by Prakhar Patidar
It is the monsoon’s tail end. This year, I was introduced to the infamous Mumbai version of it. And the perennial visibility of the opulent Ambani wedding left me fatigued. More than that, it left me yearning to go back to what weddings have meant to most of us, those outside the ivory towers. I wish more thought went into the idea this piece germinated from.
Suddenly, when I was made an unwilling party to the Anant-Radhika Ambani Wedding, everyone had an opinion about it, I realized I hadn’t really thought much about weddings—not even the more definable specifics of the event, let alone the abstractions of marriage. I’ll be honest, I was amused by how this contemplation had missed the radar all through my girlhood. After all, doesn't the instruction manual dictate: “She is just a girl and must have already had some conceptualization of the wedding day even before she hit puberty”?
Even through the formative years of transitioning into what looks like a welcomed but dreaded womanhood, the thought never really took hold. Sure, I had dreamt about what a marriage with a certain somebody would be like. I even lost sleep over whether "there could be one without him." Haven’t we all been lovestruck at some point and imagined scenes from a happy future?
Someone to have long conversations with about your very many plants or your fears that knowing the world for what it is, is to slowly descent into madness. A fairy-light lit verandah (or a balcony, if your city doesn’t have that kind of space) to sit in when it drizzles, or to slow dance on when it's too cold. To cook and clean together, throw games nights and have friends over, go grocery shopping together, or Blinkit-ing surprise snacks, Hitt-ing the kitchen if cockroaches find a way in and eating out for a week straight. If identities need changing, it has to be with two fake passports or nothing; maybe even overthrow the government if the moment calls for it—and all that romantic jazz.
The D-day though, I have not given it much thought. The specifics I have begun considering – a court marriage and an intimate wedding party perhaps. What it’d feel like, I wasn’t yet ready to consider, it sounds like an awfully chaotic day and an even more complex feeling. But I was forced to, all thanks to the Ambani wedding.
And now, I think I know what it means to me, thanks to Mira Nair's intimate portrayal of this rite of passage in her 2001 film Monsoon Wedding. In a conversation with Naseeruddin Shah, Nair describes the making of the film as: ‘Idea is how to make something out of nothing, how to make something cheaply, inexpensively but inventively, with a great bunch of actors and non-actors, to try and have a reality check on what it really is to have a wedding.’
Nair’s world, true to my favourite recipe of good cinema, is a mix of reality, nostalgia and fantasy. Each strand draws from her experience, identity and undeniable talent that marks her early work. Monsoon Wedding is a culmination of the realist orientalism seen in So Far From India [1983], India Cabaret [1985], and Salaam Bombay [1988], her confused self-divided between her heartland and the dreamland evident in Mississippi Masala [1991], The Perez Family [1995] and the misfire Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love [1996], and her story-teller self-desirous of happy-endings.
Aditi Verma [Vasundhara Das] is to marry the Indian American Hemant Rai (Parvin Dabbas). An elephant stands right in the middle of this arranged set-up. Lalit Verma, the best of all the screen fathers played by Naseeruddin Shah (he was the only redeeming part of Shakun Batra’s 2022 disappointment Gehraiyaan), is the patriarch responsible for making it all happen. He runs around the house ensuring the tent is set up, flowers are fresh, and all is set, paying for it with cash and worries ‘exactly and approximately’. Pimmi Verma [Lillette Dubey], the mother, gets anxious and smokes it up as her daughter inches closer to becoming a bride. Imagine the bunch that’d gather at a quintessential Indian wedding – an unabashedly outspoken aunt [Kamini Khanna], a life-of-the-party uncle [Kulbhushan Kharbanda], an older cousin reduced to her unmarried status [Shefali Shah], a tween still unaware that your body, preferences and performance must align with the gender norms, alternatively, a tween happy following his heart [Ishaan Nair], a distant relative’s flirtatious son [Randeep Hooda], a cousin venturing into young love [Neha Dubey], a dreamy-eyed house-help [Tillotama Shome], a street-smart wedding planner [Vijay Raaz], that one creepy uncle [Rajat Kapoor], his wife who turns a blind eye to his perversity – you know it, this is a version of all our families ‘exactly and approximately’. This phrase, uttered by a show-stealing Vijay Raaz’s PK Dubey, the wedding planner as he tells Lalit the cost of putting a waterproof tent is ‘2 lacs “exactly and approximately”’ describes best what this film manages to capture – the exact bittersweetness of a family wedding, and the approximate subjectivity of that experience.
In doing so, the film feels particularly intimate. In a rather poignant scene, as the parents look over their sleeping daughter, they exhale how fast the time has gone by. In another, the house-help, when secretly trying on the bride’s jewellery, looks longingly at her reflection while her lover gazes at her through the window. In another, the casually ostracized unmarried cousin Ria’s body stiffens when her abuser’s eyes fall on her. In my favourite scene, when the abuser is named, a disabling helplessness takes over because such things are only hushed away. Watching Monsoon Wedding is to peer into familiarity – both comforting and discomforting.
Nothing rattles a home like a wedding. This chaos has no time to mull over an unwanted touch, a lingering gaze or an uninvited advance. The respectability of the family allows no room either. When that creepy uncle’s hand slides to your lower back as you bow down to touch his feet or the cousin’s friend pinches your waist, is there even space to react when everyone is watching? There are weddings that I remember for the food, for the excitement of staying up the night for pheras, for realising at a cousin’s bidai that this event is about a woman uprooting her life as she knows it to start anew and yet not being able to look away from the heartbreaking beauty of it. And then there are weddings I can’t forget because of that look, that advancement and that touch. I am sure most women can’t. When Riya calls her abuser out, it is a scene from an imagined past we mull over when the wedding’s over, when it’s quiet and there’s nothing left to do but think about what happened. When her father figure, Lalit, chooses to stand with her, you’re already teary-eyed.
Declan Quinn’s hand-held camera brings out the vulnerable, volatile energy of a wedding but it also turns to exoticized shots of Delhi streets for fillers. A quintessentially diasporic sounding alaap over classical instruments with a western twang composed by Mychael Danna plays in the background. Performances are to look out for with an ensemble cast basking in each other's light.
This also exemplifies how dearly collaborative cinema needs to be to create the magic that draws us to it. There is an enchanting energy generated only when all elements of what makes a film fall into place like a neat little puzzle. Monsoon Wedding is nearly constantly charged with it barring a few misses such as the exoticism the film can’t help but escape and the fluff it transcends into despite having had such a real grip over its world. In another interview, Nair says about cinema, ‘In its cutting…in its dialectic juxtaposition of this with that, you can create an energy that is a third thing’. This film reminded me that this third thing is why cinema feels so intimate, why reflections happen, and one Miss I-never-thought-about-my-wedding-day has spent the month contemplating the very day and all that comes with it.
About the Writer:
Prakhar Patidar is an independent cinema and culture researcher, exploring the dynamic intersection of academia and practice. Recipient of the Rama Mehta Writing Grant 2022, a Jio MAMI Young Critics Lab 2023 fellowship, and an ARCUREA 2024 fellowship, her recent engagements include an IFA-funded project on WCC, programming for ALT EFF 2024, collaborating on documentary projects with Fazeli Films, and contributing to Cut, and Print!