Attending a Kashmiri Wedding

As soon as I landed in Srinagar, I was welcomed into the current of wedding activities.  We stopped at the tailor’s for the friend I was staying with to be fitted for another intricately beaded colorful outfit.  Then we went to the main wedding house where the bridal party was keeping the bride company while she got henna on her arms and feet.  She had to sit still for hours (she refused to get any more even though her family wanted it up to her knees), while the older women sang Kashmiri wedding songs and burned incense for her.

The second day was the nikah, or the official Islamic wedding ceremony.  The groom’s family was especially conservative, so the nikah ended up being a private meeting of a few men from each family negotiating the wedding contract.  Islamic wedding contracts historically were a way to protect a woman’s rights in her marriage.  The men then went to the bride to ask her if she accepted the dowry (in Islam, the man’s family gives it to the woman) and if she agreed to the marriage.  She had to respond out loud three times.  The bride’s family hosted the male relatives of the groom’s family for a huge meal that afternoon.

That evening the bride’s side hosted the close female relatives of the groom for mehndi or henna.  The women together ceremoniously filled in the last fingertips on their henna, there was of course more traditional Kashmiri wedding songs, and a huge meal of wasiwan was served.  Wasiwan is the famous Kashmiri style of feast, where guests sit in groups of four and eat with their hands off a large shared tray of rice.  Servers come by and deposit anywhere from 10 to 30 different types of meat on the tray.  Usually, there’s yogurt, spinach, paneer, and chutney, too.  You eat with your right hand only, because the left hand is used when there’s no toilet paper—there's never any toilet paper.

The next day, the bride’s family hosted everyone who had been invited to the wedding for wasiwan, the women first at 2:30 (it actually happened at 4:30—I can only think of a handful of countries like the US that have a strict sense of time) and the men afterwards.  Islamic culture does not often have mixed gender activities, and there was limited room in the massive tent erected in the garden.  Kashmiris buy houses specifically with weddings in mind.  Either they have their own garden for this purpose, or they share a vast lawn space with the directly adjacent neighbors.  The top floor of every house is an empty hall, only used for parties, like weddings and Eid celebrations.  The tent was luxurious, floored with carpets, filled with fans and AC units, and framed by drapes.  Everyone sits around the edge to eat, with two people of the wasiwan group resting their back on the outside and two people on the inner side of the rolled out strip of table mat.

This was the first night the groom came to the bride’s house.  When he arrived, everyone in the bride’s family (including me) put garlands of flowers and seeds over his feathered hat and around his neck.  At the end of the night, the bride finally came down from her room and rode back to the groom’s house with him.  She seemed very nervous beforehand, and mostly tired of taking pictures.  Some of the men from the bride’s family (and one strong-willed aunt who had planned the whole party) were allowed to go with her.  They finally got home around 4 am.

The next morning, the bride’s male cousins went to visit her at the groom’s house.  Later that day, the groom’s family hosted our side of the family for wasiwan, so they in turn could show off their wealth and gratitude.  It started with juice, nuts, dates, dried fruits, presents, tea, and cake, and ended with ice cream and more wedding favors.  The bride and groom sat on a slightly elevated platform at one end of the tent.

The pirsal occurred throughout the rest of the week, where members of the bride’s family took turns visiting the couple each day.  Like most Kashmiris, they live in a joint-family house, where different generations might have different floors of the shared family house.

There was plenty of drama throughout the entire process, as stress is high for any multi-day wedding, especially in a culture where every member of the family likes to offer their opinion on everyone else’s choices.  My friend felt very limited by the fact that we always had to wait for an available driver to go anywhere, and then we had to have our outing approved by every relative older than she.

Presents were exchanged every step of the way.  Each side of the family was constantly giving the other enormous baskets of walnuts, cash, and candy.  Every time either side hosted the other, they greeted them with flower petals, serve juice, dried fruit, and nuts, and beautiful gift bags filled with chocolate and walnuts.  The groom’s family gave the bride another wedding outfit and more gold to add to all the money and gifts that were given at the engagement ceremony two years ago.  The bride was never without weighty gold, and I noticed everyone had gold iPhones or gold phone cases at least.  However, Muslim men are not supposed to wear gold or silk.

The bride and groom met through her aunt who had consulted a couple munzamir (matchmakers, usually gay or transgender men) who had decided their families were compatible.  They had spent a little time together since then—they live in different cities—but had communicated by phone nearly everyday.  Neither was allowed to visit the other’s house.  While plenty of people have love marriages nowadays, Muslim women can only marry Muslim men, and the men can only marry people of the book (e.g. Muslims, Christians, and Jews).  A marriage between a Hindu and a Muslim would result in alienation by the whole family.

Everyone was so welcoming of me, and some actually thought I was a different Kashmiri cousin at first.  Kashmiris are famed around India for being beautiful, because they tend to have lighter skin and eyes.  The few lighter-skinned people generally originate long ago from the upper caste brahmins of India, and even a lost tribe of Israel, as legend has it.  So long as I wore the traditional dupatta loosely draped on my head or shoulder, people couldn’t tell I was a meme foreigner, or an Agraise.  Plenty of people on street still stared, and some asked to take photos with me, my friend, and her cousin (all very pale).  To get a good deal at markets, my friend would only talk to me in Kashmiri and I would respond in the few words I knew while pretending to follow along with what the vendor was saying.  Actually Kashmiri uses so many lend words from English that I could guess at a lot of the meaning.  At the wedding, everyone was so impressed that I ate the waziwan (it made my friend and her brother sick so they refused) and with my hands.  They also claimed the way I sat on the floor was like a Kashmiri.