Fusion not Confusion
As soon as our daughter, Simran, announced her engagement to John, my husband and I began planning for the wonderful wedding we were going to host for them. In any Indian family, a daughter’s wedding is a big deal, but in our case, it was an even bigger one. Our own wedding(s) had been such a fiasco that we wanted to make sure our daughter did not have to suffer through anything similar to our multi-ceremonial ordeal.
My husband and I got married in 1989 in Delhi. Given that I was from a Punjabi Hindu family and my husband came from a Bihari Muslim family, there was absolutely no middle ground to be found between the two sides.
The result was that to satisfy my parents we had a small Hindu ceremony at a temple and, for his parents’ sake, we went through a Nikah officiated by a Maulana, and then finally to undo the effects of the two religious ceremonies, we had a civil ceremony in a dinky courtroom in Tees Hazari in Old Delhi.
Not a Big Fat Indian Wedding
In the 30+ years of our married life together, this story of how we got married three times has been told repeatedly at our dinner parties. Each time our guests laugh as we narrate how we negotiated the minefield of expectations from each side. Each time, quite predictably, our children roll their eyes, and at the very end, my husband repeats his hackneyed punchline – since he is “legally” allowed to marry four times, he’s still holding on to his trump card of a fourth wife just in case I turned out to be a bad one.
As blended wedding ceremonies go, ours was as chaotic and traumatic.
We decided that our daughter’s wedding would be be the opposite of ours. Simran knew we weren’t going to push for some version of My-Big-Fat-Indian-wedding for her, but we did have a vision of how the ceremony would reflect some of our Indian traditions. Each of us was holding on to preconceived ideas; for instance, I could only visualize her in a red bridal outfit; how else would she be able to carry off all the heavy gold jewelry I’d been collecting for her?
For my husband, the obvious choice for dinner was an Indian caterer; after all, how does one celebrate a wedding without some scrumptious Biryani, spicy Tandoori Chicken, and hot buttered Naan?
Love & Tradition
Yet, early in the process Simran and John vetoed all our ideas. She refused to wear red or pink and instead, chose a white lace bridal gown. John didn’t want to make his side of the family uncomfortable by serving them unfamiliar or overly spicy Indian dishes.
In the end, everything fell into place and the wedding reflected the very best of America – a mishmash of traditions and an overflow of love and goodwill. Judy, a close friend of mine, who happens to be Jewish, held a small Mehendi ceremony at her home the day before. The wedding ceremony and the subsequent reception were held at a friend’s farm in Virginia.
Initially, the bride and the groom exchanged the flower garlands (handmade by us the previous evening) in a Jaimala ceremony. Next, my two best friends from college read out English translations of each of the seven Hindu vows, while Simran and John took their pheras around a firepit. And then, under a small wooden arbor, my beautiful daughter took her wedding vows, in a traditional Christian ceremony officiated by John’s childhood best friend, a chaplain in the U.S. Army.
East Meets West
In the past two decades, as the Indian American community has continued to grow, so has the popularity of blended Indian American weddings. This trend has led to a rapid increase in wedding planning businesses and the Internet has become a great source for ideas on how to plan your wedding.
For instance, Maharani Weddings is a good resource for finding a variety of businesses and vendors. Another popular website, Wedding Sutra, has an entire section devoted to Indian-American ceremonies, with photographs and details of real-life nuptials and how they were organized, including marriages of same-sex couples and destination weddings.
The Blindian Project has proven to be another useful resource for couples where one partner is Indian and the other Black. Their social media accounts often showcase blended wedding ceremonies where elements of both cultures are incorporated and honored.
Blended Weddings Before The Internet
Back in the 1990s, when Rachel, a young Jewish woman, got engaged to Amit, a Bengali Hindu, they did not have the advantage of googling their way to a blended ceremony. Rachel told me that she had planned the wedding “using public libraries and microfiche/microfilm.” It was important to them that their special day reflected both their cultures without being rigidly ritualistic.
So, they planned their day-long wedding, where a Hindu priest presided over a traditional Bengali ceremony in the morning. In the evening, a Rabbi officiated over the Jewish Ashkenazi ceremony.
Rachel made handouts explaining the various elements of the two ceremonies and what each of the steps symbolized; that made it easy for both their families to follow along. For Rachel, the goal was “to use the experience as a way to help the two families learn more about each other, and to look for similarities in each ceremony.”
The response from wedding guests was overwhelmingly positive. Rachel credits the dual ceremonies with creating a bridge of understanding between their two families.
Do What Works for Both of You
The best part of organizing a wedding today is that the couples are not bound by any rules. Each couple gets to choose what works best for them. When Safiya started dating Gary, she told him about the various multi-day Muslim wedding ceremonies she had attended while growing up in Texas. She had grown up in a devoutly Muslim family and her faith was important to her.
Gary’s family from Ohio was what one would characterize as culturally Christian. But the more Gary heard about Safiya’s cousins’ elaborate weddings, he was hooked.
Initially, he went through a small ceremony to convert to Islam. Months later when they got married in 2023, they went all out. With the help of an Indian wedding planner, they organized a weekend of events attended by over 300 guests.
On a Friday in September, they first held a Mehndi-and-Sangeet ceremony at Safiya’s parents’ home. The next day, Gary arrived in his custom-made Achkan and Pugri on a horse, followed by a jubilant baraat of family and friends. Safiya’s mother told me that Gary’s parents, his sister, and his brother-in-law had the best time dancing to Bollywood music outside the main venue.
The traditional wedding ceremony, conducted in Arabic, was followed by a sumptuous Mughlai meal prepared by a Houston-based caterer. The following weekend, being more laid-back, Gary’s parents hosted an informal barbeque at their house in Cleveland to introduce the newlyweds to their extended circle of family and friends.
Adapting to Our Adopted Culture
Blended ceremonies aren’t just being used in weddings of inter-racial or inter-religious couples. In fact, Western customs are being incorporated into otherwise totally traditional Indian weddings. Nowadays, it is more common for some Indian brides to walk down the aisle on their father’s arm, for ceremonies to include bridesmaids and groomsmen, and even involve ring-bearers and flower girls.
Many families are open to mixing traditions from their homeland with the customs of their adopted culture. More often, couples are choosing to blend ceremonies in ways that resonate with them. The intermingling of cultures and traditions makes each wedding ceremony unique, inevitably creating memorable moments for both the couple and their guests.
