At the marriage registrar’s office, the ceiling fan turned languorously. A bureaucrat in a wilting brown shirt sat at a large desk piled with dusty files tied in red string. My partner and I stood in front of him, feeling like truant schoolchildren summoned to the headmaster’s office. I wore a Kanchipuram silk sari in a blinding bright pink—the compromise for saying no to a lehenga weighed down by sequins and cancan—with delicate gold temple jewellery inherited from my grandmother. My partner turned up in a dull gold kurta and dhoti.
There was mithai and baskets of marigold petals, but no orchestra and fireworks in the wings. The bureaucrat opened our file with a slightly bored look on his face—indeed, he double-checked our names to confirm he had the right one from that day’s docket. “You want to be his wife?” he asked gruffly, after enquiring about how long we’d known each other. Within minutes, we signed on a dotted line and he pronounced us married.
A month later, there would be one night of merriment aided by an open bar at the Hyatt in Gurugram—another compromise for saying no to a three-day party, to assuage disgruntled relatives. But this March day 12 years ago, it was just the two of us, bound as much by our love for travel as we were by our liberal, agnostic worldviews. With us were two dozen of the people we loved most looking their best—arriving from lands as near and far as my office in Ballard Estate and our homes in New Delhi—all of us fanning ourselves and biding our time with selfies in a queue outside the Fort civil court’s bleached facade.
There is a particular kind of room in this country where marriages are made—but rarely the best photographs for a conventional wedding album. India’s booming wedding economy is now estimated at somewhere between $40 billion and $130 billion a year (depending on which reports you trust, and there are many from IBEF, WedMeGood, Custom Market Insights and dozens more). The average urban wedding runs into the tens of lakhs, catering to several hundred guests, with families often spending a vast fortune (occasionally the size of a small country’s GDP) on wardrobes and jewellery alone.
In this scheme of things, registering a marriage in the civil court is often thought of as a dull formality. It is a process “strongly advised” by the Supreme Court and state laws but, in India, a marriage’s validity isn’t always governed by a piece of paper. Some people, though, choose the court marriage. They choose to solemnise their marriage in the eyes of the law rather than in ritual alone.
It is worth asking why a woman like Sakshi Rawte-Dhar, not yet 30, would stand outside the Bombay High Court’s marriage registrar’s office holding nothing but the knowledge that her partner was on his way with a bouquet, and feel, in that ordinary corridor, something closer to the thing weddings are supposed to produce—and so rarely do. Or why Urmi Mistry, after the sudden death of her father-in-law delayed everything by a year and a half, would sit her parents down and describe, instead of a wedding, a life—savings, travel, a house someday—and watch them come around to it, tearfully, as if she had narrated something utterly inconceivable, and yet wholly revelatory.
These are not women rejecting marriage. They are women rejecting its packaging. And in going the legal route of a court marriage and designing their nuptials to their own individual tastes, what they might actually be choosing is themselves.
