Weddings of Northeast India: cultural extravaganza

Diversity of cultures is something our country has a rich heritage of. As one moves through the vast landmass called India, languages, customs and the very cultural display drastically change every few miles. In the gateway to the Northeast, Guwahati, a typical urban Brahmin familygets ready to bid farewell to a daughter of the family. The extended family gathers around for support. As with most Indian wedding customs, the actual wedding is preceded by a number of pre-wedding rituals. It begins with ‘Nou-Puruxor Shraaddho’ where the bride and her family pay homage and take the blessings of their departed ancestors from the past nine generations. Every ceremony must begin with blessings from god and from ones ancestors. The day before the wedding, the groom’s family, mostly women come over to the bride’s house to shower her with gifts. These gifts range from clothes, like the Mekhela Chadar to food items, like an entire fish. The gifts have ritualistic significance, and the ceremony is called ‘Juron’. The ceremony takes place in front of a mirror with the bride being adorned with ornaments and jewellery. It is the morning of the wedding day and the bride gets ready for a ritual bath, called the ‘Nuoni’. Before ‘Nuoni’ water has to be collected from a holy source for the bath, in a ritual called ‘Pani-Tola’. The womenfolk of the family set off to a nearby temple pond, for this ritual. In the nearby state of Arunachal Pradesh, permanent rice cultivating tribes called the Apatanis have very different rituals for weddings. In the rice plains of Ziro, the nature worshipping Apatanis have a number of traditions for a couple to be wedded auspiciously. A ceremonial walk by the womenfolk of the bride’s family from her home all the way to the groom’s family is one of the most peculiar rituals. Christian majority states of Mizoram and Nagaland mostly have typically Christian weddings in churches, with the occasional ethnic attire being worn instead of western wear. In states like Manipur, where the Hindu religion has perforated into the tribal population, wedding customs seem to be a perfect mix of Aryan Hindu customs with the age old Meitei traditions. One of the most striking differences is the fact that there is no ‘yagna’ or ritual fire around which a typical Hindu wedding takes place. In a way similar to the Apatani wedding, the union of a couple might start with them eloping. But negotiations and talks must begin right after. The actual wedding takes place after a number of talks between the families, a few rituals wherein the engagement takes place and other religious ceremonies where the date of marriage is decided. The groom waits for his bride to come to the Mandap, while the priest reads out the combination of Hindu and Meitei chants. After a couple of tiring hours of ritualistic chants, the bride gracefully walks in, dressed beautifully in a ‘Potloi’, which is a traditional Meitei dress. The respective families gift the ethnic clothes worn by the bride and the groom to them and it holds great significance in the wedding ceremony. The Meitei groom takes away the bride and she is allowed to come back to her maiden home again on the fifth day after the wedding when another ritual takes place. Their rituals display an interesting trait of being Aryan Hindu yet having a lot of characteristics of the indigenous religions and nature worshipping aspects of the Meitei. The various indigenous groups that live in harmony in the region display a wide spectrum of ethnic cultural colours. It certainly signifies that culture is never static and always changes with the times. To SUBSCRIBE click the below link: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_c... Like & Follow Us on: Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/WildernessFil... Twitter: https://twitter.com/wildfilmsindia Website: http://www.wildfilmsindia.com/ This footage is part of the professionally-shot broadcast stock footage archive of Wilderness Films India Ltd., the largest collection of HD imagery from South Asia. The collection comprises of 100, 000+ hours of high quality broadcast imagery, mostly shot on HDCAM / SR 1080i High Definition, Alexa, SR, XDCAM and 4K. Write to us for licensing this footage on a broadcast format, for use in your production! We are happy to be commissioned to film for you or else provide you with broadcast crewing and production solutions across South Asia. We pride ourselves in bringing the best of India and South Asia to the world... Please subscribe to our channel wildfilmsindia on Youtube for a steady stream of videos from across India. Also, visit and enjoy your journey across India at www.clipahoy.com , India's first video-based social networking experience! Reach us at rupindang [at] gmail [dot] com and admin@wildfilmsindia.com