Indian wedding fever.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay

Indian wedding fever.

This picture is too much for me.

Talk about the wedding industrial complex has been all over the place and I like it. But the conversation of race and culture has been left out of the larger discussion. How does capitalism intersect with wedding rituals in cultures other than mainstream white culture? Looking through the wedding section of Nirali has me perplexed (and cracking up) thinking about South Asian weddings in the US and how they typify this notion of the “wedding industrial complex”. I have been to many and at this point I have just stopped going. I am 29 and don’t plan on getting married. In fact I vehemently oppose getting married, and really can’t afford to fly all over the country for a ritual I have deep problems with.

The weddings that I have seen and many of the weddings characterized in Nirali, don’t really seem like weddings that are about love and romance. They seem more like business mergers and marketing ploys. Some weddings even get straight to the point and ask that you don’t bring boxed gifts, just a check. Nothing says love like having all your friends give you a few thousand dollars. And clearly love can only *really* happen if you spend 70K and have 500 of your closest friends present.

Weddings in India are huge as well, but in the US they are huge, elaborate, cheesy and cost a small fortune. It has become the norm in the middle class South Asian community to have a huge wedding and spend a ton of money whether you have it or not. It is a new way to become American in an Indian way. For example, “something old, something new, ” is not a South Asian tradition! That is the placement of US romantic fetish marketing within South Asian chic. Romantic heterosexuality, having money and raising a normal family have become encoded in the “becoming” process for second generation South Asian Indians. And since being American seems to be all about capitalist consumption they may almost succeed, except for that post 9/11 ‘you look like a terrorist snag.’ (Which may be the fear that exaggerates it in the first place, but let me not get ahead of myself.).

It is so lame. Neela at Hyphen delves deeper.

Thoughts?

Posted at 8:25 PM, Jul 17, 2007 in Sexuality | Permalink | View Comments

Comments

Hmmm
I have been attending a lot of weddings in India in the past 1 year, and they seem really expensive as well- its very standard to have a "non-dowry" wedding that costs 20 lakhs, dowry makes the expenses go much higher of course.

What bothers me much more is all the degrading rituals that are a part of the wedding. One of my closest Maharashtrian friends got married, and one of the rituals was that her parents - both mom and dad - had to wash her just-about-to-be-husband's feet. Another Goan(Hindu) wedding had the priest make the to-be-husband deck his bride (my friend) with a lot of jewellery - and the priest kept emphasizing the role of the jewellery as bonds which would maintain her marriage, which should never be taken off (toe rings, mangal-sutra, bangles, etc. etc.) Of course, the whole Punjabi (or is it Hindu) ritual of changing the girl's first as well as last name in the wedding ceremony, and watching your cousin sit with her head bowed, while random family members of her husband, discuss whether she should be called Geeta or Seeta is soo sucky ! And the "keep touching everyone's feet, don't look up, don't smile much, make sure you cry at least once in the wedding" set of instructions given to most North-Indian brides makes me wonder how women put up with it.

Unlike you, I definitely intend to get married some day, and am very very unsure of what kind of wedding will I be able to bear without being fully turned off by the hypocrisy.