wedding videos in north kerala: technologies, rituals, and ideas about love and conjugality

5/21/2018 Wedding Videos in North Kerala: Technologies, Rituals, and Ideas about Love and Conjugality

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Wedding Videos in North Kerala:Technologies, Rituals, and Ideas about Love

and Conjugality

JANAKI ABRAHAM

This article focuses on weddings and wedding videos in north Kerala, India, and asks two interrelated questions: one,

how have marriage rituals and the ways in which a wedding is performed changed with the critical presence of the

photographer and videographer? Two, how does the wedding video represent marriage, conjugality, and love, and how

have these changed with changes in technology? [Key words: cameramen, India, love, marriage videos, visual repre-

sentations]

One of the most dramatic changes that has taken

place in weddings in north Kerala, as indeed in

other parts of India, is the way in which they are

recorded and presented. A very large and heavy photo-

graph album that has to be lugged about because of its

size and weight and a video CD that circulates widely

among friends, family, neighbors, and even curiousothers are considered essential products of a wedding.

While studies in visual anthropology in the last de-

cade or so in India have moved away from a prior

concentration on the study of indigenous art tra-ditions to more diverse visual formsFphotographs

(Karlekar 2005; Pinney 1997),1 calendar art (Uberoi and

Sood 20012002), television (Mankekar 1999), or Bolly-

wood film (Dwyer 2000, 2006; Dwyer and Patil 2002;

Uberoi 2006),2 marriage photographs and videos and the

implications of the new participantsFcameramenFat

a wedding have received surprisingly little attention.

The heavy album and the video, the cameramen and

the processes of recording and mixing the video, pro-

duce the marriage in distinct ways. These are important

processes that have brought changes in ritual and in

ideas of marriage. In this article, I ask two interrelated

questions: one, how have marriage rituals and the ways

in which a wedding is performed changed with the in-

troduction of the photographer and videographer? How

have these new participants in a wedding altered the

marriage ceremony? Two, how does the wedding video

represent marriage, conjugality, and love, and how have

these changed with changes in technology?3 Simulta-

neously, I look at whether the particular form a video

takes is unique to the community, and what differenti-

ates this form from that of other videos.

This study is based on fieldwork done primarily

among the ThiyyasFa caste group concentrated in

north Kerala, in southern IndiaFalthough now spreadacross the country and the world. The Thiyyas5 are a

large, heterogeneous intermediate caste. They were con-

sidered a polluting caste, and suffered considerable

disabilities due to practices of untouchability andunapproachability. Although associated with a tra-

ditional occupation of toddy-tapping, members of the

caste have been engaged in occupations ranging from

agricultural labor and ayurvedic doctors, colonial ad-

ministrators, and professions such as law, even as early

as the mid-19th century. Educational and occupational

opportunities made accessible through the Basel Ger-

man Mission and the British in Madras Presidency led

to the formation of a sizeable elite among the caste

during colonial rule. Thiyyas, especially in the coastal

towns of Thalassery, Kannur, and Kozhikode, are in fact

well known for having accessed employment or entre-

preneurial opportunities that opened to them. The

Thiyyas are internally differentiated by kinship prac-

tices. North Malabar Thiyyas have a history of

matrilineal kinship5 while south Malabar Thiyyas have

been patrilineal. The focus of my research has been north

Malabar Thiyyas.

Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 26, Issue 2, pp. 116127, ISSN 1058-7187, online ISSN 1548-7458. & 2010 by the American Anthropological Association. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-7458.2010.01072.x.


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The fieldwork for this article was initially done in

Thalassery, Bangalore, Palghat, Chennai, and Delhi

starting in 1996 and then during short stints of ten days

or two weeks every six months over two and half years

between 2005 and 2007. During these periods of field-

work I attended marriages and did fieldwork in houses,

and in photograph, video, and video-mixing studios. Inhouses, I spent time looking at and talking about mar-

riage albums, and changes in marriage rituals, and

looking at some photo albums and videos being watched

by families. Fieldwork in photographic studios has been

harder. It took me a long time to be allowed into a mix-

ing studio and to watch the mixing being done, partly

because of the problems of a woman hanging out in a

small, all-male space, but also because of the fear, ini-

tially, that I would carry information about the craft to

competitors.

The Cameraman as Wedding Officiator or

Choreographer of Performance

People say that the video started gaining popularity in

Thalassery in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Before that,

some weddings were filmed but only those of the com-

paratively wealthy, and that too by family members or

guests who may have had a movie camera. Marriage

photographs are of course much, much olderFin Tha-

lassery the oldest I have come across are from the

beginning of the 20th century.

In Thalassery, marriages are by far the most promi-nent occasion when photographs and a video are

takenFin addition to naming ceremonies and the first

time a child is fed rice. Among the middle class in Tha-

lassery, other occasions such as the first birthday of a

child are increasingly events when a professional may be

requested. In contrast to practices among Christians in

Thalassery, and practices in many parts of the world,

death and death rituals are not occasions when photo-

graphs are taken. Photographs and videos, then, tend to

be restricted to happy eventsFthose that people want

to remember and share with others.

