Frames per Second: The Big Bad Bollywood Wedding

Fans obsess over celebrity weddings such as Ranbir-Alia. But the big fat Indian wedding is inalienable from Bollywood

While news and pictures of the Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt wedding occupied the headlines and went viral on social media last week, a unique wedding was held in Kolkata. Fans of the Bollywood couple organized a Bengali-style wedding for the actors, where life-sized dolls of Kapoor and Bhatt were married to each other following traditional rituals. The organizers were the Ballygunge 21 Pally Cultural Club and several entrepreneurs as well as some personalities of the Bengali film industry, reported The Indian Express. Some of the fans also played the parts of Karishma Kapoor and Kareena Kapoor, cousins of Ranbir Kapoor, at the wedding. While it is easy to dismiss such incidents as indulgences of fans, they reveal a few fundamental things about Bollywood and Indian society itself.

Marriages—and weddings—are central to Indian society. Journalist Rukmini S drew upon a wealth of data to show about 93 per cent of Indians got into arranged marriage even in 2018. Another set of data from 2014 showed that 90 per cent of marriages were within the same caste and 95 percent within the same religion. (With 11 states now introducing or planning laws to prevent allegedly forceful conversion—often erroneously referred to as Love Jihad—of grooms and brides, inter-religious marriages are likely to fall even further.) Another survey from 2020 showed that younger people were losing interest in marriage. Nevertheless, weddings continued to be a big industry in India—according to Statista, turnover for wedding tourism in India had gone up from Rs 234 billion in 2017 to Rs 458 billion in 2020.

Of course, anyone who has attended a wedding in recent years or been married—including this columnist—would be aware that Bollywood plays a very important part in the ceremony, be it the music or the fashion or even the rituals. For instance, rituals such as mehendi and sangeet were almost unheard of in Bengali weddings even 10-15 years back, but are now an integral part of many, displaying a Bollywoodization of culture. Discussing the influence of Bollywood on Indian marriages, cultural studies scholar Andrew Howe in his essay “Here Comes the (Bollywood) Bride” writes: “Bridal rituals in Indian society hinge around families coming together and the preservation of cultural and patriarchal norms… Since 2000, cinematic depictions of marital unions have shifted somewhat—despite maintaining some of these patriarchal ideas—towards the ascendency of middle-class values and the negotiation of global Indian identity.”

But why is Bollywood so influential in Indian—and, in fact, South Asian—weddings? To understand this, we must first understand what Bollywood is. Film scholars such as Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Ravu Vasudevan have tried to understand how the Hindi film industry based out of Bombay (Mumbai) became commodified as Bollywood through the 1990s and early 2000s. In his 2003 essay, “The Bollywoodization of Indian Cinema”, Rajadhyaksha argued that cinema had a strong political significance because of its mass cultural influence. Vasudevan, in his essay “The Meanings of Bollywood” (2011) provides a helpful list of films that presented the traditional family identity through a set of ornamentations and performances—Hum Aapke Hain Kaun…! (Sooraj Barjatya 1994), Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (Aditya Chopra 1995), Pardes (Subhash Ghai 1997), Kal Ho Na Ho (Nikhil Advani 2004), and even Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding (2001) and Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice (2004). This was a sort of commodification of Indian culture by an export-oriented film industry. Of course, all these films either revolve around weddings or feature weddings in a significant way.

These films have developed a genre of their own, with weddings becoming ritualistic sites of resolving crises that beset Indian society in the post-Liberalization era. These challenges could be the nuclearization of larger families (Hum Saath Saath Hain, 1999), foreign influences unavoidable in an open market (DDLJ, Pardes), and even death (Kal Ho Na Ho). The family was the safe space in which these anxieties could be addressed. As Vasudevan notes, even the term Bollywood came into circulation only in the late 1990s, after the Mumbai-based film industry was given official recognition as an industry by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in 1998.

Over time, Bollywood and Indian weddings found themselves inalienably intertwined, with frenzied voyeuristic interest in celebrity weddings such as Aishwarya Rai-Abhishek Bachchan (2007), Anushka Sharma-Virat Kohli (2017), Deepika Padukone-Ranveer Singh (2018), and Katrina Kaif-Vicky Kaushal (2021). These weddings themselves have become performances, and Bollywood superstars like Shah Rukh Khan performing in big-budget weddings (Band Baaja Baaraat, 2010, refers to it) have embellished the rituals. As we have already seen, the budgets for weddings and the budgets for films have increased in tandem. This is not a coincidence—both are markers of certain economic and political developments in post-Liberalization India.

Perhaps the one Bollywood product to interrogate how films, weddings, and the economy were inalienably interlinked was the 2019 drama series Made in Heaven. The nine-part series follows New Delhi-based wedding planners Tara (Sobhita Dhulipal) and Karan (Arjun Mathur in an Emmy-nominated role). In each episode, they try to organize a big-budget wedding for New Delhi’s rich and famous—industrialists, former royals, political leaders. Each wedding is, of course, a performance on its own—a display of wealth, tradition, ambition. But they also put the spotlight on the cracks beneath—the persistence of patriarchy, the sharp class differences, and a brutal dog-eat-dog world that is urban India. In this world, the glitz and the glamour that money can buy are perhaps more real than love and companionship.

Uttaran Das Gupta’s novel Ritual was published in 2020. He teaches journalism at O P Jindal Global University in Sonipat, Haryana.