The Big, Fat Indian Wedding: Disparity, Despair and Dignity

By Aanchal Bagaria, MINT 1st Year

Recently, my friend from Italy asked me about an event that was being discussed all over the world — the kind you’ll find difficult to avoid if you are an individual with internet on your phone — the Ambani Wedding. For the unversed, the son of Asia’s richest man is all set to marry his childhood sweetheart, and the implications are manifold. The family owns Reliance Industries, a multinational conglomerate with businesses in several diverse sectors — energy, petrochemicals, natural gas, retail, telecommunications, mass media, entertainment and beauty. The pre-wedding celebrations saw International Pop sensation, Rihanna, perform for the first time in India. Her remuneration was reportedly a whopping 8-9 million USD. Some unimaginative members of the media called it India’s Met Gala, with Ivanka Trump, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and the King and Queen of Bhutan, in attendance, among other business tycoons and celebrities. There were enough diamonds to make it the perfect setting for the next Ocean’s 8 movie. 

It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to claim that the entire Indian movie industry was present at the event, entertaining the crowd at all times. The rest of the country sat wondering what they did wrong in their past lives for their invitations to get lost for the wedding of the century. It has attracted eyeballs from every corner of the world, including BBC News, Time, People’s Magazine and CNN, among others. Where does this obsession with keeping up with the personal lives of the famous and powerful fall under the current larger context of hyper-consumerism? The Ambanis are reported to have spent more than 100 million USD on this affair, which is not even roughly 0.1% of their earnings. This is a concerning figure not only because it highlights the economic disparity between the country’s ultra rich and its poorest, but also because this opulence sets the tone, standards and aspirations within prevalent wedding culture. A pre-wedding like this only raises the question of how far the rich would go to provide a spectacle.

The media coverage has been fascinating — no one seems to bat an eye when it comes to overspending by families such as these. The airport in Jamnagar, the city in Gujarat where all the festivities were being held, was declared an International Airport for the days of and around the event. The reason for this location was because the family had just inaugurated the biggest wildlife preservation project in the country called, Vantara, in the vicinity. Along with this project, they also have several charities in place, but is it still enough to justify such a gala? An article published in the Daily Mail, points out the dubiousness of the location, as this is also the state where one-third of the population or over 31 lakh families are living Below Poverty Line (BPL).

Weddings in India are status symbols, and people generally overlook the dark side of the wedding business. In a country where most struggle to host a “bare minimum” wedding due to financial constraints, on the other side of the spectrum, one can see the indulgence that Asia’s richest family embodies. Is this a reflection of our society? Is this the way I as an Indian, want to “publicize” my country, where women are still treated as a liability, one where forty to fifty per cent of female homicides in India result from dowry (a customary practice where the bride’s family offers gifts in kind or money to the groom’s family, also referred to as ‘bride price’) disputes. According to the National Crime Records Bureau of India — in 2019, the country recorded more than 13,000 complaints over dowries and more than 7,100 dowry deaths.  

It feels unfair to witness an event of this scale when millions of people struggle to access basic healthcare facilities. According to the World Bank’s median poverty line, about 60% of India’s nearly 1.3 billion people live on less than $3.10 a day. In an article published in the Business Insider, Rajni Haldia, a Delhi-based cleaner who earns $25 a month, told BI that she felt “very bad” watching the coverage of the lavish pre-wedding festivities while knowing the extent of poverty in India. “I hope all the rich people who came to India for the wedding are seeing the difference between the rich and poor, and I hope the government can do more to tackle this.” Lower middle class families are trapped in a vicious triangle that consists of viral extravagant weddings, social evils like dowry and the struggle of making it all seem perfect on social media. People resort to marriage loans, sometimes at exorbitant interest rates from money lender, irrespective of whether they can afford it, and even if it means spending their entire lives paying off the debt. The previous generation took marriage loans to affirm their social standing; today, it is often it to maintain social media personas.

There is a need to decode the folly of such weddings and cultivate cultural consciousness, but it is next to impossible when this sort of conspicuous consumption is  advertised as a sign of India’s power and, even, as a flag-bearer of Hindu identity. We can only wait to see how they would top these pre-wedding celebrations with the actual wedding in July — we might see the reunion of the Windsor brothers or the repetition of the 2022 Super Bowl performance. Stay tuned!