At the weddings I attended, cameramen were very

prominent and I began considering the implications ofthese new participants. For one, there were often so

many of them. Both the brides and the grooms side

had their own photographer and videographer. At

middle-class marriages there are also family members

and friends taking photographs. There are three distinct

ways in which these people recording the event have

had a profound influence on the event itself: (a) their

presence, (b) their intervention in staging the event, and

(c) their role in the ritual.

When both the grooms side and the brides sidebring in cameramen and videographers, there are a total

of four men and at least one extra person with each

videographer to hold up the lights and manage the wires.

Six people shuffling about; technology that clicks and

flashes; wires that run across the floor that people

have to avoid tripping over; not to mention bright,

warm lights that go on and offFall make for a strong

presence.

At some weddings, particularly ones that are con-

ducted in an auditorium, the change in setting and the

strong presence of cameramen altered how weddingguests witness the event. When the wedding is held in

an auditorium, the ceremony is generally performed on a

stage on which only the immediate family is present. The

other guests become the audience, sitting below in rows

of seats. In this spatial arrangement the cameramen be-

come both the audience and the spectacle. They form a

sort of screen around the couple so that all that the au-

dience can see are their backs, with cameras sticking up

above their heads and the flashing of lights.6 At best,

people may get just a glimpse of things happening

through the crevices in the screen of cameramen (Figure

1a and b).

The audience for the ritual, then, are the cameramen(and the immediate family), because few others can see

it. The guests who are there to witness the marriage

only actually get to see it later in the photographs and

videoFthat is, through the eyes of the cameramen! The

idea of witnesses who are there to legitimize the mar-

riage by being present and actually seeing the ritual

performed is thus reformulated. Despite this, the product

of the video and the album are seen as worthy of in-

vesting inFeven at the cost of guests who are not able

to actually witness the ceremony.

However, this arrangement is quite different when

the marriage takes place in the house of the bride. In

Thalassery the ceremony takes place in the front court-yard with people standing around and on the raised long

veranda of the house that runs along the courtyard.

While those on the raised veranda manage to see what is

Janaki Abraham is a Reader in the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University. Her interest in the visual

cultures of north Kerala grew out of her doctoral work in the region. An exhibition titled Exploring the Visual Cultures of North

Kerala: Photographs, Albums and Videos in Everyday Life, based on this postdoctoral research, showed at the Arts and Aesthetics

gallery in the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi in March 2008.

Wedding Videos in North Kerala ABRAHAM 117


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going on, those on the ground level still have to jostle

with the cameramen and peer over their shoulders to

see.

The role of the cameramen goes far beyond their

presence at the event. Cameramen often intervene in the

wedding ritual itself. The technology they use is imper-

fectFbatteries or a tape has to be changed, the light

has to be adjusted, and so on. There are times when aphotographer will ask for the ritual to wait for him, say-

ing, ayittu illa, meaning not yet ready. Indeed, people

often note that the ritual revolves around the conve-

nience of the cameramen! The cameramen often suggest

that some part of the ceremony be repeatedFparts of

the garlanding or the exchange of bouquets. Sometimes

this may just mean making the gesture as though it is

being done. Some parts of rituals at a marriage are

then open to repetition. Repetition that will enable

a particular part of the ritual and the event in general

to be repeated again and againFin multiple copies

of the pictures or in a video that will be played and

replayed.Sometimes the cameraman or a videographer may

actually become one of the people conducting the mar-

riage ceremony. At a marriage I attended in a panchayator village adjacent to Thalassery town, at which the

nattumukhyastanor elder in the locality was conducting

the marriage,7 the person who appeared the surest about

custom was the cameraman. He frequently let his camera

hang by its strap around his neck as he directed the bride

and groom to sit in the right place, or suggested the order

in which the ceremony should proceed: the bride puts

the garland on the groom first, then the groom puts the

tali(gold necklace with pendant) on the bride, then gar-

lands her, then they exchange rings, then they exchange

flower bouquets.

In interviews about the differences in customs be-

tween different communities, cameramen in Thalassery

and in Palghat tended to effortlessly list the differentcustoms: In a Brahmin wedding . . ., Among Ezhavas

. . ., Among Muslims . . ., and so on. Having witnessed

so many marriages, cameramen have become knowers

of customs of different communities. As the owner of

one of the studios in Thalassery said, Ella kalyanam

namakke by heartFWe know by heart the customs of

all the communities.

Not only is a cameraman a knower of customs, but

his knowledge of customs also includes his own under-

standing of the essential ingredients of a marriage. At

the wedding described above where the cameraman di-

rected the ritual, after the exchange of garlands, the

tying of thetali, and the exchange of bouquets, he askedwhere the kumkumam was.8 Somebody rushed into the

house and brought out a box ofkumkumam. The use of

kumkumamat a marriage was in fact a new addition andone that was not part of all marriages at the time. While

many young Hindu women wear a red mark in their

parting now, in the mid-1990s this was only beginning

to become a fashion and people say it was rarely seen in

the 1980s. Thus, while the cameraman knows about the

marriage customs of different caste groups and different

FIGURE 1. A wedding in Bangalore, 2007.

118 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEWVolume 26 Number 2 Fall 2010


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regions, this knowledge is influenced by his own ideas of

what defines a marriage.

