I have just returned from one of the most beautiful weddings I have ever attended; our family has ever had. There were so many times, as the ceremony urfurled,I found myself thinking this. So as I flew back home I pondered over what was it about it that I found thus.
It was not just the asethetics of it, though that was stunning.
Take a look and you'll get the idea.
It was just that every pre-concieved idea, every bias flew out of the window. I admit willingly that we are not the most inlcusive of commmunities. that we have a hoary reputation, deserved of course, of being quite the oppoiste. Yet , I am increasingly discovering that we are the most adaptable, the most elastic group of people.
My title should have told you that one of the parties invloved was not Indian. Yes, the bride was European. Every Indian reading this post will know exactly how rigid our ritualsitic practises are . So it was no mean feat that the bride's family participated in all the rituals. The mother of the bride did the Palligai, a ritual where nine cereals are soaked in little clay pots. After the wedding ceremony , the spouted seedlings are let free in a pond or lake or any other water body. Both the mother and the sister did the pacchapodi chuttal, a ritual to ward of the evil eye using coloured cooked rice balls.
One of the most emotinal moment was perhaps, at the Kasi Yatrai, where the groom is perusaded by the father of the bride to adandon his ambition of going to Kasi and marry his daughter instead and become a householder. Here , the language and the concept both being obstructions, the father of the son played the role of the bride's father and urged the groom to marry his duaghter. The groom's both grand mothers sang special wedding songs for the oonjal.
There were many such moments incuding the ease and conviction with which the bride said the slokams and the respect with which bride's family performed their part in the ceremony. The bride's parents even did the ritualastic washing of the groom's feet; an act,as another newly married nephew remarked, can be at best described as awkward.
Why even do this? Why even have a Hindu wedding at all is what you are thinking at this point. Because that is what the bride and the groom desired. That is why the two families got together, threw conventions and personal misgivings out the window and gave them a wedding to remember. Here I have to talk about the role of the vaadhiyar, the priest who helped the family find a way around the rules and practices to make this ceremony smooth and seamless. It was one of those moments that left me happy to belong to this community.
I am sure I am not the only one who came back with some wonderful memories of emotional moments, funny scenes and some incidents that gave me goose-pimples.
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