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| Bride Devleena with husband Joshua and her American relatives |
London, Oct. 24: Devleena, a pretty Bengali girl, got married in Dwarka on the outskirts of Delhi a few days ago in a traditional Hindu wedding with all the usual trimmings.
She and her husband were smeared with turmeric paste, the bridegroom’s family members were given plenty of gifts, and then at the ceremony itself, the bride was lifted on a wooden seat and taken seven times round the groom before the priest, one Mahacharya Dr Muktipada Charavorty, married the couple according to Sanskrit rituals at the auspicious hour before a holy fire.
The bridegroom looked tall, fair, in fact very fair, and handsome in his silk finery, as did his three sisters in their gorgeous wedding saris. The bridegroom’s parents beamed happily.
Perhaps the only departure from the norm was that the bridegroom, Joshua, had come from Boston; his sisters, Mara, Elena and Ariel, from Maine and other cities in America; and his parents, Webster and Marilyn, from the vast and dusty plains of South Dakota.
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| Relatives show off their mehndi |
After trips to the Taj Mahal and Jaipur, the Americans returned home after their first encounter with India, while Josh and Devleena headed for Florence before they go back to Boston where they live.
Webster telephoned his Indian hosts to express his thanks for all that had happened on the journey from Dakota to Dwarka and back again: “We have had a wonderful time in India.”
Shantanu, the bride’s father, remarked: “We accepted globalisation with grace and dignity.”
Webster told The Telegraph that since he had never been to India before, he decided to go to his local video store and buy the movie that tells foreigners all they need to know about Indian marriage ceremonies.
“We all watched Monsoon Wedding,” revealed Webster.
It would be pointless protesting that Mira Nair’s movie, however entertaining, is more about a dysfunctional Punjabi family and offers little insight into a Hindu wedding, and specifically a Bengali wedding.
With 25 million-30 million Indians scattered around the globe — 1.5 million in the UK and 2 million in the US for a start — what the ministry of tourism in Delhi is promoting as “wedding tourism” is now very much part of the government’s overall strategy to attract more overseas visitors to India.
These weddings fall into three categories: the first is where both the bride and groom are of Indian origin but wish to have the ceremony in India for sentimental, family and business reasons.
The New York hotelier Sant Singh Chatwal organised a week-long extravaganza in 2006, starting in Mumbai, taking in Udaipur and ending in Delhi, for his son, Vikram. There were hundreds of guests from the US, among them Bill Clinton.
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| The priest tells Joshua he is now married to Devleena for “seven lifetimes” |
The second category is where either the bride or groom is of Indian origin but the couple are accompanied back to India by the foreign partner’s relatives and friends. Jhumpa Lahiri’s in Calcutta in 2001 was such an affair.
The third category — and one that the government of India is promoting most energetically — is where neither the bride nor groom is Indian but both are attracted by the idea of being nourished by the spiritual experience of a Hindu wedding in India.
Today, the British media has accorded generous coverage to the wedding of the UK TV presenter Russell Brand to the singer Katy Perry near Ranthambhore. Elizabeth Hurley’s wedding was even more of a celebrity affair in Jodhpur in 2007 though in her case she married an Indian — Arun Nayar. She sold the pictures to Hello! for over £1 million.
Brand’s example will give a further boost to wedding tourism. It has become a flourishing business that has encouraged a number of Indian travel companies to enter the market.
Typically, one such agency in Delhi offers “a fine range of Special Wedding Tour Packages keeping in mind the rising reputation of Wedding Tourism in India. Avail of the one that caters to your liking and fondness and fulfil your long-cherished dream of a fanta-fabulous wedding in India”.
As joint secretary in the ministry of tourism, Leena Nandan has helped develop wedding tourism. “We feel there is a huge awareness now about weddings which are like a microcosm of Indian life,” she said.
“You capture the entire drama of Indian life, the colour, the music and the emotion built around the Indian family. We are trying to come up with such creatives and such advertising which can really reflect India as a marriage tourism destination.”
She told The Telegraph: “There is now a new dimension to it. We are not talking only of Indians getting married. We have found that people from New Zealand have come here just to get married because they have read so much about Indian weddings that they wanted to get a feel of it right from the involvement of friends and family members to the rituals and what they mean, what is the philosophy behind an Indian marriage and how the Indian marriage has so much life to it, so much of vibrancy in it.”