Please, please let it finally be over! With the wedding of Indian billionaire heir Anant Ambani and pharmaceutical heiress Radhika Anant Ambani (née Merchant) on July 12, one hopes that maybe, just maybe, we will get a break from the “wedding of the century.” It has saturated our media feeds since the first “pre-wedding” function in March. By July, it seemed that we were stuck watching a four-month-long wedding video, without a plot or narrative, just a mise en scène drenched in sickening opulence. It has exceeded anything that Bollywood has shown us so far, whether in movies or in the Bollywoodized weddings of its stars, like Alia Bhatt, Katrina Kaif, and Deepika Padukone.
With a budget estimated at $600 million, the Ambani movie is in the line of a genre that first appeared in the 1990s. Films like Hum Apke Hain Kaun (Sooraj Barjatya, 1995), Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (Aditya Chopra, 1995), and Kuch Kuch Hota Ha (Karan Johar, 1998) featured a wedding as a major attraction and plot point. Yet, despite a record-breaking budget, the Ambanis appeared desperate and ridiculous in their imitations of Bollywood. They danced woodenly in a gauche imitation of the all-star party in Om Shanti Om. The groom’s parents, Nita and Mukesh Ambani, failed miserably at projecting any playfulness as they lip synced to “Chakke Men Chakka Chakka Pe Gaadi” in a PG-rated version of romantic grandparents doting on their grandchildren. Then, there were the embarrassing baraat scenes with Anant on top of a ghori calling on people to dance; a brat asking the family’s employees to perform. They may have tried to appear regal, but the combination of traditional Hindu values, including the recreation of the ghats of Banaras (the riverfront steps that lead to the Ganges river), with Mughal throwbacks, such as Anant’s sherwani and 183-crore kalgi, recalled middle school fancy dress parties. Eager to show their hold over Hollywood glamor as well, Radhika showed up in an imitation of a gown worn by Blake Lively at the Met Gala in 2022. Isha Ambani flaunted Christian Dior during the pre-wedding cruise in Italy. Finally, Radhika professed her heart-felt love for Anant in a speech literally copied from Shall We Dance (Peter Chelsom, 2004). The Ambanis seemed unable to pull off anything authentic or original!
The irony of the big fat Bollywood wedding is spawned by two contradictory demands of neoliberalism: to simultaneously distinguish oneself and uphold convention. The trend has produced convoluted terms like arranged love marriage, made famous by Salman Khan in Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! As Ashish Rajadhyaksha (2004) noted, these glossy, family-centered romantic stories that crossed over into North America and the United Kingdom were a small part of the Bollywood culture industry that promoted a “feel-good version” of Indian nationalism. It was a new form of nationalism, one that promoted an aggressive market individualism and reflected the global aspirations of the Indian bourgeoise. Affluent spending on rituals, Rustom Bharucha (1995) and Patricia Uberoi (2006) note, became a traditional, even spiritual value. The brand identity of the global Indian bourgeois was a postmodern mish-mosh of so-called Indian culture presented as confident blend of Orientalist tropes, reinvented rituals, and Western brands. Over the decades, as neoliberalism has become increasingly saffronized, the “Indian” has Hinduized as well. For all the public relations stories about Radhika and Anant’s love story as childhood sweethearts, they are the perfect example of an arranged love marriage, well-matched in terms of family wealth, caste, and religion. Whatever the variations on rituals—the baraat, the vidai, and so on—all signify the patriarchal, heterosexual family as an economic unit, owning and passing on private property.
The Frankfurt School described this drive toward differentiation between essentially homogeneous things (for example, brands in sports shoes or cars) as the work of a culture industry that not only tends toward monopoly of ownership over cultural production, but also produces social conformity. Reliance (Ambani’s company) owns sixty television channels in sixteen languages, Jio Cinema, and the rights to stream Indian Premier League cricket (bringing in masses of advertising revenue). Nita Ambani owns Mumbai Indians, a cricket team. We pay Ambani’s Jio Internet service to bring it home, over broadband televisions and smartphones. The wedding cross-promoted other Ambani domains, like cricket, fashion, and Bollywood. At the Sangeet, Nita congratulated Rohit Sharma, Surya Kumar, and Hardik Pandya (members of the winning cricket team at the International Cricket Council T20 World Cup). The Ambani women sported Schiaparelli, Manish Malhotra, and Abu Jani Sandeep Khosla gowns (brands in which the Ambanis have shares). Isha Ambani started the e-commerce platform Ajio, which promotes businesses in beauty, high-end groceries, pharma, and e-commerce lifestyle websites. Stars like Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, and Amitabh Bachchan were acting their brand identities and paying their regards to the boss, who in turn turned it into an opportunity to sell to advertisers. Imitation creates synergies across channels. It is a profitable venture all around, each unit self-advertising into an amalgamated culture where advertising becomes indistinguishable from life.
