Weddings in India have increasingly become an extravagant spectacle. The big fat Bollywood wedding has redrawn the Indian middle-class aspiration of what a wedding ought to be like. Packed with romance, traditional rituals, modern fantasy, fun-filled songs and dances- all make Indian weddings. Once a marriage match is made, the preparation for the conspicuously consumerist wedding begins.
The idea of an elaborate wedding is seen as a one-time affair and deemed as a rite, larger than life; ergo, an occasion that demands to be celebrated. Under the broader pale of cultural and economic globalisation, the proliferation of the service industry in neo-liberalised capitalism is accompanied by the rise of peculiar consumption patterns, reflecting a world undergoing rapid changes (Miles, Meethan & Anderson, 2002: 1). There is a shift from manufacturing to consumption in the larger economic design. One has to be a capable consumer who could aspire to consume endlessly and work toward it. Contemporary weddings have to be located within these transformations. It is another important site for displaying one’s identity and lifestyle.
There is an array of services that make such weddings possible. Providers range from owners of banquet halls, caterers, stage managers, choreographers, sound and light engineers, dress designers, jewellery designers, Disco Jockey and other performers. A globalised version of the popular cinema industry, television and social media too play an important role in influencing the imagination of weddings. There is, in fact, a new genre of Bollywood style wedding. Elsewhere, Dwyer and Patel (2002) have underlined the growing abundance of cinematic images across the country’s landscape, on posters and hoardings, magazines and television, and the Internet. These cinematic images have become part of consumers’ “habit and speech, dress and manners, background and foreground” (cited in Guha, 2015: 30).
The influence of the popular cinematic imagination in the viewers’ lives in post-independent India is not a new phenomenon. Arguably, cinema has been a guide for ordinary citizens in many ways. The belief of regular folks in the cinematic images was premised on the axiomatic idea, vis-à-vis seeing is believing (Das Gupta, 2008). However, this belief was not in the mode of consumerism. It could be in the mode of a renewed faith in the sacred mythology; or a renewed belief in building a new nation based on equality and social justice.
It is evident that a dynamic relationship between the reel and real, online and offline, is perpetuated and sustained through popular-cultural imaginations.
The big Bollywood wedding – its conspicuous consumption dictated by the need to individuate oneself, to package and present oneself as a globalised Indian who flamboyantly embraces ‘tradition’ as a matter of choice- is symptomatic of a neoliberal subject governed by a regime of consumption was to show that one has ‘arrived’, every event including something as conformist as a wedding, must be presented as uniquely individual (Kapur, 2009: 222).
To this, Bollywood (post liberalised popular Hindi cinema industry) tends to vend new trends, imaginaries, and inspiration to support consumption-driven weddings. With the glamour, celebrity, penetration of mediums and salability of message, such imageries are taken for granted. A speculative estimation can be made by looking at the fact that the replicas of the wedding lehenga (a traditional outfit) adorned by an Indian cinema actor, Anushka Sharma, sold at a price higher by around ten per cent[i]. Replicas of the choker (a tightly fitted necklace) that another Bollywood actress Deepika Padukone wore in her wedding also sold pretty well (ibid). It is thus not far-fetched to arrive at a speculative correlation of the popular-cinematic-glamorous imageries setting a wedding-consumption trend.
While this suggests an interface of reel and real, one shall also note the mediation that enables the blurring of cinematic and social. The so-called real weddings are sufficiently Bollywoodised, with the enactment and invention of rituals mediated by media and advertising (Kapur, 2009:224).
New phrases have acquired currency, with the cinematic depiction and availability of the service industry. For instance, the portrayal of Destination weddings, in films like Student of the Year (Director, Karan Johar, 2012), Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani (The youth is hearty Director, Ayan Mukerji, 2013) and Shaandar (Splendid, Director, Vikas Bahl, 2015) popularised the idea. In addition to this, elaborate haldi and mehendi ceremonies, bachelorette and hen parties have become the new norm in Indian weddings.