Cameramen routinely explained that they are often

asked about ritual procedure because the older genera-

tion is dying out and the younger generation who live

outside Kerala often do not know the customs. A few

spoke about how mistakes were often made in the rit-uals at marriages. When I asked Asif, a videographer in

Palghat about whether he intervened, he said that he first

gauged the character of the person officiating the

marriage and from that decided on whether he should

intervene or not. Some people dont like us telling

them, he said in Malayalam. Similarly, cameramen and

mixers in a digital video-mixing studio in Thalassery all

said they followed a similar strategy but that sometimes

they were told off and asked to take care of their own

work!

Video started gaining popularity in the late 1980sand early 1990s, and photographic studios in Thalassery

started doing wedding videos around this time. Video

technology is now completely digital and footage can be

cut to any required length. However, the original VHS

tapes were three hours long and no editing was possible.

The video man was constrained by the kind of technol-

ogy being used. While the actual marriage ceremony in a

Thiyya marriage lasts only a few minutes, the logic of a

large photograph album or what used to be a three-hour

videotape placed its own demands on the event.

With the advent of the video and the large photo-

graph album, an increasing number of occasions have

become part of what is photographed or filmed andpresented as part of the marriage. In contrast to old

black-and-white marriage albums that focused on the

day of the wedding alone and generally had only a few

photographs, a number of events have now become part

of what must be recorded of the marriage. Thus, on the

evening before the wedding, the cameraman films the

brides sari and accessories being brought to her house

from the grooms house, and the subsequent visit of

friends and neighbors for a meal. In addition to this, the

brides and grooms respective visits to a temple, either

in her neighborhood or one that she frequents, have now

become an important part of the wedding video. Many

albums and videos have shots of the bride walking intothe temple, dipping her feet in the temple tank, and

praying at the temple. The same types of images appear

in the grooms album and video as well. The desire forvaried shots, especially those that will contribute to the

overall aesthetics of the video, motivate this decision.

Thus, at one of the weddings I attended, I was witness

to the cameraman insisting on taking photographs of

the bride before the flowers were put on her hair. He

kept saying that there needed to be different kinds of

photographs for the album, otherwise it would appear

monotonous.

A style of composition known as the outdoor has

become popular in recent yearsFfilming the bride or

groom outdoors in a garden amidst foliage. Sometimes

they get the bride to change her clothes more than once.

This is sometimes achieved through the technologiesof digital mixing.9 Added to this routine is filming the

couple a few days after the marriage outdoorsFagain in

a park, in a garden, or on the beach. What makes this

outdoor routine important is the understanding that

footage of intimacy in the outdoors will provide the

happy ending for the video in which the couple are

seen as united in conjugal love. The invention of this

routine for the marriage video is clearly governed by

the variety it provides and is critical to the idea that

the video and album produced must be interesting and

entertaining.When I asked a group of video men in a studio why

the outdoor filming was generally done only a few days

later, and not on the day of the marriage, one of the men

explained that the couple are not comfortable with each

other immediately after the marriage. They would only

get good footage if it was a few days later. The video-

graphers strategy to film the outdoor scenes a few days

later is thus informed by the assumption that the marriage

is an arranged marriage where the bride and groom

may have barely seen each other before the wedding and

where they will need time to feel comfortable with each

other. In a number of videos one is aware of the video-

grapher directing the couple to perform in front of thecamera. The videographer here is the choreographer and

director of the film. The man is tentative when he puts his

arm around his wife and looks to the cameraman/choreo-

grapher for approval of whether he is performing the

romance as directed. Both of them usually have a some-

what embarrassed smile on their faces (Figure 2).

Often one can see the couple looking very unsure

and very embarrassed. It is significant that the public

demonstration of affection is in complete contrast to a

public morality in Kerala in which couples are not meant

to show affection in public or even in their house when

they live jointly, other than in the privacy of their

room.10

However, some couples do not wish to appear in

an outdoor sequence. The videographer thought this

was based on class. According to him, High partyikkuoutdoor ishtam illaFhigh-class people do not like

outdoor shooting. He said they wanted something

more simple. Class then is critical to the nature of the

choreographed performance. Both this choreographed

performance (and its absence) inform the idea of mar-

riage and its representation in significant ways.



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Mixing an Entertaining Video: Producing

Love and Status

This section is based on a study of over 35 marriage

videos belonging to people from different class back-

grounds, and spanning a period of 20 years between1987 and 2010. A majority of these are of Thiyya

weddings. However, for comparative purposes, the

selection included two videos, respectively, of a Chris-

tian and a Muslim wedding, and three videos from north

India. Of the videos of Thiyyas, the class difference spans

the broad width of the middle class. A majority of these

are marriages within the caste.

I focus on how a video is crafted by a videographer

and mixer to be entertaining and something that the

couple will want to keep. Further, I am interested in

how it represents marriage. The marriage video made

by these experts is different from other vid-

eosF

different from the home video, the documentaryfilm, the feature film, the music videoFeven while it

draws from each of these. While looking at the marriage

video, I am interested in simultaneously exploring the

ways in which this form seeks to become a new genre,

distinct from others.

