“Are you following the big fat Indian wedding?” Said a journalist friend from London.
“Trying not to,” I said rolling my eyes.
But in India it was hard to escape the wedding of Anant Ambani, the youngest son of India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani and Radhika Merchant.
To escape the social media barrage, I fled to my hair salon. And the TV was on with live reporting from the red carpet at the wedding. There wasn’t anybody on the red carpet yet but the reporter, unfazed, was reporting as if it was breaking news.
TV CLIP
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata
The big fat Indian wedding has become quite a cliche now. But this upended the cliche. It was not just the wedding. It’s been a 5 month wedding tour. There had been a pre wedding bash where Rihanna had sung, a Meidterranean cruise for 1200 of their closest friends, Justin Bieber had performed in the lead-up. Almost every Indian film star was there jostling with each other in the crowd, singing and dancing like extras in a Bollywood film.
DANCING
At one time Indians looked to places like Buckingham Palace to see fairy tale weddings. Professor of English and royal watcher Niladri Chatterjee remembers the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana.
NC1: I remember watching the wedding on on our black and white television. And then I thought, who are these people?
Then he came across pictures in Time Magazine
NC2: pages and pages and pages of colour photographs of of the royal wedding. And I thought, this looks very attractive. This is this is very like fairy tale.
Now a Guardian headline for the Ambani wedding read Ambani wedding: After months of celebrations, the Windsors of India finally set to marry.
But with a price tag estimated at 600 million dollars, that’s not a wedding the Windsors can probably afford anymore. And that’s still only 0.5% of the Ambani fortune according to Guardian.
Some have read this wedding as a symbol of India’s growing confidence in itself. While Indian industrialists once showed off their bling at foreign locations at destination weddings, the Ambanis brought the world to India.
Bill Gates. Mark Zuckerberg. Tony Blair. Boris Johnson. John Cena. And of course the sisters Kardashian.
Kim Kardashian as she sashayed in in a red gown and green Lorraine Schwartz emeralds. Content creator Julia Chafe of Jewels with Jules asked her about her jewellery
KK1:The hand piece, the head piece. Its all about emeralds at an Indian wedding.
But it still couldn’t compete with the jewellery worn by the groom’s sister-in-law Shloka says Jewels with Jules.
JJ1: Nothing says violently iconic as almost 350 carats of diamonds on your necklace alone. Shloka’s jewellery weighs almost 450 carats.
Just the earring weighed as much as a brick according to Jules.
The previous most expensive wedding in India had also been the Ambanis. For Anna’s sister in 2018 at 100 million dollars. This broke that record.
More than anything else it showed that Indians are not afraid to flaunt their wealth, something that had been frowned upon for decades thanks to the influence of figures like Gandhi. When the first Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter Indira got married, she wore a simple pale pink cotton sari that her father had spun in prison while he had been jailed by the British.
India has come a long way from that. Last week it was impossible to turn on social media without being blinded by the bling from whats become the biggest fattest Indian wedding ever. But with both bling and traditional rituals.
PRAYERS
And it’s been greeted with gaping jaws and gushing press coverage but also eye rolls and pointed criticism.
Swati Narayan, author of the book Unequal says this wedding and the pre-weddings can come across as almost obscene especially in a country like India.
SN1: These pre weddings, um, to the sort of aspect where we're having 74% of Indians cannot afford a healthy meal, uh, a nutritious diet on a thali. And we are having this obscene inequality of wealth.
She says it only underscores the immense wealth gap.
SN2: We are right now in a billionaire Raj in India, which is a recent research study that shows that the inequality in India is the worst that it's been since the days of the British Raj. And so the growth that we see in India is coming from the top and remains concentrated in the top, and the entire bottom half of India's population has to survive on 6% of the country's wealth.
So if they can’t have bread, let them have instagram reels?
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW