Two daughters got married in recent weeks, a Goenka girl and a Ruia. There were thus two sets of extended festivities, taking in their glittering embrace the country’s power elites. So it was twice the opportunity to bless couples, be seen, schmooze-and, most of all-eat as if antacids were going out of style.
At both, the jaw-dropping array on the buffet tables was a hotter subject of conversation than the falling Sensex and mercury in Mumbai. (Bridal rocks are simply taken for granted.) It wasn’t just traditional fare, which is still par for the course at most Indian weddings. The menu reaffirmed that globalisation was well and truly entrenched in Indian big business. Both weddings featured specialties from several continents. The Taj had been commissioned for the Ruia wedding; Harsh Goenka, being a great foodie, had taken the trouble to get chefs from their country of origin, planning their air travel and lodging as meticulously as the elaborate fare.
All wedding banquets are elaborate, but why is that of the Marwaris and Gujaratis such a Jodhaa Akbar -sized production? The obvious answer is that these are both business communities with more money to spend and a frontal culture of manifest opulence. Punjabis are no slouches in what they unabashedly celebrate as ’show-sha’, but they don’t have this war-chest of disposable income.
Secondly, today’s business royals carry on the practice of the originals, where weddings served functions way beyond conjugal beds. Palanpuri diamond merchants have set a benchmark rivalled only by a Lakshmi Mittal, because they need to show a Jonathan Oppenheimer or Ronald Winston the extent of their political and business influence. The Marwaris need to reaffirm their primacy in their own clan.
There is a third reason. An Indian wedding is never only about self-gratification. The guest is as central to it as the bridal couple. And food is the only level at which guests can fully participate, the truly interactive quotient. Yes, guests can stand in an interminably long queue waiting to wish the family, while balancing unwieldy packages in unwieldy clothes. Yes, they can swing at the sangeet. But it is food which plays the stellar role in the extended ritual of a wedding just as the jaymala does for the intimate one.
In every tradition, the dissatisfied guest is considered inauspicious. This is why hosts go on piling food on to plates or banana leaves, and guests have developed an accepted choreography of saying no differently when they mean it, and when they actually want to stuff in the 35th jalebi .
However power weddings impose a dilemma because their genre of guests usually wouldn’t be seen dead jostling at the ‘live counters’, and is too conscious of its gym-toned abs. This upper crust hasn’t stayed hungry all day for the anticipated gourmandizing of the evening. Moreover, they cannot be lured by exotica. They have eaten raclette in St Moritz and Baba Ghanoush in Alexandria. So, to get this bunch to actually stay to eat calls for strategies rivalling the launch of an IPO.
Incidentally, carnivores may think otherwise, but a Marwari or a Gujarati will never concede that the vegetarian imperative imposes an additional complication. In any event, much of the India’s business Brahmins are strictly shakahari. Incidentally, while there was no distracting booze at the Goenka reception, the Ruia celebration had foreign bar tenders juggling bottles.
This is why the food here has to be an exceptional hook, an extravaganza of different themes meticulously strategised and executed for the different functions.
The original intention of ‘just show our face, wish, but not eat’ melted like the gooey Lindt in the chocolate fountain. The culinary contagion was palpable at all the Goenka wedding functions as the power club infected each other with their recommendations: Have you tried the Khaosway? Don’t miss the Lebanese counter. I stuffed myself on the roesti. I’ve never ever had chaat like this.
The won’t-haves had been converted into the must-haves. The food had served its strategic imperative.