The 20th century has been marked by significant

changes in the technologies used to photograph and

film, and in how the finished product of the photograph

album or video are produced. When the video started

gaining popularity in Thalassery at the end of the 1980s

and early 1990s, VHS videotape or cassette was used in

which little manipulation and editing was possible.11 A

few minutes of the film were left blank at the beginning

of the tape to be filled in later, bit by bit, by doing a VHS

to VHS copy from different tapes. What was added at the

beginning was some text that was filmed by mechani-cally placing the lettering against a background, and

inserting some scenery, often by filming postcards (as

shown below) or inserting film footage of scenery

taken earlier by the cameraman.12 In some videos, a few

images of the couple posing together had been inserted

at the beginning (Figure 3).

This is in sharp contrast to current digital video

technology that allows for the film to be transferred onto

a computer for editing at any selected point. The other

dramatic change has been in the kind of images avail-

able and the technologies of editing and special effects in

photographs, photograph albums, and videos.

Of course an important change has occurred in thecost and affordability of these. While even ten years ago

only a broadly middle-class group could afford the vid-

eo, now it is a part of almost all weddings. The cost of the

album and the video depends on the number of pictures

taken or the number of tapes filled, and for both an

album and a video the cost ranged from Rs. 3,000 to

over Rs. 20,000 in 2007 (from roughly US$65 to over

US$450).

The ways in which the video opens vary and is one

of the indicators of the creativity of the editing and

FIGURE 3. The beginning of a video before digital filming and editing (ca. 1987).

FIGURE 2. The marriage videographer choreographs love and romance (ca. 2001).

12 0 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEWVolume 26 Number 2 Fall 2010


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image mixing. The different openings belong to four

categories:

(1)A large number start with an image of the god

Ganesha or with just a lamp and then go on to ac-

knowledge the video studio. They thus frame the

marriage as having religious sanction (Figure 4).(2)Some videos start with an advertisement for the

video studio, such as Devan studio presents . . . It

may show a camera with a film reel coming out of

it or globes twirlingFan opening that clearly

mirrors the beginning of commercial films or the

start of a news program on TV. This image may be

followed by an image of a God. The nature of the

beginning in these prioritized the idea that what is

being watched is a film product.

(3) Some do not have a religious beginning and

instead start with secular images of well-be-

ingFthe sun rising and greenery, for example.

(4)A small number start with a curtain raiser, pre-senting the video clearly as a performance, as a

show.13 However, although this beginning explic-

itly presents the video as a performance, the others

that say the . . . studio presents . . . within the

first few minutes frame the video as something

that is crafted and presented by the studio.

Elaborate video-mixing techniques are employed in

wedding videos to conjure love, romance, and an image

of conjugality. The choice of images varies. A popular

choice is of images of KeralaFimages associated with

well-being, such as lush green paddy fields, the sea and

the green western Ghats, and images of Keralas dis-

tinctive cultureFKathakali, Theyyam, or Mohiniattam.

These locate the video in Kerala and conjure a sense of

pride in its culture and landscape. Green hills, water (the

sea, a river, or a cascading waterfall), birds, including a

dove or flocks of birds in flight, and flowers are by farthe most popular images used in these videos. These

pictorial references draw on an aesthetic of love and ro-

mance seen often in Indian cinema (see, e.g., Dwyer

2000; Dwyer and Patil 2002) (Figure 5).14

However, the images often go far beyond the local.

They range from images of the Tower Bridge in London,

of a violin with pearls dropping onto it, to tulips and

orange maple leaves. Images from far away, like Lon-

dons Tower Bridge or the Taj Mahal, conjure images of a

life together not confined to the local. They allude to the

romance of travel and to a honeymoon far away.

Dwyer and Patil argue that the remote and even fan-

tastic places, which are part of the multiple landscapesof romance in Hindi cinema, constitute privacy for the

romantic couple, a private space where they are away

from the surveillance of the family that controls,

prevents and decides romance, love and marriage

(2002:5859; also quoted in Orsini 2006:35).

According to the videographers, men who work in

the Gulf often request them to edit in images from there

so that when the titles appear at the beginning of the

video, the background depicts tall buildings and high-

ways in Dubai or Abu Dhabi. However, each of these

images signals different meanings. While the water,

FIGURE 5. Locating the video in the local; conjuring pride in Kerala (ca. 1999).

FIGURE 4. The beginning of a marriage video post digital technology (ca. 2006).



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hills, and greenery may conjure up images of well-being

and romance, images of the violin suggest style. This

hybridity of images is significant, although it is not un-

ique to this genre. G. Arunima (2003), in discussing the

artist Raja Ravi Vermas work, points out that the cul-

tural hybrid is seen as a marker of the creative artist or

musician. With the marriage videos this hybrid use ofimages is similarly presented as a marker of the creativ-

ity of the video-mixer (Figure 6).

When I asked the mixing studios where they got these

images from, they said it had become very easy now be-

cause both still and moving images were assembled in

Chennai and distributed on compact discs.15 Someone

even delivers these CDs to the studios in Thalassery. This is

quite different from a time when these cameramen would

go to hill stations like Kodaikanal in south India to take

photographs or film footage of the hills, clouds, birds, or a

waterfall. However, what enables the circulation of the

images of Tower Bridge and the violin also allows for

images considered local in Kerala to be used in northIndian videos. Thus, in a couple of north Indian videos I

have found images of coconut trees and piles of coconut

husk mixed into the images of the Delhi marriage!

