Ancient, modern unite in lavish wedding.
San Jose couple engineer Indian extravaganza full of lavish tradition & love.
When two Silicon Valley twentysomethings get married, they can do it any number of ways — a church wedding, a civil service at City Hall, or even a backyard ceremony with a friend ordained through the Internet.
When Rucha Heda and Priam Mukundan, two 25-year-old Indian American engineers, tied the knot in May, there was nothing quick or futuristic about it. They looked to the past — the ancient past.
That’s how they found themselves in bright and bejeweled Indian clothing under a four-pillared tent, where an officiant conducted prayers in Sanskrit (and then translated their meaning in both Hindi and English) for 90 minutes. Afterward, they walked around a fire pit to seal their vows — just one of more than a dozen rituals to ward off negative energy and prove their commitment and unity during the wedding weekend.
In India, the spectacle wouldn’t have caused a second glance.
But as the Bay Area’s Asian Indian population grows — from just over 16,000 in the 1980s, according to Bay Area Census figures, to more than 310,000 in 2015, according to U.S. Census estimates — such celebrations are drawing attention as they intersect with 21st century culture. Even TV is documenting the trend. The Smithsonian Channel followed the lives of three Indian American couples and their lavish celebrations in “My Big Bollywood Wedding,” which aired last month.
At the stately Dolce Hayes Mansion in San Jose, the engineering couple’s wedding was a sensation, too, causing guests at other, Western-style weddings occurring on the same grounds to stop and stare. And why not? With processions led by drums and guests dancing in saris and sherwanis the colors of the rainbow, it was a Bollywood musical come to life.
“As we’ve grown up our parents have instilled the cultures, traditions and values of India,” Heda said. “As much as possible, it’s important to us to keep that alive.”
The meetup
The pair met in 2009, the first day of freshman year at UC Davis. They filed into a lecture hall with other students and waited for a teacher to show up. When no one did, a young man got up in front of the class.
“Hi! I’m Priam,” he said. “Dude, are you like the T.A.?” someone asked, referring to the teaching assisant. “No,” said Mukundan. “I just wanted to say hello.”
Heda thought it was odd, but admired his nerve. “This guy,” she remembered thinking, “is trying really hard to make friends.’”
Mukundan, an introvert from Folsom, near Sacramento, liked solo activities like video games and playing tennis, and decided to change his ways in college. If he hadn’t, he might never have propelled himself outside his comfort zone — or made an impression on Heda.
Heda, an only child, moved at age 7 from India to the Bay Area with her parents, and was an extrovert, singing at age 5, watching Bollywood movies and studying classical Indian music. She speaks two Indian languages, Hindi and Marathi.
She found Mukundan’s nerdiness endearing, so when he invited her to lunch within the first month of school, she said yes, and a friendship blossomed. They took long walks, their conversations focusing on what made each of them happy, and what they wanted from life.
In October of their senior year, they began to date — a normal progression in the U.S. but an anomaly in Indian culture.
“In India, when you finish college, your parents will likely find a match
“I’m sure my mother would chide me. But we’re in the States now, so we’ve got to blend the best of both cultures, American and Indian, and hopefully this enriches their lives.” Mukundan Govindan, the groom’s father
for you, you meet and talk for several months and you say yes and get married,” Heda said.
That’s how it was for Mukundan’s parents, whose marriage was arranged by their parents. Heda’s father arranged his own marriage by placing an ad for a bride in the Times of India, an English-language newspaper. He met with his prospective wife only a few times before they wed.
“When it comes to dating, it’s a weird, different concept — there are a lot of questions for previous generations,” Mukundan said. “I saw potential if we started dating. I knew if I ever had a shot, it would go the distance. I saw the chemistry, and how empathetic we were to other people. I knew relationships take time to build. I said, ‘I think it’s time.’ ”
“They understood it’s different here,” Heda said of her parents, “and gave me the freedom to look and see what to do for myself. For me it was about finding someone I had a strong connection with and who shared my morals and perspective on life.”
They dated through the end of college and then long-distance before getting engaged. After graduation, Heda began working in business software in Silicon Valley. Mukundan went to Cornell University in New York to earn a master’s degree in computer science. When he came back, he decided to pop the question.
Mukundan asked the bride’s parents for permission to wed. Mindful of Heda’s love of Bollywood films, he concocted a day-long outing for her at UC Davis that centered around a scavenger hunt. The final clue led to a ballroom, where they’d shared an important dance as undergrads, and where she was surprised to find both families gathered. He danced and recounted their history, complete with audio-visual effects — and then proposed. Heda accepted.
