The traditional Meitei wedding, rooted in indigenous rituals and community-oriented ceremony, has seen a new ‘spectacle’ unfold with increasing regularity. Recent Meitei weddings over the past few years have witnessed the surging trend of extravagant and big fat weddings filled with costly ‘pomp and show ’and ‘lavish affairs’, mirroring the big fat North Indian wedding trends.
Platforms like Instagram and Facebook are filled with meticulously produced wedding photoshoots and reels. These events, once a simple, traditional, community-oriented and modest nuptials, have now become ‘status markers’ for the urban elites and also for most middle-class families. It is now a spectacle of silk and gold, designer outfits, opulent stage decorations, as social media gets flooded with cinematic pre-wedding and wedding shoots.
The penetration of neoliberalism and market capitalism, rapid urbanisation, access to consumer goods and the spread of digital media, particularly social media, have fostered a class of new aspirations. Thus, these weddings are no longer mere traditional celebrations but expressions of class, power, and consumer capitalism. A critique of such trends requires us to dive deeper into the socioeconomic transformations of our society, rather than blanket bans on such trends, as these celebrations are manifestations of larger economic issues.
A critique of this using Marx’s materialist conception of history provides a useful starting point in understanding the transformation. Marx argues that the economic base, i.e., its modes of production, material conditions and class relations, shapes the superstructure, which includes culture, ideology, law and its social institutions.
Manipur’s economic structure over the past few decades has shifted from a subsistence and communal exchange economy to a capitalist one. Rise of the salaried middle class, penetration of neoliberal market, rapid urbanisation, rising private sector, entrepreneurial earnings, etc., have transformed the economic structure. The rise of the extravagant Meitei weddings as cultural practices represents a superstructural element and is a direct reflection of our economic changes.
Weddings now provide a fantasy of prosperity, and are a space for the active display of social status, social capital and prestige. The wedding spectacle thus reflects a deeper transformation of our economic structure, a direct reflection of late-stage capitalism, and a class structure where active display of wealth becomes the new norm of social legitimacy. Moreover, this extravagance can be understood as a symptom of late-stage capitalism marked by hyper-consumerism, extreme wealth disparity and the commercialisation of daily life.
Thorstein Veblen’s concept of ‘Conspicuous Consumption’ further explains this rising phenomenon. The theory put forth by economist Thorstein Veblen in his 1899 work “The Theory of Leisure Class” posits that people engage in conspicuous consumption, i.e., buying and using luxury goods as a means of demonstrating wealth and social prestige.
Further, he argues that this behaviour is not merely about satisfying needs but stems from the desire for social recognition and differentiation from others and highlights the role of social norms and cultural expectations in shaping consumer behaviour, suggesting that individuals often derive identity and self-worth from their consumption choices.
The newly affluent class display their wealth through such spectacles to mark its distinction from others. The wedding procession is no longer just cultural as it has now become performative for a wider, imagined audience through the elaborate gold jewellery, designer phaneks, and social media-worthy pictures. Every corner of the celebration, from the gold jewellery, high-end designer outfits, its opulent wedding location, lavish feasts, to the drone shot videos posted on Instagram, becomes a commodity for public consumption.
The role of social media becomes important as it becomes the primary space for displaying the big fat Manipuri wedding. Thus, this spectacle of the affluent classes (especially the urban elites and business classes) becomes the new norm, which puts pressure on many working-class families to achieve this new societal expectation, leading families to take huge loans to finance such spectacles, often falling into crippling debt.
It is exactly at this juncture that various Lups and community bodies have come out calling for blanket bans on such extravagant weddings, arguing that such new practices go against the traditional values and put a strain on the working class in mimicking the practices. While these efforts may come from genuine concerns, these bans are fundamentally misguided as they target the superstructural manifestations while ignoring the underlying economic structure. They focus on the visible expressions (lavish wedding), which is a symptom of the disease, i.e., the economic structure of late-stage capitalism.
Banning ‘fijangs’, ‘cake-cuttings’, ‘designer outfits’, etc, does nothing to address the systemic inequalities perpetuated by this economic system. These bans and restrictions remain merely symbolic if we don’t analyse the prevailing capitalist economic structure that perpetuates class disparity, corruption, hyper-consumerism, and market-defined identity. Such interventions may even lead to manifestations of consumerist logic in more extravagant alternative outlets.
The critique here is not an argument against celebration but rather against letting capitalism reshape the meaning of our celebrations and commodify them, which perpetuates anxieties and fear among families as they try to meet social expectations, and the focus of the lups and organisations on the superstructural symptoms. The intervention must move beyond blanket bans, moral lecturing and policing and examine the economic structure that produces such competitive consumption and status-driven activities.
The writer is a research scholar, Department of Sociology, Dhanamanjuri University Manipur
