The Great Indian Wedding

Welcome to the blog of Knotty Affairs.

If you love marriages, plan to get married, are married or any of your friends or relatives are about to get married, you’ll find lots of useful and interesting information here.

We plan to write and have a conversation about anything that concerns marriage. Why we get married, the ways we get married, the food that we eat at marriages, the clothes we wear, the songs that we sing; the list is endless and so will this blog be.

But for starters, we thought that we should just write a bit about the Great Indian Wedding.

The prefix ‘Great’ might be misinterpreted by a lot of people for weddings filled with pomp and splendour but that’s not the case. The Great Indian Wedding, with or without the frills, is great because of the sentiment attached to it, the promise that it holds not only for the bride and groom but also for the entire Indian family.

It’s a moment when the entire family comes together; long lost cousins, far-flung uncles and aunties, grandpas, grandmas, toddlers, neighbours and the entire community. It’s the true definition of community celebration. And, it’s not limited to a particular faith, caste, creed or community; it stretches across the entire Indian sub-continent, enveloping all the myriad people that form the country.

The sentiment is the same but the forms of celebration, the rituals, the ceremonies, the food, the dresses and the infinite things that go into making the Great Indian Wedding are so varied and full of cultural nuances that an entire lifetime would t be insufficient to witness all of them.

From the vibrant north to the slightly subdued south, Indian Weddings take on a different hue in this enormous country. The Punjabis, people from the state of Punjab, max the music and the display of sentiment is one which you would not see in any part of the world. Unlike the Punjabis, the people from Maharashtra prefer a subdued ceremony but make no mistake about the emotion invested, it is the same.

The south has its own charm. The rituals date back to centuries and are performed exactly the way they were hundreds and hundreds of years ago by their ancestors. Food is prepared by a section of the society whose job is only to cater to preparing and serving food at marriages.

In certain communities who have migrated to bigger cities, a fleet of buses is arranged to transport relatives living hundreds of kilometers away. Elaborate arrangements are made for the lodging and boarding of each of their loved ones.

While it may be a custom in other cultures for the bride and groom to receive gifts from the guests, the traffic flows both ways in the Great Indian Wedding. Members of the family and the extended family are gifted clothes, jewellery and other tokens of love before the marriage.

And, this is just the tip of the iceberg of an institution that runs so deep and across this nation. There is so, so much more to it and in the coming articles, we’ll present you with loads of more information and interesting facts about things that surround the Great Indian Wedding. Do stay tuned and share with us your stories, interesting anecdotes, facts, trivia and most of all, your valuable comments.