haagen-Dazs ice-cream counter I encounter a saffron-robed priest carrying a small tattered leather briefcase eating a chocolate fudge bar. I ask him what time the wedding is. He replies with a breezy insouciance that the auspicious time for the wedding as per the birth charts of the to-be-wedded couple passed two hours ago. It doesn’t matter now when the wedding rituals are performed. As rich and lavish as it is inside, just steps away from the entrance, the smell of open sewage pervades the air, along with the toxic fumes of a rotting corpse. There is a mini traffic jam and cars struggle to get out. Someone next to me says, ‘Kutta mar gaya’ (A dog died). Road kill lies in front of us, its skull flattened, further squished and ground by the wheels of a car. A row of luxury cars has been parked in front of the entrance including a Roll Royce, a Bentley and a Jaguar, blocking the way of the other guests. I see my friend Rohit walking fast towards an idling vehicle. I rush towards him, maybe he can give me a lift to my car. But there are people, cars, hounds and horses between us.
Rohit is sweating profusely, it is a hot night, and he is wearing heavy formal clothes. I catch his attention, and wave to him. He looks at me, befuddled by alcohol, sweat and the general confusion, and then comprehension slowly dawns. ‘Hullo dahling. How are you?’ he says. He gets into his car. ‘How are you?’ he asks again. Before I can answer, he quips, ‘Good night, sweety!’ and swiftly drives away.
Firecrackers erupt in the sky at midnight, industrial sized firecrackers that spell out the long names of the bride and groom. After a few minutes all that is left behind is a thick cloud of noxious fumes that obscure the moon and stars. Though the wedding is still going on inside, the venue is now being dismantled by a small army of workers. The façade of the entrance has been decorated entirely with red roses, perhaps a million roses were used tonight. One worker is very carefully hand-picking roses with stalks out of a small mountain of red roses. I strike up a conversation with him. His daughter is getting married tomorrow. Fresh flowers are expensive, especially at this time of the year, and roses in particular are rare commodities. He is collecting the remains of the flowers from this wedding to use at his daughter’s wedding. He tells me that he has been saving for his daughter’s wedding for ten years. As dowry, he has given his prospective son-in-law’s family a two-wheeler, a fridge and a gold chain. His daughter and son-in-law want to go on a honeymoon to Mumbai, and he will be paying for that too. He is worried about the expenses; even after all these years of saving, it is still not enough so he is trying to salvage things from this astronomical waste.
I also see an ambulance on-site, one of the musicians sitting in the square boxes has fallen down and broken a leg. Perhaps this was the man who was being pelted with olives. He tells me that he had been taken to the back and put in a room so that he wouldn’t disrupt the wedding. It is only now that he is being treated. I ask him if I can help him in any way. He just shrugs and says that he is fine. He has only broken one leg and fractured a few ribs, it could have been worse. He doesn’t seem to be angry at his fall or for being locked in a back room for an hour.
I am astonished by the equanimity with which the man seems to be taking his misfortune. We Indians believe in karma but what I’ve seen this evening should be enough to set off a whole series of uprisings. The maid whose own child lies awake at home while she mollycoddles a child dressed like a soufflé, the worker who picks dusty roses off the ground the night before his own daughter’s wedding, the musician who is locked away in a dark room because he fails to entertain at a hedonistic wedding—do they all believe that they deserve the lives that they have, that it is their karma, that maybe their next lives or the one after that will be better if they suffer in silence in this one or are the hosts feeding them something that makes them play along?
It’s ironic that in a country where 836 million people live on 20 per day, there are also those who spend US$11 billion (6, 68,538 crore) on a wedding per year.200 It is rumoured that India’s richest man, London-based billionaire Lakshmi Mittal spent over US$60 million (373 crore) when his daughter tied the knot in 2004. The five-day affair began with an engagement ceremony at the historic Palace of Versailles, followed by a sangeet party at the enchanting Jardin des Tuileries, where guests were entertained with a choreographed enactment of the love story between the bride and the groom, culminating in the wedding ceremony at the seventeenth-century château of Vaux-le-Vicomte. The show-stealer was a Bollywood extravaganza where Bollywood stars performed on stage ending with a surprise appearance by Kylie Minogue.201 This wedding became the aspiration and the inspiration for a host of wealthy wannabes across the country leading to a series of knock-off weddings.
But not everyone can give their progeny a wedding like Lakshmi Mittal, and this drives many parents to make desperate, and sometimes financially detrimental, choices. Companies like GE Money India have introduced an ‘auspicious’ personal loan, exclusively for weddings, making borrowing money easy and quick.202 Pension funds advertise investment schemes around a daughter’s wedding.203 Poor fathers will borrow from local shop owners at 22 per cent interest when banks deny them loans and mothers will sell their jewellery to finance their daughter’s weddings. There are umpteen examples of families that have gone bankrupt after funding their daughter’s lavish wedding and fulfilling ostentatious dowry demands. Yet there are no signs that the madness is going to go away.
