A Rajasthan Wedding

‘O for a muse of fire, that would ascend
the brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
and monarchs to behold the swelling scene’

Not in fact a battle but a royal wedding in Rajasthan; attended by former princes galore, at least one monarch and and another ex king, Gyanendra of Nepal. A scene swelling with the fabled colours of the Rajasthan desert and its peoples; gilded by the stars of Bollywood and international rock; a feast of images worthy of the muse and quite other worldly to those more used to lower key European weddings.

The marriage of the Yuvraj Shivraj, son of the Maharajah of Jodhpur, to Rajkumari Gayatri of Askote-Raj, may be one of the last great traditional weddings among the former royal families and was celebrated as such in a state where ‘Bapji’ Jodhpur, is still respected to a degree in keeping with his lifetime of work for Jodhpur and the state of Rajasthan. Noblesse oblige.
This wedding was a celebration too of the bridegroom’s astonishing recovery from an almost mortal injury in a polo match six years ago and an auspicious augury for a continuance in the status quo that few of the population of Jodhpur deeply invested in their historical traditions had dared hope for. Jodhpur was en fete.

For foreign guests, Indian weddings are always spectacular events requiring an unusual degree of stamina and, when among the warrior Rajputs at least, on whom whisky has no more obvious effect than mother’s milk, a hard head and a good liver. A wardrobe is required that extends far beyond the usual and re-usable wedding clothes lurking in the recesses of the spare room cupboard. This wedding, in two cities and multiple venues involved as many changes of clothes in a day as an Edwardian house party, with jewellery and baggage to match. O for a lady’s maid and a Louis Vuitton cabin trunk or two.

In truth, while the Edwardian women of the Raj may, like Lady Curzon in her peacock dress, have competed to some extent with the satins, silks, chiffons and brocades of formal Indian attire, contemporary western style clothing in its poverty of colour and embellishment is hard pressed to shine next to a myriad coloured nine yard turban or a shimmering sherwani with diamond buttons, costume that makes the most undistinguished suddenly regal, let alone a woman’s swirling traditional tinselled and bejewelled ghagra and odhni .

Better then for the foreigner just to relax and revel in a spectacular repast for all the senses. The cheerful discord of the pipes of the Rajputana Rifles combined with folk singers belting out their best known songs from the roof top alcoves of the Rambagh Palace in Jaipur heralding the evening arrival of the barat procession led by a painted elephant, tusks streaming with tinsel and unmoved by red carpet style banks of flash photographers, bringing the bridegroom from Jodhpur to his bride. The bridegroom himself arriving at the last, straight and beautiful, sitting in an antique carriage drawn by Marwari horses who struggled against ruts in ground made marshy by heavy unseasonable rain.

Private family and religious wedding ceremonies morphed into drinks and dinner, guests drifting like petals in the evening breeze, stopping to greet old and new friends or gawp at the world famous such as Mick Jagger and Sting or, and more covetously, the spectacular jewels adorning both men and women; groups ebbing and flowing around the green acres of the Rambagh lawns; the bharat followers remarkably fresh after an all night party on a special train from Jodhpur and an early morning breakfast at a desert tented camp.

A return train trip to Jodhpur the following day gathered up new guests from Jaipur and reunited the men’s bharat party with the women of the bridegroom’s family and their friends, who remained in Jodhpur in keeping with tradition. Any idea that the women had been other than enjoying themselves as hard as the men was dispelled the next day by the improbable sight of kitsch plastic palm trees adorning the Umaid Bhavan Palace gardens as a backdrop, from all accounts, to some serious female partying.

For foreigners, serious shopping too had to be fitted in somewhere and well oiled expeditions to the narrow lanes of the old city encouraged abandonment to the seduction of salesmen luring customers with soft as butter Kashmiri shawls, myriad coloured silks and embroideries reputedly designed for the great fashion houses of the World and being sold, naturally, at a snip of their real price.

The romantic tour de force of the festivities, a dinner and dancing in the Mehrengarh Fort that evening, transported us all to an earlier era. The steep, carefully lit, walk up to the Fort in full evening dress and for safety’s sake on the cobbles, discarded heels, rewarded by a mesmerised sense of timelessness induced by Zilla Khan’s exquisite sufi singing. More temporal desires finally overtaking the crowds in a determined post trance search for the bar at the end of the crowded ramparts as a wave of thirsty people flowed onwards and upwards, the blue city unfolding far below them. The magic was restored by dinner in the courtyard of the ancient and lately restored Zenana building, a fitting setting for a post prandial nautch performance and where the crowds, however many hundred, were dwarfed by the surrounding impenetrable walls. The Nautch was followed by rather less lithe performances on the discotheque floor where we danced or swayed about until dawn.

A sustaining breakfast at Raas, the latest jewel in the hospitality chain in Jodhpur, was followed next morning by much needed mid-morning trays of bloody marys passing generously round the vast halls of the Umaid Bhavan Palace to rejuvenate the jaded and over partied for the culmination of the wedding festivities, the grah pravesh, the arrival of the bride at her new home. The assembled company, once more in their most colourful and traditional costumes with cameras at the ready, watched a procession led by the horses of the Jodhpur Lancers, the bride, more mundanely, bringing up the rear in a white 4x4, to be greeted by her new family. The ceremonial followed swiftly and inevitably by a large and delicious lunch before the bump back to earth began for most of us with thought of trains and planes to catch and the whole greyer reality of daily life, outside this happy, rainbow bubble, to face once again.