Foliage is a popular motif in these videos. Clips of

flowers and greenery are mixed in, and the bride and

groom, respectively, are askedto pose in a garden among

trees, bushes, and flowers. Hindi and Malayalam cinema

are clearly strong influences in this. The outdoor

filming done after the marriage and orchestrated by the

cameraman is seen as the signature of particular cam-

eramen. Many videographers pride themselves on doing

good outdoor scenes. The scenes show the couple walk-

ing toward each other, walking toward the camera

holding hands, or sitting next to each other on the grass.

Some even have the couple walking around trees as in

Bollywood films. Sometimes these shots of a couple are

superimposed so that they appear to be walking amidst

falling maple leaves in New England during the fall.Special effects are critical to the production of love

and romance. Images twirl onto the screen and slide off

at one end. Multiple images come cascading onto the

screen and grow in size to fill the screen. Or an image of

the groom or bride multiplies on the screen and moves

around. Often images of the couple slide into gold

watches, or onto a computer screen (Figure 7). This ma-

terial culture is part of the association made in these

videos between love and well-beingFin this case, a

material well-being.16 It makes explicit the association

between romantic love and the culture of consumer

capitalism (Illouz 1997). Love is also conjured in less

subtle ways, for example through heart shapes holding apicture of the bride and groom within. Sometimes the

video-mixer and videographer17 construct a dream se-

quence in which the groom thinks about his bride on the

night before their wedding, thus suggesting love and

desire before they are married (Figure 7).18

Simultaneously, the videos mark out class and

status through the focus on the gold jewelry (Figure 8)

and the clothes the bride wears or will wear, the house of

the bride and groom, and the arrangements made at the

wedding ceremony.19 As mentioned earlier, the video

shows the grooms sister or a female relative bringing an

FIGURE 6. The hybrid of images used, particularly of places far away (ca. 2001).

FIGURE 7. The dream sequence before the wedding (ca. 1999).



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attache case to the brides house the day before the

wedding, and displaying the sari, blouse, sandals, hair

clips, makeup, and other accessories given to the bride.

Among the Thiyyas, dowry is not given and when the

bride goes to her husbands house, the only object she

takes from her natal home is the gold she wears. Every-

thing else, including safety pins, hair clips, and even thestring with which the gold necklaces are tied at different

lengths, comes from the grooms house. The status of the

groom and his ability to provide for his wife are high-

lighted by the cameramans panning on not only the sari

and blouse but also on accessories, such as sunglasses or

a watch.

The material culture of the bride and grooms house

is often given importance in the filming. In upper-mid-

dle-class houses, videographers tend to concentrate on

the objects and pictures therein. When talking about the

images they mixed into videos, one videographer said a

lot came from what he described as the houses of a high

party (upper or upper middle class). We dont have tomix in many other images, he said.

It is clear from the videos that in simpler homes,

the preferred technique of filming material culture is

through close-up shots and often a series of close-ups

of dolls, posters, or objects in the showcase are

taken in such a way that they focus on the object and

not on its place in the house. Thus, there are often very

few long shots of the whole showcase, or the whole

poster. This technique enables the introduction of

shots that are not in the house. In one video, for ex-

ample, I noticed a close-up of an aquarium, with no

long shot of its place in the house. Puzzled, I asked the

video-mixer if objects like this were often included.He said that in the video he was mixing at the time, he

had given them the aquarium for free. It wasnt

there . . . I gave it, he repeated in Malayalam. Whilethe violin with the pearls is clearly added, the scene

of the gold fish in an aquarium is meant to appear as

though it is in the house. When the material culture

of a house is so tied to status, the addition of some

feature is presented as a gift from the video-mixer

to enhance this status.

The arrangements made for the wedding are seen as

expressing status and the amount of money spent. The

video thus focuses on the decorations and on the food

being served. The banana leaf with all the different

dishes placed on it is panned. In more upper-middle-

class wedding receptions, held in the evening after the

wedding, the camera shows the food laid out in a buffetand pans on each dishs labelFmutton biriyani,batoora,

channa, for example. That some dishes are not part of

local cuisine and not easily available in Thalassery only

adds status to the arrangements.

While mixing is done for the whole film, by and

large the narrative remains linear in time. At most, at the

beginning of the video there may be a shot of the couple

taken after the marriage ceremony. Usually the video

starts with the bride or groom outdoors, followed by

shots of the temple visit, in turn followed by shots of the

evening before the wedding when family, friends, and

neighbors visit the brides or grooms home. This is fol-

lowed by the wedding, the outdoor scenes with thecouple, and sometimes, among the upper middle class, a

reception. However, the events covered depend on whe-

ther the video is of the brides side or the grooms. This is

a critical difference between the two videos. Each video

follows the events in the brides or the grooms house the

day before the wedding, and on the day itselfFas they

dress up, get blessings from elders, and then leave for the

marriage venue (for the bride it may just mean shots of

her walking out of the room to where the marriage is to

be conducted). The brides video ends when she leaves

the temple, the auditorium, or her house after the wed-

ding. The grooms video continues to when the bride

is welcomed into his house and family, friends, andneighbors are invited for a meal.

