Kavita Ramdya & The Romantic Call of Bollywood

If you’ve been reading Beatrice for a while, you know I’ve collaborated with the Asian American Writers Workshop to put together some fun events in the past—I’m not actually involved with their speed-dating workshop coming up this Saturday night, but it sounds like it could be fun for the romantically unattached, and it’s especially encouraging to see that they’re covering all the major orientations. When I first heard about the event, I got curious about Bollywood Weddings: Dating, Engagement, and Marriage in Hindu America, so I asked Kavita Ramdya to talk a bit about what inspired her to pursue this subject and interview a bunch of people about their weddings. (She also shares her own backstory on her website.) The event is already sold out—which is very good news for the AAWW’s fundraising efforts—but I think you’ll find Ramdya’s field of study quite interesting in its own right…

Bollywood Weddings is ultimately a compilation of real-life stories describing how people fall in love, what they look for in a potential partner and how popular culture, in this case Bollywood films, influences their conceptions of love, romance and marriage. Ironically, Bollywood never entered my mind in the four months of library research, reading and prep work I did before interviewing approximately twenty married couples. The original dichotomy I was working with was America’s modern, love marriage versus India’s traditional arranged marriage. However, while conducting my interviews and attending twenty weddings, Bollywood kept popping up as a recurring theme. The second-generation Indian-American women I met couldn’t relate to the fitted, strapless white wedding dresses worn by models in mainstream wedding magazines since white is traditionally considered the color of mourning in Hindu culture and displaying one’s sensuality is frowned upon in Indian families. However, these same men and women I interviewed couldn’t relate to the way their parents married: none of the couples I met had arranged marriages. Instead, many of them had “arranged meetings” where they were introduced to prospective marriage candidates who were ethnically, religiously and regionally compatible, people they were then “allowed” to date and with whom they could fall in love and marry.

In interviewing married couples, I was surprised, needless to say, by learning how significant a role the Bollywood film industry is in young Hindus’ conceptions of India, love, romance and weddings. Just as Hollywood movies may influence bridal trends for American Christian and Jewish brides, Bollywood movies serve as a source for wedding planning and learning about Hinduism, information Indian-American Hindus seek at such a significant rite-of-passage. Although the young men and women I interviewed were professionals (doctors, engineers, or finance professionals), well educated at the best universities and lead cosmopolitan lives in fast-paced New York, they seek religiously “accurate” information about Hindu wedding customs. Bollywood cinema emerged as the answer to their desire for information.

I loved writing a book full of anecdotes about love and marriage culled from my interviews. Many of them desired to stage a wedding as colourful and exotic as the one which concludes director Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, a film that has become the measuring stick for Western audiences in measuring the authenticity of an Indian wedding. In one hilarious interview, a Hindu bride explained that it wasn’t until after her wedding that she Googled a poem read during the ceremony and realized that it was of Native American origin rather than from the subcontinent. Another bride dramatically shook her head in sorrow when she recounted how upset she was when the Hindu priest asked her and her future husband to fish their wedding bands from a bowl of water. The guests’ laughter distressed the bride; she was concerned that the sanctity of her otherwise religious wedding was jeopardized.

While Indian-American Hindus are concerned about staging an authentic and accurate Hindu wedding ritual, the aesthetic influences of Bollywood cinema are unmistakable: from decorating the mandap to choosing bridal clothes, organizing the reception to posing for the wedding photographer, Bollywood’s style plays an influential and meaningful role in the lives of Indian-American Hindus at the most significant rite of passage, marriage. One bride, Ajala, e-mailed images of Bollywood actress Madhuri Dixit wearing a gold lengha to a seamstress in India, instructing her to replicate the lengha which Ajala then wore to her wedding. Although my book focused on the Bollywood film industry’s influence over Indian-American Hindu couples in falling in love and marrying, the larger message is clear: Popular culture in whatever form whether it’s Bollywood or Hollywood, HBO or Fox, billboards or magazines are influential aspects of the physical, sociological, intellectual and cultural environment in which we live, learn and love.

5 March 2010 | guest authors |