Mumbai, India — Naveena Vanamala sits very still as her makeup artist leans in close, carefully pressing tiny white dots of pigment in an arc above her brows on the most important day of her life. Her phone keeps ringing. Flowers for her hair are missing.
Normally the father of the bride handles problems with vendors, as part of his role as ceremony funder and host, but her father died six months ago, and now she’s making last-minute decisions about a Mumbai wedding she isn’t sure she can afford.
The 26-year-old social media marketing executive earns about $145 a month. Yet, what began as an already stretched wedding budget of $3,200 quickly doubled. She took out a bank loan. Her fiancé, who already had a home loan, borrowed against his house again.
“It wasn’t worth taking so much loan,” Vanamala says. “But we had no option. We had to do it.”
Across India, weddings are often large, multiday celebrations, fueling an industry worth around $130 billion, according to analysts at US investment bank Jefferies.
Here, marriage and money are bound together by social pressure that dictates that the bride’s parents pay for a lavish wedding, and in some cases dowry –– gifts given to the groom’s family that are now officially outlawed but still change hands.
For poorer households, expectations of a large event with gifts of gold, cash, household goods and even vehicles can turn a daughter’s wedding into a financial crisis.
At the other end of the spectrum, gold jewelry stacked in velvet trays, intricately embroidered lehengas (long skirt) and professionally choreographed dance routines in front of thousands of guests have become hallmarks of high-end Indian weddings –– a scale of spending that, the Jefferies analysis notes, sees Indians on average spend roughly twice as much on their nuptials as they do on education.