North Malabar Thiyyas have a history of matrilineal

kinship and a rule of virilocal residence, wherein thebride goes to live in the grooms house. This is important

in understanding their marriage ceremonies and the

visual representations of them. It is also critical in un-

derstanding the sharp distinction between the emotional

aesthetic of the wedding video here and that of the north

Indian video in which the bidaiFor the ceremony at

FIGURE 8. A focus on the brides jewelry, henna, and sari (ca. 1999).



9/12

which the bride is bid farewell by her natal familyFis a

significant part. Shuddhabrata Sengupta (1999), one of

the few who have written on marriage videos, discusses

the way the camera pans on the farewell and how the

shot overdramatizes it. This dramatic parting in which a

bride hugs each member of her family, often more than

once, and everyone weeps, is completely absent in Ker-ala. Among those with a history of matriliny, a woman

has a right to return to her house at any time while she is

married, either to visit or to live. Before the breakup of

the matrilineal tharavad (the matrilineal joint family

house) she would often return at widowhood to her natal

house where she had a share in the property. In other

words, for those with a history of matrilineal inheritance,

marriage did not mark a severance from her natal home.

This continues to be true. Brides do talk about feeling

sad when they leave their mothers house and do feel

extremely nervous given that they have often notexchanged more than a couple of words with the man

they have married, but there is a strong feeling that it is

not good for a bride to cry when she leaves her house.

The couple sometimes touch the feet of her parents be-

fore they leave. But other than this, which is often swift,

the departure from the place of the marriage is quick and

not ritualized. Further, the custom is that an odd number

of her relatives go back to the grooms house with her.

Given the lack of a ritual of severance with her natal

home, and the lack of tears, the video presents marriage

as a union of a man and woman through ritual and fa-

milial consent and characterized after the marriage by

love and romance. The anxiety of the bride is at mostexpressed by her sullen face but is not subject to focus

either through filming or mixing. The emotional aes-

thetic of the video is then not marked by dramatic shifts

in the mood, for example from merry making and danc-

ing to sorrow and loss as in north Indian videos. Instead,

it is characterized by a somewhat even spirit of romance

and ritual, and the warmth of family and friends.

Sound is a critical part of the way in which the video

is produced, as something that will be watched by many

and a film that seeks to be entertaining. Most videos are

completely dubbed over, while some include the original

sound track only at the sequence depicting the religious

ceremony. Other than those few minutes, when one canhear the priest or another functionary reciting shlokhas

and directing the marriage, or the nadeswaranand vad-

yam(wind instrument and drums) being played, the restof the video is dubbed with religious or devotional

music, film music, and what is called light music or

melodies, consisting of instrumentals or vocals. This is

dramatically different from the music in the older VHS

tapes where often the whole film was dubbed with one or

two songs or even if there were more, images were not

edited to the music as is the case today, when images and

music are edited simultaneously. Now, the product

seems to be inspired by a song sequence in a film or a

music video, where the tempo and lyrics of the songs are

appropriate to the scenes portrayed or vice versa. When I

asked the videographers and mixers why they dubbed at

all, they looked a little puzzled and one of them said in amatter-of-fact way, It has to be entertaining . . . People

have to sit and watch it for one or two hours, he said in

Malayalam. Without the music no one will watch it.

Most videos start with devotional music. It marks

the beginning of something auspicious that has religious

sanction. In addition, a visit to the temple the day before

the wedding is also often dubbed with devotional music.

The film songs vary and often are a mixture of Malaya-

lam and Hindi. The videographers said sometimes people

asked them to put their favorite songs in the video.

However, this dubbing is only possible because of thenature of the ceremony, which does not involve public

speaking. These are in contrast to videos one can see on

YouTube of Indians settled in the United Kingdom or

United States, in which speeches are often made by rel-

atives and friends of the couple. Here the speeches are an

important part of the wedding ceremony and cannot be

dubbed.

The end of the video, like the beginning, is often

creatively dramatized. Often they end with greetings

from the video studio to the married couple: Wish you a

happy married life. The video is presented as a gift to

the couple in which the videographer has produced both

ritual and, most importantly, romance.One can see from the transformations in the pro-

duction of marriage videos that the medium has grown

far more self-conscious over the years. Kerala has a

thriving film industry and a huge number of film buffs.

Many videographers aspire to be filmmakers, and some-

times marriage videos are the bread and butter for an

aspiring filmmaker. In the video with the dream se-

quence (see Figure 7), the image moves onto a screen

with an audience. This is the videographers dreamF

that his films will be watched in a cinema hall. Despite

this, it is clear that the video camera still shadows the

still camera. People spend a lot of time at each event of

the wedding posing in lines for the still camera. The vid-eo camera follows the still camera, moving from one end

of the group over each persons face one at a time, before

showing a long shot of the group.The changes seen in videos are not only indicative of

transformations in the institution of marriage, but have

in themselves brought significant changes to the insti-

tution. While individual desire and happiness are

stressed through images of romance, the dramatization

of familial consent, tradition, and ritual is critical. These



10/12

are similar to the trend in Bollywood films in the 1990s

discussed by Patricia Uberoi (2006), in which love and

romance are seen as legitimate when accompanied with

familial consent. In fact, it is significant that in the late

1990s, love marriage was a term that people hesitated

to use in Thalassery. Most often people would squirm a

bit and hurriedly say love and arranged, highlightingthe distinction made between self-arranged marriages

that had familial consent and those that did not. The

latter were seen as somewhat dishonorable and associ-

ated with couples eloping and having a court marriage.

