For big-screen spectacles, Hollywood has adaptations of superhero comics, fantasy fiction, folk tales, religious epics, and period tales. Bollywood has the wedding movie.
Consider the most basic promises of the genre, which even the most low-budget wedding-themed movie can easily fulfil: overdressed men and women, colourful sets, a reaffirmation of basic family values, socially sanctioned revelry, and displays of copious amount of food. Even the recently released Shandaar, a misfired send-up of the genre, ensures that there are enough sequined costumes and ceremonies to satisfy matrimonial maniacs.
Shandaar does have one valuable suggestion to shake up the standard mehndi ritual at the Punjabi-style wedding: stage a mock talk show where the prospective bride and groom can reveal how much they know (or don’t know) about each other. Wedding organisers who have run out of ways to please demanding clients must be grateful for the tip.
The modern matrimony movie, from Band Baaja Baraat to Wedding Pulav, is said to be the direct result of the stupendous success of Sooraj Barjatya’s Hum Aapke Hain Koun…! Made by Barjatya’s family banner, Rajshri Films, in 1994, a few years after India rewrote its economic goals and junked its socialist bent for good, Hum Aapke Hain Koun…! has often been described as the world’s longest wedding video. Barjatya retooled Rajshri Films’ rural hit Nadiya Ke Paar from 1982. Starring Sachin and Sadhana Singh as lovers who must bow down before their respective duties to their families, Nadiya Ke Paar also features wedding celebrations, though on a much smaller and more intimate scale.
Nadiya Ke Paar is set in rural Uttar Pradesh, and there are scenes that lovingly recreate local traditions for audiences, such as the one in which the new bride searches for her husband’s ring in a plate containing turmeric paste. Songs mark the wedding celebrations as well as the early joyous post-nuptial period. A pregnancy is announced, followed by a song.
Nadiya Ke Paar’s chaste lovers are almost doomed to sacrifice their mutual adoration until the dues ex machina makes its appearance in the form of a relative who overhears their predicament. In Hum Aapke Hain Koun…!, the role of divine intervener falls on the Pomeranian Tuffy.
The times have changed since the rustic simplicity of the early 1980s. Hum Aapke Hain Koun…! duly reflects as well as shapes the consumerism of the 1990s through its elaborate staging of the wedding that will bring Prem and Nisha in contact with each other. The movie works as an event to be envied as well as imitated – it is spectacle and tutorial. Barjatya made one more movie in the genre, with the self-explanatory title Vivah, and his upcoming Prem Ratan Dhan Payo, said to be a reboot of Raja Aur Runk (1968), might just grab the imagination of wedding organisers and families unaffected by the economic downturn.
Although Hum Aapke Hain Koun…! is held up as the progenitor of the genre, Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding is the better movie. Nair’s most accomplished movie brilliantly weaves together an affectionate celebration of one of the most basic human rites of passage with a realistic critique of the modern Indian family. Set amidst the affluent Delhi set and featuring the stress-laden and divisive run-up to an event that nobody seems to want, Monsoon Wedding also combines spectacle and tutorial. It has the pre-nuptials dance practice, the last-minute glitches and hiccups, the dreadful family secrets that have a way of spilling out at inopportune moments, and the final reaffirmation of family values. The mostly hand-held camerawork by Declan Quinn and convincing performances impart the feeling of watching a beautifully made home video.
Monsoon Wedding’s influence extends all the way to Hollywood. Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, based on a screenplay by Jenny Lumet, pays overt tribute to one of the first Indian movies to explore the pains and pleasures of tying the knot.
