How the wedding market perpetuates dowry culture

If Donald Trump has tariffs, India has weddings.

- Nishtha Gautam

The upcoming wedding season bodes well for the Indian economy, with the wedding industry pegged at $130 billion. Government data suggest that this industry, the second-largest in the country, is responsible for creating nearly one crore jobs. Such is the potential of the Indian wedding market that almost every sector caters to the life event of two individuals joining in matrimony.

Three cheers for the resilience of the Great Indian Wedding? Probably not.

Just like the unsavoury bits of the shaadi ka laddoo — and the unpredictability of its crumbling — horrors underlie these glitzy stats. Research shows that an average Indian family’s expenditure on a wedding is about three times its annual income. Worse, this single life event claims twice the amount spent on the child’s education for 18 years.

Are we still feigning surprise at the continuance of dowry killings despite some of the strictest legislations against perpetrators? If yes, we are simply blindsiding ourselves. By pretending to be horrified at a young woman's death while comfortably ‘consuming “aesthetic” visuals from various moodboards and events, not limited to ostensibly wedding-related ones, we are complicit in this societal scourge.