While the image of conjugality characterized by

love is modern, one notices that in this performance of

romance, gender roles are reproduced. In many of the

outdoor scenes in particular, it is most often the man

who is seen to be the primary actor, putting his arm

around the bride as they pose on the beach, for example.

This should not be surprising given a conjugal norm inKerala in which the husband is seen as having authority

over his wife. Given this and especially Keralas high rate

of domestic violence,20 it is hard not to read these por-

trayals of love and romance in wedding videos as

somewhat utopian, at least where women are concerned.

Watching Marriage Videos

Any discussion on marriage videos is incomplete with-

out a discussion of how they are viewed. The changing

technologies of the video and the mixing studio, and

particularly the shift from cassette to DVD, have oc-

curred along with a shift in the material culture ofhouses. Since 1996, when I first visited Thalassery and

started fieldwork, there have been dramatic changes. At

the time, in the lower-middle-class households a televi-

sion was comparatively new and many houses did not

have one, so that children and adults would go to

watch the Sunday afternoon film at a neighbors house.

In the summer of 2007 it seemed as though all houses

in the two neighborhoods where I conducted my initial

fieldwork had a TV. While the lower-middle-class

households had a TV, VCD, or DVD player and a music

player, the big upper-middle-class houses often had these

and a world space radio. Having these was tied to the in-

come of the family, an interest in music and film, andoften a Gulf connection. Of the films that were played on

the DVD, the marriage video held an important place

along with commercial films and music videos.

After a marriage, the marriage video is awaited with

considerable interest and anticipation. People start ask-

ing for it barely a few days later. This interest is

expressed by both those who could not attend the wed-

ding, as well as those who did. Thus, having been at the

wedding does not make the video redundant. This is

one way in which the video is seen, not just as a text of

what happened, but also as a productFsomething to

be consumed and a source of entertainment.

Often the video is watched at home by a number of

people, both adults and children. It is not necessarily

something that needs to be watched with complete con-

centration, so someone may wander off to another roomduring the screening. Animated and lengthy discussions

take place on the amount and type of jewelry worn by the

bride, as well as her sari. Comments are often made about

both the brides and the grooms looks. Much time is spent

identifying people. Sometimes, there is discussion on the

customs followed. However, what distinguishes a video is

the quality of the images, the mixing of scenes, including

the outdoor scenes, the nature of special effects, and,

most important, the music. Thus, this product is not only a

record of the events, but one that is also meant to entertain.

The marriage video circulates like the album doesF

andhaving seen one does not mean that there is no interest in

seeing the other. With widespread migration from Kerala,

there has been a dramatic expansion of viewing circles so

that it is often sent abroad to relatives who did attend the

wedding.

Conclusion

This article has explored the implications of a set of new

actors at a marriage ceremony and changes in wedding

videos with the changes in technology. It discussed the

way the wedding video is crafted to conjure love andromanceFboth through choreographing a performance

at the wedding ceremony and after, as well as through

the techniques of video-mixing. I argue that cameramen

are not only "knowers of custom" but inventors of it too.

The influences of these new knowers of custom and the

demands of the technology used are often ignored

when we consider changes in the culture of marriage

brought about through processes such as the media and

globalization.

It is clear that there is no one-on-one relationship

between the ritual and performance of the wedding, and

the video representationFeven while it is important to

recognize that the genealogy of the movie camera mustbe traced to the still camera. What I have tried to show is

that the relationshipFa complex oneFis important in

understanding how community and the local come to

mark out the video. This is particularly evident through

the argument about what the lack of the bidai (bidding

the bride farewell) in north Indian weddings means for

the aesthetic of the video. This aesthetic quality of the

film marks it as the other of the Malayalam art film

characterized by melodrama and melancholy, often



11/12

ending in tragedy. Marriage videos are more akin to new

films in mainstream cinemaFboth Bollywood and

Malayalam cinema, in which marriage, ritual, and gift

giving are dramatized and love and romance are legit-

imized when accompanied by parental support (Uberoi

2006). The pictorial references through which love and

romance are conjured are clearly cultural, as, for exam-ple, the images of well-being in Kerala, of style and

material well-being, distant travel, or images such as the

Taj Mahal that are associated with deep conjugal love.

These tend to draw from cinemaFBollywood and Ma-

layalam. However, what is unique to wedding videos is

the movement of images on the screen and the circula-

tion of images between these videos. These are critical to

the video produced that seeks to represent the wedding

and more generally conjugality while being entertaining

The wedding video is a product created by the

videographer and the video-mixers. That the choreo-graphed scenes of love and romance or the mixed

images, including the dream sequences, often evoke

laughter in their viewers, whether in Thalassery, Delhi,

or London, suggests that this is not a product that simply

records the events of the marriage but one that pre-

sents the marriage and the relationship of the couple

through the eyes of the videographer and video-mixer.

This crafting of the video and the increasing self-

consciousness in its production would suggest that

the wedding video is moving toward being a new

genre, distinct from others.

