The great Bengali monsoon wedding

There is a scene in Mira Nair’s film, Monsoon Wedding, where the bridegroom asks his fianc?, handpicked by his parents, about the odd similarity between an arranged marriage and a “love match?”

“Well, how much more risky can this arranged marriage thing be from meeting one night in a noisy and smoky bar and hooking up?” he asks.

A marriage is always somewhat of a gamble, in any culture. In the United States, the notion of an “arranged” marriage may sound antiquated, but for most of my family in India it is still a way of life, as I discovered this summer.

I am the product of an arranged marriage. My parents had never met before their wedding night, 22 years ago. My parents’ tales of communicating secretly by letters before meeting face to face may sound rather romantic. Still, my conscience and liberal values were struggling to deal with my cousin’s arranged marriage that I attended this summer in Kolkata, the city formerly known as Calcutta. How can arrange weddings even exist in the modern civilized world?

Flowers can be arranged. They were arranged beautifully at my cousin’s wedding. Roses, jasmines, gladiolas, lotus buds and other fragrant Indian flowers for which I know not the translation, were hung all over the house and the reception halls. The overwhelming scents of nature masking a most unnatural occurrence: the arrangement of love.

Music too can be arranged. The bride’s father had organized for authentic shehnai (traditional windpipes) and tabla players to perform on the night, rather than having music blasting from loud speakers.

Clothing outfits can be arranged. Gorgeous, embroidered saris in unabashedly flamboyant colors and designs matched with flashy gold jewelry. Men’s outfits can be arranged too. My cousin, the bridegroom, wore a fashionable cream colored sherwani suit with funny pointed sandals that made him look like a tall Bengali prince returning home from the Silicon Valley in Amrika.

Food must absolutely be arranged by an excellent caterer-after all, over three or four hundred relatives and friends feasted on the wedding night. I think it was the attraction of three days and nights of incredible Indian food that helped me dispel the deep moral and philosophical struggle I was having about actually enjoying an arranged marriage.

Flowers, music, clothing, and food-we can all agree that these can, and should be arranged with careful forethought and consideration so that the wedding night and reception are brilliant successes. But the couple? The bride and the groom? If you are a traditional and conservative Bengali Hindu family, this must be arranged first and foremost.

Although the caste system is outlawed in India, the first and foremost trait my family searches for in an arranged marriage is common caste and community. The couple should speak the same language, pray to the same gods, belong to the same caste and preferably hail from the same area of Kolkata. Inbreeding and deficiencies, anyone?

Bride hunting involves my uncle and aunt physically visiting houses to carry out an interview and screening process as intense as a Wall Street job interview. My cousin’s bride was found to bear the right surname, the right caste, sufficient education and sophistication, and the right skin tone-very fair. In a nation still suffering from colonial hangover and Aryan illusions, the statement “as lovely as Queen Victoria” is considered a compliment to any female. Have you ever seen a photograph of Queen Victoria?

The groom is not interviewed or dissected like the bride, and he does not visit the prospective girls’ houses. In fact, my cousin just looked over photographs while he was in Los Angeles, and only met the top three prospects his parents had selected before making his decision the winter before the wedding. The bride was asked whether she wished to marry my cousin or not. When both families confirmed an engagement, my cousin took out his bride to be on two dates. To my surprise and amusement, he even bought her a teddy bear by the second date.

A prerequisite for the engagement was horoscope matching. Superstition reigns supreme in my family filled with engineers, doctors, and academics. An astrologer is paid to quack like a duck that no horrible disasters are on the horizon. If you dare challenge this superstition my aunt will immediately launch into a collection of tragedies that occurred when distant cousin X ignored the astrologer’s advice. (Cousin X usually has grievous domestic issues to deal with. When my aunt really gets excited, Cousin X dies a painful death, or far worse, has a divorce.)

My uncle and aunt personally invited each and every one of the guests’ families by visiting their homes and handing them invitations. Talk about socially intimate and utterly impractical-I accompanied them on one such trip and met eccentric and far-flung family members. My favorite was the violently Marxist revolutionary turned economics professor (we need one of those at Georgetown).

With all the invitations handed, we were ready for the first day of the three days of a Bengali wedding: Ayburo-bhath also known as the Bachelor Party! Before your imagination runs wild with images of gyrating Indian belly dancers, this day is actually a sedate affair where my cousin is served rice for the last time as a bachelor, surrounded by his closest relatives. By the time the wedding night came around, followed by the reception which was drenched in monsoon rains, I had cast aside my preconceived notions of what an arranged marriage was supposed to look like, and feel like.

Based on my upbringing and Westernized cultural influences, I realized that I have a rather narrow outlook of how love and marriage should be defined based primarily on a diet of soap operas, popular novels and Hollywood plot lines. There does not need to be a single and final way on what the perfect wedding should be like. No matter if you are conservative-or liberal-minded, believing that your ideals are the only ones that exist is plain wrong. Even in America, the rigid definition of a wedding as a union between man and woman may change for future generations. My cousin’s wedding was a celebration of love and togetherness, and I was honored to be part of it.

What I find most interesting is that even though my cousin has lived in L.A. for five years, he still chose to take the traditional path of an arranged marriage. Sometimes traditions cross borders and seep into different societies, simply refusing to fade into the annals of history.

Pothik Chatterjee is a senior in the School of Foreign Service. This piece does not represent the experiences of all Indian families, just the author’s.