I was finally shaken out of my dazed passivity when Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Baba Ramdev showed up at the wedding. Now, I was overcome by a curious sense of déjà vu. Where had I seen this cast of characters in a conspicuous display of ritualized performance before? Ah! it was at the inauguration of the Ram Mandir, a not-yet-completed Hindu temple being constructed on the site of a sixteenth-century mosque, earlier in January this year. There was Mukesh Ambani and the entire family in tow—the decked-out Nita, the obedient and ever-smiling Anant and Radhika; film stars Katrina Kaif, Amitabh Bachchan, Ranbir Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, Rajnikanth, and Madhuri Dixit; cricketers like Sachin Tendulkar; godmen like Baba Ramdev; and Modi himself.
Both the wedding and the temple inauguration had the same masala ingredients—lavish newly constructed sets (Ram Mandir and the glass dome for the wedding), several costume changes, glittering jewels, a lot of bowing to men in saffron and idols, gratitude at one’s good fortune to be invited, shows of love for symbolic children (Ram Lalla and Radhika), staged entries of celebrities, gushing reporters on site, and ritualized greetings, from feet touching to blessings, as if it were a large extended family gathering. The unifying figures across both events were Modi and the Ambani family—that is, representatives of the state and capital.
Movies and sports events pale in comparison to these large-scale productions that spill over into public life. Movies and cricket matches, for instance, have a beginning and end and are confined to spaces, the theater or the stadium. We know we are watching a performance, that the movie or match will end, and we will return to our lives. But when the event is presided over by the prime minister we are in a different territory. Civic life was hijacked for both the wedding and the Mandir—Mumbai traffic was diverted and the Jamnagar Airport turned into an international airport for the wedding while the Mandir literally erased and created the new architecture of Hindutva. Several prominent politicians, and not just of the Bharatiya Janata Party, showed up at both the wedding and the Mandir, proving that to be outside of this hall of mirrors is to be declared anti-national, to be cast in the category of other, such as Muslims and minorities, the dreaded “Maoists” or “urban naxals.”
Here, we move beyond the movie and to cinema—more precisely, the cinematic experience where the image beckons us 24/7 toward a more tantalizing reality than the one in which we find ourselves. Moreover, becoming part of this immersive screen reality becomes the way to relate to others. One of my acquaintances, a proud bhakt, posted a picture of herself in a red Banarasi saree, like Nita Ambani’s. There could be some tongue-of-cheek humor here, certainly some bragging about her wealth as well. The danger, however, lies in her self-projection into the larger cinematic spectacle, the drive to show and to be seen. Imitation is no longer an embarrassment, but becomes a way to assert one’s identity and social belonging. The dark underside of this are lynch mobs who record and share their acts of murder. The lynch mob is an obviously violent submission of the individual to a group image, the self-projection over social media less so. However, the impulse to join a totalizing reality and inflict violence on those outside it is shared.
Guy Debord describes two forms of spectacular power: concentrated and diffused. The former is built around a dictatorial personality, as in Germany in the 1930s. The latter is the U.S. version, built on a false sense of choice based in market-produced commodities. In the former, anxieties around unemployment or lack of health security, for example, may be sublimated by joining an ethno-nationalist campaign under the führer. In the latter case, these are repressed by distractions offered by the market and over entertainment. As Debord explains, the spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relationship, where people relate to each other through images. By the late 1980s, Debord (Comments on the Society of the Spectacle) proposed that a new form, the integrated spectacle that combined both previous forms, had emerged.
In my view, this is where we now find ourselves. The drive toward accumulation of wealth in a few hands and the growing inequality and environmental destruction it has brought in its wake has been pushed through the allures of Hindutva. The shimmering superficiality of the big fat Hindu wedding is the diffused version, a distraction from the horrors its concentrated form has brought forth. I am thinking of the travesties of love jihad and honor killings. The only novelty of this wedding was the amount of money spent. Where weddings in more social times, in peasant cultures, for instance, were a way to consume and distribute surplus and were partaken by the entire village, the Ambanis served self-glorified images of themselves eating and partying. If only images could be eaten, we’d all be full and not need any more!
My hope at the start of this essay, that this display will end, is naïve. As long as they can sell it, we will keep seeing this family living out the Bollywood dream for us to consume. We will keep seeing replays of the portable Hindu family (to use Uberoi’s excellent term in Freedom and Destiny), doing business globally while flamboyantly celebrating its “traditions”; the “father” guarding over some large unspecified “business,” but no one ever works. Both the reality and aspiration for the global empire was visible in the presence of the likes of capitalists like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, politicians like Boris Johnson and John Kerry, and stars like Justin Bieber and Rihanna.
The good news is that quite a few of us have tired of this formulaic movie. Reality hits—one can’t live on image alone. After all, Modi did not get the huge victory for which he had hoped. And, for many of us, the mediocrity and fakeness of the Modi-Ambani/neoliberal-Hindutva spectacle has lost its sheen or never had it in the first place.