Acknowledgments

This article, in its various avatars, has been presented in different in-stitutions: The Sociology Department, DSE, Delhi University, Instituteof Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, CDS, Thiruvananthapu-

ram, Anthropology Department, Kannur University, Pallayad, Schoolof Womens Studies, Jadavpur University, and the South Asia semi-nar series at LSE, London. I would like to thank the audiences in each

of these seminars for useful questions. For detailed comments on thearticle I thank Prof. Roma Chatterji and Dr. G. Arunima. I am grateful

to the India Foundation for the Arts for support for the project ofwhich this research has been a part. For assistance on this larger

project I thank Aarthi Ajit. I would like to acknowledge the numerouspeople in Thalassery who have helped in this research in various

waysF

by welcoming me into their homes, inviting me to marriages,showing me videos and albums, and helping me source videos.Thanks also to the studios and cameramen who, despite tight work

schedules, took the time to explain their craft to me and answer scoresof questions

Notes

1 These references are only indicative and should not be

read as an exhaustive list.

2 The first edited book on Malayalam cinema has just been

published; see Pillai (2010).3 This article is part of a larger project that explores whether

we can talk about community or region-specific visual

cultures. Do communities have distinct ways in which they

represent themselves, or are they represented by profes-sionals hired on such occasions to photograph/film the

event? How are these visual cultures influenced by class,

location, gender, individual biography, and technology?4 I put Thiyyas in quotation marks to indicate that this iden-

tity is socially, historically, and contextually constituted.

The Thiyyas are the majority caste in Malabar.5 In 1975, matriliny in Kerala was legally abolished

through the passing of the Kerala Hindu Joint Family Sys-

tem (Abolition) Act. This meant that the matrilineal joint

family house and landFthetharavadFwould not accrue

new members after this date. This came at the end of leg-

islations on marriage and property that started in 1896

with the Malabar Marriage Act, 1896. The 1975 law was

the final legal axe to matriliny. However, this is not to say

that matrilineal kinship is dead, as everyday kinship

practices have a complex relationship to changes in the

law.6 Some photograph studios have their cameramen wear

jackets with the studios name and logo printed strategi-

cally on the back of the jacket.7 There was no priestFa feature that is common. Sri Naray-

ana Guru, a religious leader and social reformer, in-

troduced a number of changes to the marriage ceremony

at the beginning of the 20th century. One of these was that

a priest officiate at a wedding. Sri Narayana Guru estab-

lished a priest training school for men of all castes and

established temples, so that Thiyyas did not have to bearthe indignity of standing outside an upper caste temple

and having the offering thrown at them from afar.8 Vermilion powder that is worn just above the forehead in

the parting of the hair. This sign symbolizes that a woman

is married.9 In their exploration of clothing and romance in Hindi

films, Dwyer and Patil (2002) argue that not only are the

frequent changes of clothes tied to the display of conspic-

uous consumption, but also it is meant to communicate

the adaptability of the heroine.10 This focus on conjugality and romantic love in a context in

which the demonstration of affection is not considered

appropriate has a long history. As Rochana Majumdar asks,

How (are we) to understand Bengali wedding portraits,most of which show the bride and bridegroom . . . often with

their limbs touching, their images frozen in a gesture of to-

getherness when other histories seem to suggest that these

sentiments were far more contested in everyday life?

(quoted in Pinney 2008:144145). Pinney (2008:145) ar-

gues, Conjugality, especially in various Indian reformist

movements, was defined and enacted in front of the camera

before being exported to more everyday spaces. Further,

photographic practices and in this case the videography

of the outdoor scenes, for example, are, as Pinney writes,



12/12

drawing on the work of Sujith Parayil, not simply a repre-

sentation of new modes of spatiality but the simultaneous

physical enactment of that new world (Pinney 2008:145).11 Video Home System, an analogue video technology that

was developed in Japan in 1976.12

This text was of the title Wedding, the name of the studioand the cameraman, the names of the couple, the date, and

so on.13 This is indicative of the influence of the Parsi theatreFa

strong influence seen in Bollywood films.14 In turn, Hindi cinema draws from multiple influences, in-

cluding, as Dwyer argues, from aesthetics developed in

Urdu poetry and seen in calendar art (2000:155).15 This place in Chennai also assembles images using the

software Photoshop, so that layers can be separated and

put onto another image.16 As discussed earlier, images of green fields in Kerala also

make the same association with well-being.17 Videographers often sit with the video-mixer when the ed-

iting is being done, or at least brief him on what theywould like done, including special requests of particular

music or clips by the client.18 This is contrary to the way marriages were arranged in the

1990s, where before the marriage the couple would have

barely seen each other and exchanged a few words, if at

all. One understanding that informed these arranged

marriages was that love would follow the arranged

marriage. During fieldwork for my Ph.D., in response to

my question about whether they had had an arranged or

a love marriage, some respondents said, Nischeyicha,

pinne love! (It was arranged, love came after!) (Abraham

2006).19 The jewelry is often photographed or videoed before it is

worn. The sari is shown when it is about to be taken to thebrides house or after it is given to her in her house the day

before the wedding. These are also the focus when she is

dressed up on the day of the wedding.20 See, for example, Kodoth and Eapen (2005).

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wedding videos in north kerala: technologies, rituals, and ideas about love and conjugality

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