An “Arranged Love” Marriage: India's Neoliberal Turn and the Bollywood Wedding Culture Industry

Abstract

In the last decade of the 20th century, coinciding with India's economic deregulation, the Hindu wedding became a core attraction in popular Indian cinema. Weddings in real life, in turn, became more elaborate organized by a wedding industry, which professionalized and commodifed work that was previously done by an informal economy or outside of it by members of the family. Evoking the Frankfurt School, this paper locates the big wedding as a product of the emerging Bollywood culture industry and its ideological redefinition of nationalism/citizenship as both acts of consumption and the re-enactment of patriarchal and caste-based identities. Challenging the explanatory power of the notion of hybridity and its rejection of “totalization” narratives, the paper asks for a reconsideration of the meta-narratives of class and gender, capital and patriarchy to understand the ways in which global capital is most intimately experienced and lived.

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