Indian weddings
Christmas Day, 2005
At the fag end of the year, in the winter months starts the Indian wedding season. I for one have been a mute spectator through the last 25 of these seasons. This season a bunch of folks I know have got hitched and moved on. A close cousin of my (one of atleast 50 cousins I know) was one of them. And this ranting is a reflection of what I noticed at her wedding.
First, Telugu wedding ceremonies are atleast 3000 years old. The various rituals and iconography reflect a rich and not so proud agrarian past of ours. The iconography if full of green rice plants, prayers and appeasement to the gods of agriculture and not the least use of enough rice to feed Bangladesh in a famine. Also the clothes the groom wears and other things are very agricultural to say the least. India might not be an agrarian nation any more (one a quarter of the GDP is farm based) but definitely when investment bankers marry software professional, they do it like their forefathers did in the Godavari / Krishna delta atleast 5,000 years ago.
Second, the great south Indian wedding is as much a shown of pomp as the Punju wedding in Delhi is. South Indians are less pompous then the Punjus in the north (although they might be equally rich if not richer than the P folks), but come the wedding season, the peak to mean ratios of pomp and ostentation are the same for both sets of people. You only need to see the finery and the silks on display at the weddings to know what I mean. No wonder thieves target wedding households for a good loot.
Third, the wedding season is also the matchmaking season. All the eligible guys and girls turn out in their finery (and in the north Indian version dance as well) so that the opposite sex (or more likely the parents and the various intermediaries of the opposite sex) notice. The objective is to impress the prospective pater/mater familias (usually it is materfamilias) so that the good looking and highly eligible bachelors / bachelorettes can be snared into matrimony by the next wedding season.
Lastly, in large families a good wedding is the re-union of the family at large. I come from an especially large family. My mother was one amongst 11 and my father one amongst 5. So a count of my cousins reads like the census survey of Andhra Pradesh. The cousins are spread across continents (most in the USA) and don't typically meet. A good wedding is an occasion for all of us to come together meet, take pictures one last time, until atleast the next wedding.
PS: The great convergence of cuisine in India can be best observed in a South Indian wedding. The north Indian options available in a Telugu wedding are indicative of a Punjabi takeover of India or more likely the great convergence of cuisine and culture in India
At the fag end of the year, in the winter months starts the Indian wedding season. I for one have been a mute spectator through the last 25 of these seasons. This season a bunch of folks I know have got hitched and moved on. A close cousin of my (one of atleast 50 cousins I know) was one of them. And this ranting is a reflection of what I noticed at her wedding.
First, Telugu wedding ceremonies are atleast 3000 years old. The various rituals and iconography reflect a rich and not so proud agrarian past of ours. The iconography if full of green rice plants, prayers and appeasement to the gods of agriculture and not the least use of enough rice to feed Bangladesh in a famine. Also the clothes the groom wears and other things are very agricultural to say the least. India might not be an agrarian nation any more (one a quarter of the GDP is farm based) but definitely when investment bankers marry software professional, they do it like their forefathers did in the Godavari / Krishna delta atleast 5,000 years ago.
Second, the great south Indian wedding is as much a shown of pomp as the Punju wedding in Delhi is. South Indians are less pompous then the Punjus in the north (although they might be equally rich if not richer than the P folks), but come the wedding season, the peak to mean ratios of pomp and ostentation are the same for both sets of people. You only need to see the finery and the silks on display at the weddings to know what I mean. No wonder thieves target wedding households for a good loot.
Third, the wedding season is also the matchmaking season. All the eligible guys and girls turn out in their finery (and in the north Indian version dance as well) so that the opposite sex (or more likely the parents and the various intermediaries of the opposite sex) notice. The objective is to impress the prospective pater/mater familias (usually it is materfamilias) so that the good looking and highly eligible bachelors / bachelorettes can be snared into matrimony by the next wedding season.
Lastly, in large families a good wedding is the re-union of the family at large. I come from an especially large family. My mother was one amongst 11 and my father one amongst 5. So a count of my cousins reads like the census survey of Andhra Pradesh. The cousins are spread across continents (most in the USA) and don't typically meet. A good wedding is an occasion for all of us to come together meet, take pictures one last time, until atleast the next wedding.
PS: The great convergence of cuisine in India can be best observed in a South Indian wedding. The north Indian options available in a Telugu wedding are indicative of a Punjabi takeover of India or more likely the great convergence of cuisine and culture in India
posted by Dinkar at 6:52 PM
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