Indian Wedding Industry Turns A Major Income Generator

Indian billionaires are creating their own heavens to celebrate marriages – moving from one end of the world to the other end to find their preferred places. Marriages of celebrities have become national affairs, be it of cricketer Virat Kohli or industrialist Mukesh Ambani’s daughter.

- Tushar K. Mahanti

It is a different thing that the extravagant weddings in recent months have tended to also generate a negative reaction. Too golden, too grand, too loud, the grievance goes. How can one spend so much money when there is a serious agrarian distress forcing innumerable farmers to commit suicide? After all, marriage is a solemn affair.

The union of a man and a woman, recognised by society or ceremony is as old as the human civilisation itself and marriage of some kind or other is solemnised in all human societies. But, over time, weddings have taken different forms.

Hindu marriage is said to be derived from laws interpreted in the Dharmashastras or sacred texts, which has its roots in the Vedas, the oldest surviving documents from the Vedic era. Therefore, arranged marriages can be said to have initially risen to prominence in the Indian subcontinent when the historical Vedic religion gradually gave way to classical Hinduism.

With the expanding social reform and female emancipation that accompanied economic and literacy growth after independence, arranged marriages are gradually ceding space to “love marriages”. Common in urban areas and also increasingly occurring in rural parts, parents now arrange for marriage-ready sons and daughters to meet with multiple potential spouses with an accepted right of refusal. These arranged marriages are effectively the result of the desire for wide search for spouses by both the girl's and the boy's family. If the girl and the boy are given the freedom to choose spouses, the marriage ceremony is still largely being arranged and conducted by the families. The festivities and celebrations, which are an essence of the kaleidoscopic Indian culture definitely have a considerable socio-economic impact.

Socio-economic impact