Going back to the concepts of liberalisation and globalisation, one can understand the changes witnessed now in contemporary India. Likewise, the landscape of commercial Hindi cinema has also been influenced by these changes. According to Thomas (1995), historically, the moral universe of commercial Indian cinema is a world in which social duties, love of nation, and kinship bonds outweigh individualism and personal desires (cited in Sharpe, 2005: 64). The 1990s family melodrama broke with this convention by giving value to acquiring new wealth and pursuing personal desires (ibid) while maintaining the moral values of ‘Indianness’ simultaneously. The visuals, depiction of new and shiny lifestyles onscreen influence India’s middle class to aspire to be a part of such a lifestyle generated by economic liberalism.
Glossy, high budget films shot in Europe and the United States and influenced by the sleek choreography of commercials are far removed from the feudal village drama of the 1950s and 1960s belonging to the golden age of Indian cinema (Sharpe, 2005: 60). These high budget films often focus on festive occasions, fancy parties, conspicuous weddings, among other things, which paints a dainty picture in the spectators’ minds. To make the reel possible in actual life, the entry of many transnational companies in the goods market led to a real possibility of young men and women entering the corporate sector at salaries that their parents could not dream of (Chaudhuri, 2001:376). Liberalisation has broken down the so-called traditional system of marking identities within the middle class as well. The middle class has expanded, and markings have changed (ibid, 377). The market-driven logic of capitalism endorses the idea of a Global India by the visibility of such classes in popular culture, who can afford to sustain in a global world. The uneven effects of economic liberalisation almost disappear at its front as there is a universalising of class experiences (Sharpe, 2005: 77) portraying the image of a shiny India. The pandemic has raised questions about the ‘shining’ and the possibilities of the ‘big’ wedding. We will have to wait and watch. For the wealthy, possibilities are many. A reference to an earlier piece I wrote may be relevant here.
The impact of the lockdown has dealt a heavy blow on the catering business. Sridhar Natarajan, a caterer, recounts how they have launched a home catering service to stay afloat during the Covid-19 crisis and stay in touch with their customers. The promising wedding photoshoots are also at stake. Family members and friends have now taken up the role of wedding photographers. The same fate also awaits destination weddings, as such weddings will probably be limited to places within the driving distance of the city. Lamenting on the bleakness of the situation, Divya Chadha, founder of a wedding and event planning company, claims how ‘the big fat Indian weddings’ will no longer be ‘big’ and ‘fat’. The only hope of all these service providers lies with the end of this pandemic (Kalita, 2020).
References:
Chaudhuri, M. (2001). Gender and Advertisements: The Rhetoric of Globalization. Women’s Studies International Forum. 24 (s 3-4).373-385.
Das Gupta, C. (2008). Seeing is Believing: Selected Writings on Cinema. New Delhi. Penguin Books.
Dwyer, R & Patel, D. (2002). Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film. Rutgers University Press.
Guha, S. (2015). Bollywood and the Culture Industry: A Critique of How Stereotyping in Bollywood has led to Mass Commercialisation of Key Cultural elements in India. Heritage.
Kalita Moureen. (2020). ‘I do’ or ‘Do I?’: Weddings amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic. Doing Sociology. 22nd July 2020. https://doingsociology.org/2020/07/22/i-do-or-do-i-weddings-amidst-the-covid-19-pandemic-moureen-kalita/, accessed on 21st August 2021.
Kapur, J. (2009). An “Arranged Love” Marriage: India’s Neoliberal Turn and the Bollywood Wedding Culture Industry. Communication, Culture & Critique. 2. 221–233.
Sharpe, J. (2005). Gender, Nation, and Globalization in Monsoon Wedding and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. Meridians. 6.1. 58-81.
Warde, A., Anderson, A.M., & K. Miles, S. (2002). (eds.). Changing Conceptions of Consumption in The Changing Consumer. Routledge.
[i] https://in.fashionnetwork.com/news/Fliptrends-survey-Bollywood-major-fashion-growth-driver-in-2018,1053756.html#.XO52togzbIU, accessed on 27th May, 2019.
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Moureen Kalita is a PhD student in the Centre for the Study of Social Systems (CSSS), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi.