Author: Jenny B. Davis
Publication: North Shore Magazine
Date: January 2004
URL: http://www.northshoremag.com/cgi-bin/ns-article?articlewhat=articles/01-04-monsoon_wedding.dat
With pounding drums, a painted bride
and a groom that arrives on a white horse, Indian weddings are spectacular
affairs
Not many brides can say their weddings
stopped traffic. But that's exactly what happened to Mita Jain last May
as friends and family followed her fiance down State Street on their way
to the ceremony at the Palmer House Hilton. Of course, it's not every day
that passers-by are treated to a man in a gilded turban riding a decorated
white horse, surrounded by more than a 100 men and women dancing and chanting
while a costumed drummer keeps the beat.
While the spectacle stopped shoppers
along the bustling street - a double- decker tour bus even pulled over
so its riders could take photos - the event was nothing unusual for Jain
and her guests. It was simply a normal wedding procession, Indian style.
"Indian weddings are like non-stop
festivals," says Jain, a lawyer and independent Indian wedding coordinator
in Chicago. "Everything revolves around ceremonies, music, dancing and
food - lots of food."
Typical Hindu nuptials involve a
number of events that can stretch anywhere from a weekend to a whole week.
"It's about colors, music, food and chaos," says Sabrina Hans, who has
been planning Indian weddings in Chicago for 17 years.
Like the festivities depicted in
last year's award-winning film Monsoon Wedding - which introduced Western
audiences to a typical, upper-middle-class Hindu wedding ceremony - the
entire affair is not just a union of two people but of two families and
two ways of life, ancient and modern. Each point along the path holds unique
religious symbolism that stretches back thousands of years.
Jain says she never considered having
a Western ceremony, even though she grew up in the United States. "My parents
made sure we were brought up with a lot of traditions, so it was important
to me to honor them," she says.
Growing up, she always dreamed of
herself in a sari of embroidered red and white silk rather than in a stark
white, Western-style gown. "It was the only way it seemed right," she says.
Ceremonies and Symbolism
Before the first ta-dum can be tapped
on the traditional dhol drums, the bride's family and friends meet for
a mendhi party. Part bridal shower, part primping session, the party's
main event is when a mendhi artist paints intricate patterns on the bride's
hands and feet with henna dye. It is a painstaking process that can take
hours. Done correctly, the designs can last up to two weeks.
Seema Shah, a consultant in Chicago,
had to sit still for three hours while a mendhi artist painted Arabic-style
designs on her hands and feet in preparation for her wedding last year
in Arlington Heights. But it didn't end there; Shah had to take extreme
care not to disturb the drying, cracking henna paste. "The longer you leave
the paste on, the darker your designs will be," she says. "It looks better
when it's darker." The darkness of the henna symbolizes how much a bride
will love her husband.
Mendhi also held another purpose
many years ago: to help break the tension on the wedding night. "In ancient
India, all the marriages would be arranged so, to break the ice, the artist
would hide the groom's initials in the designs," explains Hans. "On the
wedding night, the groom would have an excuse to get close to his bride
- to find his initials on her body."
The Indian tradition of arranged
marriage also dictates the start of the wedding ceremony. It used to be
that the groom and his family would travel by foot and on horseback to
the bride's village to marry and then meet - often in that order. Although
the days of arranged marriages are happily over (replaced in many cases
by a family-influenced "fix-up"), the tradition of the groom's trek, or
barat, continues.
Although the distance is often only
a block or two, the groom will still travel to the wedding site, where
his bride and her family await, on horseback and surrounded by family,
friends, dancers and musicians. The groom, who wears a loose-fitting, Nehru-collared
Sherwani and a turban tied by his eldest uncle, typically shares his saddle
with his youngest male relative as a good luck charm.
Shah couldn't resist sneaking a
peek as her husband and his barat made its way through the parking lot
of the reception hall to the front door. Surrounding him were hundreds
of friends and family members, Western and Indian, whipped into a dancing
frenzy by the pounding beat of the dhol drums. "All of our friends said
they had never seen a barat like it before," she says happily. "You could
just feel the energy."
Once the barat reaches its destination,
the elder men on the groom's side formally greet those of the bride's family.
