'WED IN INDIA'

Rich locals or foreigners - Delhi wants them tying knot in country

- Debarshi Dasgupta

For their wedding, Mr Anubhav Agarwal and Mrs Snigdha Agarwal wanted a small, intimate affair at an idyllic location. The bride-to-be had also long dreamt of getting married in Turkey, a favourite overseas wedding destination among affluent Indian couples.

"We wanted our special day to be more intimate and only with people close to us," said Mr Agarwal, a steel industry businessman based in Meerut, a city around 80km from Delhi.

In the end, however, the couple, both 29, chose to tie the knot in India, reasoning that the traditional wedding they wanted could not be easily replicated abroad.

"For an Indian wedding, when you want it to be traditional and according to the religion or the traditions that our families follow, we thought it would be best to stay in India," said Mrs Agarwal, a home baker.

They were married in March in Mussoorie, a scenic hill station in the lap of the Himalayas in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand. Some 300 guests attended the two-day nuptials, which fused traditional and contemporary touches, such as a young guitar-wielding devotional singer who performed mantras as the couple wed.

The Agarwals and their guests stayed at a five-star hotel that was reserved entirely for them. No stone was left unturned in decorating venues at the hotel in a riot of colours, with tasteful floral and fabric arrangements outshining nearby hills and even rivalling the beauty of snow-capped mountains in the backdrop.

Indian weddings usually have much more expansive guest lists, with the number of invitees at times even exceeding a thousand. But many young, affluent couples in India are increasingly eschewing this for more personal celebrations, with a relatively trimmed list of attendees at memorable locations in India or elsewhere.

Since 2023, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been urging rich Indian couples like the Agarwals to get married in India instead of having destination weddings overseas.