“As we’ve grown up our parents have instilled the cultures, traditions and values of India. As much as possible, it’s important to us to keep that alive.” Rucha Heda
“Priam,” said the bride of her groom, “is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. He’s good at calling me out if I’m approaching something in the wrong way. If I’m in an argument with a friend, he’s good at playing the devil’s advocate, and saying, ‘What is your friend thinking that you’re not seeing?’ If I’m not super motivated or down, he always knows what to say to make it better. He’s always challenging me to grow.”
Heda taught Mukundan to go beyond logic when communicating with people.
“I would often point out solutions when dealing with an emotional issue, like, ‘Maybe you should just do this or do that, because that person isn’t intending to do that,’ ” Mukundan recalled. “I learned that you can say something, but it’s more important how you say it than what you say.”
The tradition
It’s all about love, and spectacle, too.
In India, elaborate, multi-day ceremonies mark the union of the bride and groom, and importantly, the joining of two families and their friends. Pre-wedding and wedding ceremonies are typically restricted to a few hundred family members, but friends are included at receptions, where it’s not uncommon for the guest list to swell to 1,000 or more. The nation of 1.2 billion people has 29 states, each with different customs, 22 official languages and 1,652 dialects, so the types of rituals observed depend on the region in which the bride or groom lives.
In the case of Heda, whose family comes from Northern India, and Mukundan’s, which hails from the south, family systems dynamics were challenged. The solution? A fusion wedding with rituals from each region, as agreed to by the mother of the bride, Varsha Heda, who works in supply chain management at Facebook, and homemaker Amudha Mukundan, mother of the groom. The couple invited their closest 200 family members to the wedding ceremony, and an extra 200 guests to the reception.
On the road to their nuptials, there were nods to American traditions, including ring-shopping and bachelor and bachelorette parties. Using their technical know-how, the couple built their own wedding website, complete with a spreadsheet schedule that mapped out the four days of events.
And for kicks, they entered a “Raj/Rani” (king/queen) contest at the Vivah Bridal Expo in Santa Clara, the largest for South Asians in Northern California, where the grand prize was a wedding reception for up to 200 guests. Contestants were required to submit video entries that were posted to YouTube. Views were tallied and finalists had to compete in a playful onstage dating game at the expo.
Heda and Mukundan, with a flair for the dramatic, won.
“If they had wanted to get married in Las Vegas, we would have blessed them and made sure they have a happy life,” said the groom’s father, Mukundan Govindan, an engineering manager at Intel. “We were thinking our oldest daughter should be married first — that’s in our tradition. But tradition’s being broken. I’m sure my mother would chide me. But we’re in the States now, so we’ve got to blend the best of both cultures, American and Indian, and hopefully this enriches their lives.”
But there was never a question, in anyone’s mind — especially the parents’ — that the modern young couple would wed in any other way.
“If we had said no to this, he would have waited years and years until we said yes,” said Amudha Mukundan. “He would not have married her. He would not have given her up. They would have been unmarried until we agreed. He would have respected that.”
The novelty
Western guests at an Indian wedding are often surprised by the traditions, the lavish attire and the expense. From henna tattoo get-togethers to evenings of song and dance to the opening-day ceremony, an Indian wedding is no small jubilee. Bay Area brides and grooms spend, spend, spend.
“Two hundred to 300 people for us is a small wedding,” said Leena Jay, president of Vivah Expo, who remembered an Indian wedding
held at the Santa Clara Convention Center last year with a reception for 1,100 guests. “The least expensive wedding runs about $100,000, but I’ve seen weddings at the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco that run $500,000.”
She recalled a wedding last year in Las Vegas in which a family from Chicago chartered four airplanes to fly in the guests. The groom arrived on an elephant, but only after city officials determined that the weight of the guests and the elephant could be accommodated by the entrance of the MGM Grand hotel.
In the Bay Area, entrances and exits are more technologically based — arrivals by luxury cars, and exits in helicopters.
“People have done well for themselves at startups,” Jay said. “They spend the money.”
As part of Vivah’s Raj/Rani contest, Heda and Mukundan won a variety of services that helped defray the cost of the four-day wedding, which might have run $100,000 or more without vendors donating their services toward the couple’s reception. Those services included a catered vegetarian Indian buffet dinner, a decorated stage where the couple received guests, table decor for up to 200 guests, wedding-day photography and videography, a gown and tux for the reception, henna for the bride, jewelry for the reception, and the mandap, or fourpillared tent, used for the wedding ceremony on the lawn. The couple, who invited 400 to the reception, paid for the extra 200 guests.
“She wanted that dream wedding, but not for cosmetic reasons,” said the bride’s father, Amol Heda, a South Bay real estate agent. “They wanted the entire family to meet and go celebrate together, from grandparents to parents to kids and the grandchildren around us. It’s meant for everybody. It’s important to go forward, but you are still grounded in your traditions. You don’t leave your traditions and just fly away.”