Then it's time to swing open the doors, strike up the sitars and let the
wedding begin.
The centerpiece of the ceremony
is an enormous wedding canopy with four open entrances called a mandap.
Here the bride, groom and immediate family members gather to partake in
a lengthy series of rituals performed bya Hindu priest. These rituals include
ceremonial objects such as sculptures of Hindu gods, containers of water
for purification, rice to symbolize the sustenance of life and flowers
to represent beauty.
"The priest performs the ceremony
in Sanskrit, but he stops and translates after each section so you can
understand what's happening," says Shah. At Jain's wedding, she provided
her guests with a detailed program so they could follow along and understand
the complex meaning of each ritual.
Jain's favorite of the many rituals
is the mangalfera, which symbolizes the couple's unity in achieving four
basic human goals: Dharma (remaining true to one's beliefs), Artha (providing
for one's family), Kama (to love unconditionally) and Moksha (attaining
enlightenment).
"The bride and groom walk around
the fire four times, once for each of the goals," says Jain. "The first
three times you go around, the groom leads the bride. But the last time
around - the time that symbolizes enlightenment and the path towards eternal
bliss - the bride leads the groom."
The tone of this ritual and others
is definitely reverential, but it's a fleeting feeling, for the sheer size
of these affairs keeps them lively and boisterous. A wedding with only
300 or 400 guests is considered an intimate gathering, and it is not unheard
of to host more than 1,000 people. Because the ceremony can last up to
three hours, guests may come and go as they please.
In fact, the location of Indian
weddings is often dictated by the number of guests. Often the crowd is
too large for temples, so the priests instead come to the ceremony, whether
it be in a house, event hall or hotel.
When a Hindu wedding takes place
at The Fairmont Chicago, catering director Wayne Harth provides a buffet
outside the doors of the event rooms. That way, he says, guests can carry
on their conversations while enjoying appetizers, sweets and a cup of traditional
Indian chai tea, which is brewed with milk and spices such as cinnamon
and cardamom.
Unlike Western weddings, color rules
at Indian affairs - especially red, the color of love. From the flowers
that cover the mandap to the exquisitely embroidered lengha worn by the
bride, red is everywhere, set off by vibrant accents of orange, pink, gold
and green.
Guests, too, usually pull out the
stops when dressing for a wedding. "Dress is very traditional, but very
over-the-top," says Hans. "This is the time when you wear your best, most
elaborate sari and matching jewelry."
When the ceremony is complete, the
bride's family and friends surround her and tearfully bid her goodbye.
This is the time when, traditionally, the bride would leave with the groom
and his family to trek back to his village. Time, however, has modified
this ritual. "My husband and I just got in a car and circled the block,"
Jain says. "Then we went back to the hotel, changed clothes and went to
the reception." But not before the couple drove over a coconut, a symbol
of fertility.
By this point, everyone will have
built up a healthy appetite, and it is time to bring out the food, which
many consider the backbone of any successful wedding. "The food has to
be rich, it has to be good and there has to be a lot of it," says Swetal
Patel, president of Indian Garden restaurants. An empty dish, he says,
is taboo. Most Hindu weddings feature vegetarian entrees such as dumplings
in yogurt sauce, cheese in spinach sauce and black lentils over rice. When
meat is served, chicken tikka masala is a popular dish. There's also plenty
of rice, but never just the plain white variety - Patel adds vegetables
and spices to enhance both flavor and appearance.
For dessert, there is always a sweets
table filled with trays of artfully arranged traditional treats. A must-have
is ladoo, small sweet orange balls made from chickpea flour and topped
with pistachios. (Harth likes to set off the sweets tables at the Fairmont
with an ice sculpture of Ganesh, the elephant- headed Hindu god of good
omens.) Guests can also opt for a slice of frosted white wedding cake,
a nod to Western tradition that many Indian brides are finding increasingly
impossible to resist. (Shah still waxes poetic about her frothy, four-tiered
confection. "It was so Martha Stewart," she gushes.)
Throughout the entire event, there
is plenty of music and always, always dancing. "After an Indian wedding,
everyone should have eaten too much, danced too much and laughed too much,"
says Jain. "There's no better way to celebrate two people starting a new
life together."