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Marriage is undoubtedly the most veritable of Indian institutions, and pomp and show has been the mainstay of Indian weddings. For all Indian families, from the illiterate factory worker to the flamboyant real estate baron, the opulence of the wedding celebration is regarded as being directly proportionate to the financial and social status of the family. In a country with acute differences in lifestyles the one thing that binds the rich and the poor is the attitude towards marriage.
Contrary to what one expects, opulent weddings were not always part of Indian tradition. To see how Indian weddings have evolved and to understand how elaborate weddings have become an inherent part of our culture, I spent a day sifting through the wedding albums of my own family members—sepia-coloured photos of my parents’ wedding thirty-three years ago, as well as fuzzy, black-and-white photos of my shy, nubile grandmother and stoic grandfather who met for the first time on their wedding day. I sat down with my mother and aunts and asked them what their weddings were like, and how they were celebrated. I knew that they grew up in decidedly simpler times but I was struck by the level of transformation between the past and the present, although only about twenty to thirty years had elapsed.
How had the simple, tasteful, meaningful Indian wedding that I studied in my families’ photo albums and heard about from my mother, grandmother and aunts visibly morphed into the bloated, inappropriate, money-guzzling creature that passed for a wedding in these benighted times?
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As I’d already seen with Gopalji at A to Z, the we
dding budget of the girl’s family is the modern-day dowry that controls the possibilities of a girl marrying into a higher-status family. Traditionally, dowry or ‘stridhan’ was linked only to Hindu Brahmin weddings which defined different forms of ownership for women, including the times that women should receive gifts from their families particularly at the time of marriage.204 Stridhan was regarded as a woman’s wealth, a mark of a her social status and her safety net; her only resource when times were bad.
British colonial rule then codified Hindu marriage laws according to Brahminic customs, including dowry.205 Further, in colonial times, because of the way in which the British rearranged property rights and the like, dowry became a means through which women became commodity, and an excuse to harass, abuse, blackmail and even murder women. However, when dowry became a threat to the well-being of women, the Government of India had to enact the Dowry Prohibition Act in 1961. (It was framed so that it had to be proved that dowry was given as an incentive, reason or reward for the marriage, which was almost impossible.) However, although dowry has been abolished by the law, it still prevails and has expanded to include all castes and religions. A 2012 survey by NDTV found that three out of every five Indians would pay dowry. The form of dowry though has changed, and is mainly seen in the form of elaborate weddings.
And dowry deaths continue to take place. Indian government statistics show that husbands and in-laws killed nearly 7,000 women in 2001 over inadequate dowry payments.206 In 2010, 8,391 dowry death cases were reported across India, meaning a bride was burned every ninety minutes, according to statistics recently released by the National Crime Records Bureau.
As I researched further, I discovered that it had not always been that way. Dowry, as we know it today, has meant different things during different times, and it had strong links to British colonial laws. Author Veena Talwar Oldenburg in her book, Dowry Murder: Reinvestigating a Cultural Whodunnit provides a clear explanation. According to Oldenburg, ‘[d]owry has been changing so rapidly since the colonial period that it can be defined neither as the timeless stridhan, or women’s wealth as described in the third-century Dharmashastra, nor as the lethal custom that allegedly provokes the murders of approximately six thousand women annually since 1985’.207
Oldenburg studied interviews conducted by the British in villages in Punjab in 1850 and found that none of them described dowry as gifts demanded by the groom’s family. Instead those interviews describe dowry as a collection of voluntary gifts like clothes, jewellery, household goods and cash bestowed on the bride by the family and friends at the time of the wedding.208 The British established individual property rights in land, in which only men were given the right to own land when previously land was a shared resource which provided sustenance, and in which men and women had equal rights. This radical change in property rights was detrimental to women’s economic freedom. Cash and property began to play an increasing role in the composition of dowries as land became a marketable commodity in the colonial period and monetization became compulsory.209
Essentially, colonialism created only a tiny number of eligible males with proper employment or economic security but rising expectations. Mothers of daughters knew that a good dowry was now the hook to secure ‘the catch’.210
Professor Veena Oldenburg explores other reasons why dowry became so entrenched in the wedding system.
She writes, ‘The British reduction or outright abolition of the customary subsidies given to village heads by Hindu, Mughal, and Sikh rulers for the maintenance of the village chaupal (guest house), oil lamps, the upkeep of shrines and payment to the itinerant musicians made hospitality offered during weddings more costly for individual families. The inflation that accompanied the steady rise in the price of land stood on its head the old question of (movable) dowry for the daughters who married out of their villages as against (immovable) property for the sons who brought brides home. And as time went on, the increased circulation of cash and ever-broadening range of consumer goods, chiefly British imports, generated a clamour for these items to be included in dowries. A pair of shoes for the groom for walking, then a bicycle for greater mobility and now a motorcycle or even a car that costs lakhs of rupees could be on a groom’s family’s wish list.’
