The big fat Indian mock shaadi

Illustration/Uday Mohite

The New York Times reported this week on a fascinating trend: South Asian student groups hosting events called Mock Shaadi on university campuses.

A Mock Shaadi has tehengas, ghararas, sherwanis, turbans, gems, biryani, gender-bending songs and dances, without the parents, horoscopes, or marriage rituals. Yaniki, all the partying without the traas.

Mock Shaadis seem to have originated with Pakistani and Bangaladeshi diaspora student groups, and online videos of these go back to 2016, going from dank to snazzy and now attracting students across universities and cultural backgrounds. There are organising committees and contests to choose the bride and groom players.

It's hard to define if this is a way to participate in traditional life (North Indian, upper caste style) or Bollywood pleasures. Perhaps both.

A wedding has always been a movie - patriarchy's set piece, the zenith, not of fairy tale love, but fairy tale family acceptance. No matter what your accomplishments, marriage brings on janam-safal levels of moist-eyed pride. Intimate relationships constantly churn moralities and hierarchies. That is why they are a source of both desire and anxiety, which popular culture simultaneously expresses and manages, as change happens in some spaces, is limited in others.

In 1994, Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, a wedding film with 18 songs that showcased the Hindu joint family, inaugurated a new era for Bollywood, but also for an India entering economic liberalisation. Karan Johar took the filmi Indian wedding global, formatting it into a series of entertaining song and dance set pieces, with a modern-but-traditional family and modern-but-traditional wedding wear, no longer red and gold.

In older Hindi films, weddings were often a cursory montage - mandap flamet o plaintive bidai - leading to the main event: the suhag raat with its flower festooned bed and tumbler of hot milk. A song here allowed audiences to partake of the private intimacies of coupledom - or the private pains of love lost to traditional demands. It funneled a space for personal relationships and their connections or disconnections, in a narrative - and society - where family and social expectations were a dominant factor. Songs featuring rituals were more common in Muslim socials. The globalised Bollywood wedding became about the pleasures of consumption - wedding events and wedding wear. Songs were used to stage an idea of family, in a time where new market economies were changing family and community life. As people migrated for work, families became more nuclear, and traditional wedding songs and rituals were gradually lost, these films provided a kind of cultural replacement, even across the South Asian diaspora; so most weddings now look like Bollywood weddings.

But now, does a mock-shaadi, mock shaadi? Relationships today are undergoing a huge shift. Marriage is becoming decentered, and a little more flexible. Divorce is less stigmatised. Dating, chosen families, queerer loves are more visible. Bollywood, too, is becoming decentered as popular culture is dispersed across platforms and individuals are stars aka influencers. But there is also, a growing emotional disconnectedness, a fear of the mess and vulnerability of intimacies. A mock shaadi mirrors these shifts. It symbolically affirms belonging to ‘the culture' (read cultural elites), while embracing new relationship worlds, without radical political departure from other aspects of identity. Emotionally speaking, it also allows an intriguing, almost sexless role-play of attachment in an era of heightened performativity (not to mention AI), without the risks of actual connection.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com