The Indian Wedding as Set Piece

This weekend in Noida, a nightclub will host a wedding. There is no couple. No pheras. No proud parents or priests murmuring mantras. What there is, instead, is a ticket link for stag or couple entry, dance floor access, and as many shaadi-style selfies as your heart, or feed, desires. Dress desi and you will get a complimentary “shaadi wali LIIT”. The “baraat aagman” is at 8 pm.

In Gurgaon, another setup offers “haldi nights” for single women. No groom required. Just a poolside, a bowl of turmeric, and a drone camera orbiting your spin in the sun. The result is a full-blown social media narrative: sisters smearing paste on your cheeks, yellow lehenga twirls, captioned declarations of self-love.

These events do not mock the institution of marriage; they mimic its pageantry. They are a performance, sometimes a rehearsal or even a longing. You can now throw a wedding without a partner, a haldi without a family, a baraat where everyone is just there to vibe. What was once the structure of duty, held together by family and community, is now a stage for choreography. The bride, previously a daughter-in-law in waiting, is now a protagonist of pure affect.

This isn’t cultural decay. It is cultural overdrive. The Indian wedding was always half-theatre, now the script is up for grabs.

Globally, this script has already been used. In 2022, Dutch influencer Rianne Meijer staged a full solo wedding for herself: white gown, bouquet, staged mirror-kisses, and a vow to self-love. In 2018, Chinese fashion blogger Lulu travelled to Paris and posed in couture for her imaginary wedding shoot. In South Korea, “solo wedding” packages have become a lucrative industry among single women. Customers receive bridal makeovers, professional photoshoots, and an album to prove they are the main character.

In Japan, where alienation has been institutionalised, entire companies offer rental families—actors who can play your parents, siblings, or in-laws at weddings, funerals, even job interviews. In the US, guests are for hire. You can rent a cheering crowd, a dancing uncle, a teary bridesmaid. What used to be social scaffolding is now a service.

India was always going to arrive at this intersection. For urban youth, especially women, faux ceremonies can also be a workaround. A space to be bride-like without being bound. Mock shaadis come without in-laws, without pundits, without property negotiations or caste declarations. They skip the intergenerational melodrama and retain only the vibe: colour, music, friends, attention. Call it affective cosplay or a response to dating fatigue, the loneliness of urban migration, or the collapsing timeline between romance and regret. Whatever it is, it has arrived, with just the right filter for Instagram.

Weddings in India have long been rosters of obligation and curated hunger games for the bride’s family. Now, as the average marriage age rises and parental involvement shrinks, rituals have floated loose from their anchor points. The haldi and mehendi, once transitional rites for a woman’s entry into another household, now serve as solo experiences of feminine celebration. There is also a marketing logic at play. Influencers know weddings perform well on Instagram. But if you are single, how do you access this performance economy? The answer: by restaging the wedding as a set.

Just like the turmeric-streaked spectacle of faux weddings, there are other rituals being rebranded for the digital age. Silent meditation retreats, once a rite of asceticism in Buddhist practice, are now sold as sabbaticals for burnt-out tech workers. The ten-day Vipassana has become the new wellness cruise, stripped of scripture, softened for the spiritually curious. You are not renouncing the world; you are unsubscribing for a week. The promise is not moksha, but mindfulness. There is even a waiting list.

Elsewhere in Asia, the Japanese tea ceremony, a gesture of Zen minimalism and seasonal awareness, has entered its theme-park phase. In Kyoto, you can rent a kimono, sit on tatami, and be served matcha by an apprentice who can also shoot your TikTok video. The ritual is still intact, technically, but now sold as an experience. Like Holi in Indian cities, where the festival of colour has become a ticketed EDM rave with VIP passes and synthetic colour.

This is not new. Latin American quinceañeras and American sweet sixteens have long mutated from rites of passage into spectacle. Once about entering womanhood, they are now produced with more drone shots than emotion. The ritual is not for the girl; it is about her. There are themed cakes, camera rehearsals and choreographed entrances. These events share something with India’s mock shaadis: they are rituals without consequence. They ask for nothing but presence and phone memory.

In 2022, India had its first sologamy moment when a 24‑year‑old from Gujarat, Kshama Bindu, married herself in a traditional ceremony, complete with haldi, mehendi, pheras, sindoor and bridal vows all performed solo. Declaring, “I want to be a bride, but not a wife,” she reclaimed rituals once reserved for family and kin for herself. This is ritual-as-recreation at its most self-aware. The emerging pattern isn’t only that ceremonies are being monetised or aestheticised, but that participants are bending them toward new ends: agency, self-celebration, healing, belonging without obligation.

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V Shoba

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