Where to start... it's been a while since updating the blog as we've been moving around quickly from place to place and staying in cheap as accomodation where things like wi-fi (and hot water and pillows and electricity) would have been a luxury. Its been fun though here are some highlights....
The Kashmiri wedding was an epic event based around music and eating. We arrived to find the tents decorated with swathes of fabric, hundreds of fairy lights hanging everywhere possible, and masses of people arriving, grouping together to save prime spots in the main tent. The clothes were stunning - everyday dresses are colourful and decorative and the party outfits were a hundred times more so. Particularly the younger girls were draped with sequined embroidery, henna-ed hands and feet, gold earrings and bangles. The men were dressed quite low key on the first night though the next day wore beautiful traditional suits.
We sat around the tent for hours. Gradually cushions and mattresses and blankets were brought out and there would be a mass scrabble to distribute them. There were some other foreigners, either friends of the grooms (two brothers) or friends of extended family, and we all sort of gravitated towards the same area, mostly because shared language allowed for more conversation compared to all of our pitiful amounts of
Urdu. As we chatted with a couple from Australia and a group from Spain we all got arranged into groups of four and dinner began to be served. Huge metal tea pots of water were brought around for everyone to wash hands and then a big plate of rice was put in the middle of the four people. We sat with two boys from our houseboat family and they showed us what to do. Course after course of meat and sauce was delivered by men ladling out of large pans. Using only the right hand you had to scoop rice and break off the meat. It was messy... i think the only person messier than us by the end was the two year old child next to us happily bathing herself in rice.
We were wondering how people managed to eat so many courses then we notice that many women had plastic bags and were putting most of the meat in there for later. This custom means that families can share the meat back home where the diet is mostly vegetarian and is one way of the grooms to give back having received grand wedding presents of money and gold jewellery from their guests.
After the big clear up and reshuffle the musicians came in. A group with a guy called Ashoka Hussain (available on you tube) played, chanted and sang all night and were still going when we left at eight am. They were accompanied by a man in a bright red and silver skirted outfit who had bells on his ankles and danced like a kingfisher. Constantly smiling he shimmied his hips and twirled and did spins that would make ballet dancers' jaws drop. The girls would push each other out of the way to try and dance with him. All night long he would go into the audience and drag up one person at a time and dance with them as everyone watched. Some lept at the chance and others had to be carried and dumped onto the dancefloor. In the early hours of the morning as people started drifting off the red dancer got water and started flicking it, waking up the sleepy crowd to great cheers and the dancing continued.
Over the three days we didn't see the brides - they were having separate parties at their own homes and would meet their grooms for the first time on the evening of day three once all guests had left. Arranged marriage is still very much the done thing in Srinigar and the 'gifts' from the brides families were paraded around. Lots of gold, boxes and boxes of blankets, and these crazy necklaces made by stapling money together. It was a really interesting event to witness - the tents and people were beautiful but the sentiments behind it all were bafflingly sterile.
The Kashmiri wedding was an epic event based around music and eating. We arrived to find the tents decorated with swathes of fabric, hundreds of fairy lights hanging everywhere possible, and masses of people arriving, grouping together to save prime spots in the main tent. The clothes were stunning - everyday dresses are colourful and decorative and the party outfits were a hundred times more so. Particularly the younger girls were draped with sequined embroidery, henna-ed hands and feet, gold earrings and bangles. The men were dressed quite low key on the first night though the next day wore beautiful traditional suits.
We sat around the tent for hours. Gradually cushions and mattresses and blankets were brought out and there would be a mass scrabble to distribute them. There were some other foreigners, either friends of the grooms (two brothers) or friends of extended family, and we all sort of gravitated towards the same area, mostly because shared language allowed for more conversation compared to all of our pitiful amounts of
Urdu. As we chatted with a couple from Australia and a group from Spain we all got arranged into groups of four and dinner began to be served. Huge metal tea pots of water were brought around for everyone to wash hands and then a big plate of rice was put in the middle of the four people. We sat with two boys from our houseboat family and they showed us what to do. Course after course of meat and sauce was delivered by men ladling out of large pans. Using only the right hand you had to scoop rice and break off the meat. It was messy... i think the only person messier than us by the end was the two year old child next to us happily bathing herself in rice.
We were wondering how people managed to eat so many courses then we notice that many women had plastic bags and were putting most of the meat in there for later. This custom means that families can share the meat back home where the diet is mostly vegetarian and is one way of the grooms to give back having received grand wedding presents of money and gold jewellery from their guests.
After the big clear up and reshuffle the musicians came in. A group with a guy called Ashoka Hussain (available on you tube) played, chanted and sang all night and were still going when we left at eight am. They were accompanied by a man in a bright red and silver skirted outfit who had bells on his ankles and danced like a kingfisher. Constantly smiling he shimmied his hips and twirled and did spins that would make ballet dancers' jaws drop. The girls would push each other out of the way to try and dance with him. All night long he would go into the audience and drag up one person at a time and dance with them as everyone watched. Some lept at the chance and others had to be carried and dumped onto the dancefloor. In the early hours of the morning as people started drifting off the red dancer got water and started flicking it, waking up the sleepy crowd to great cheers and the dancing continued.
Over the three days we didn't see the brides - they were having separate parties at their own homes and would meet their grooms for the first time on the evening of day three once all guests had left. Arranged marriage is still very much the done thing in Srinigar and the 'gifts' from the brides families were paraded around. Lots of gold, boxes and boxes of blankets, and these crazy necklaces made by stapling money together. It was a really interesting event to witness - the tents and people were beautiful but the sentiments behind it all were bafflingly sterile.
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