She concludes that ‘the radical restructuring of land ownership and revenue collection, the accelerated monetization of the agrarian economy, urban growth, and the emergent middle-class values all worked to transform the dowry system itself.’211
Scholar Rochona Majumdar also traces these attitudes to reforms during the colonial period. The British reigned through two distinct legal codes, one of which was ‘personal law’, a category that differentiated between Hindus and Muslims and supposed that religious textual laws should govern domestic affairs. Marriage fell under ‘personal law’, and marriages became tied to property and inheritance. Majumdar describes reform efforts which aimed to repatriate marriage to the realm of the sacred. This included individual choices to curb the excess of wedding ceremonies, and marriage without dowry.212
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There is a bazaar-like frenzy at Emporio, a luxury shopping mall in New Delhi. Frantic brides-to-be with their eager mothers, trailed by harassed looking fathers and fiancées, are shopping up a storm. It is September, and the winter wedding season is just around the corner. Sparkling Swarovski-embossed trousseaux have to be tailored, gilded gifts have to be purchased, jewellery and gold has to be amassed. At a designer studio, a bride-to-be’s father pays 1.25 crore in cash for the outfits that his daughter has just purchased. One of the glamorous outfits that the bride intends to wear for her engagement is a fuchsia-pink lehenga—heavily embroidered with gold lace and thread with a bikini-shaped navel-baring blouse made of nacreous crystals—which alone costs 15.25 lakh.
The shy, pretty bride-to-be, twirling the heart-shaped pink diamond engagement ring on her finger, speaks to me about her upcoming wedding, ‘My wedding is the most important moment for me and also my family.’ She has taken a full-time sabbatical from work to prepare for her wedding this winter. ‘There is so much to do, I never imagined planning a wedding would be so difficult. I have five wedding planners, and over thirty people working full-time on my wedding. Organizing a wedding is practically like running a company. I have to import flowers and gifts from Thailand, Japan and Holland, I have to export invitations to people all over the world. I have to manage human resources, operations, PR and marketing. It is the best job experience I could have asked for,’ she tells me with a laugh.
‘Wedding retail is one of India’s recession-free businesses,’ says Diivyaa Gurwaara who organizes Bridal Asia, an annual wedding exhibition that brings together fashion and jewellery designers under one roof.213 This bridal show sprawls over 40,000 square feet and has over 100,000 visitors. Bridal Asia is just one of such wedding exhibitions that are typically held at the beginning of the wedding season in cities across the country. Sales from such exhibitions are estimated to be over US$50 million (311 crore).214 With the success of such ventures a street of permanent wedding malls with 400 stores dedicated to weddings has been built at a cost of US$16 million (99 crore) in Gurgaon, a suburb of Delhi.215
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I spot the Designer, one of the leading faces of Indian bridal fashion at an after-party at the finale of Delhi Fashion Week. I have to battle my way through a host of tall, sparsely dressed models giving each other lazy, sleepy smiles as they pull furiously on cigarettes. I finally get to the Designer and manage to tell him about the agenda of my book. We exchange BBM pins and agree to meet at his residence the following morning.
At 1 pm the next day, I enter the Designer’s home, a bright panoply of colour, where I am made to wait for an hour-and-a-half. As per the servant-boy, the Designer has just woken up and has to perform his morning ablutions before he can meet me. I remind myself never to make an appointment with a fashion designer at a fashion show. The Designer finally arrives, dressed in a silk robe. His pallor is suggestive of a hangov
er. He seems dull and spiritless, so different from the man I met yesterday. I wonder if he even remembers me. Three double espressos and a two aloo paranthas later he is finally coherent, and now the conversation flows easily.
The Designer tells me that the wedding market has seen a transformation over the past decade, and today it’s not just the brides who want trousseaux, their mothers and even grandmothers want to be dressed for what is (hopefully) a once in a lifetime event. The Indian buyer has become cosmopolitan and brand conscious and for weddings, branded clothes have become crucial. Every bride today aspires to wear designer lehengas. He waxes eloquent about a wedding lehenga for a ‘very special A-list client’ that he declares will be the most exclusive wedding outfit ever created in the history of contemporary Indian couture. It took the toil of a hundred of his most talented craft persons working over six months to craft it. ‘It is hand embroidered by the finest hands in the trade on a gold, custom-woven fabric, with the finest precious and semi-precious gemstones like onyx from Madagascar, Peruvian opals, fresh water pearls and garnets, along with Swarovski crystals and antique metals.’
While I am speaking with the Designer, a stout, pudgy man with a moustache and thick glasses walks in. He introduces himself as ‘Pagdiwala’. He points to a picture of Amitabh Bachchan and tells me that the day he tied Amitabhji’s turban was the day that he felt God’s blessings. ‘I touched his head, his nose, his eyes. I tied a turban on his head! What more can a man ask for in life!’
He hands me his card in the shape of a small turban and says that he has diversified into a host of other businesses including bangles, horse and buggy, waiter uniforms, and event planning. When he finds out that I am a writer working on a book he tells me enthusiastically that he will plan my book launch. He unleashes a repository of eclectic ideas: the entrance will be a giant book, the tray will be a book, snacks will be little books, and he even offers to tie turbans at the book launch.