Indians and even some non-Indians worldover are gripped with excitement over the wedding of Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan. She is a former Miss World, top Bollywood actress and one of the faces of international cosmetics firm L'Oreal. She has featured on the cover of Time magazine, and is one of the few Indian actors to have successfully crossed over into western cinema. She has been on Oprah Winfrey show, and the David Letterman show. Her wax statue has even been placed in Madame Tussaud's in London.
She comes from an educated middle-class family, excelled at academics, but chose modeling and then films because it is hard not to when you are regarded as the most beautiful woman in the world. Despite all her fame, fortune and success, she has remained deeply traditional, maintained her closeness to her family, and guarded her privacy. With all these accomplishments, she has won the respect and admiration of millions of women and girls in India today. She stands for what is possible for today’s Indian woman: beauty, education, independence, financial freedom, strength and respect on the world stage.
Unsurprisingly, sometime last year, Aishwarya Rai decided that it was time to get married. She set her sights on the best that Bollywood or rather, India had to offer. Her hard-earned social, political and economic capital landed her a match with Abhishek Bachchan, son of Bollywood’s first family. What followed that decision however, has been rather shocking. She and her in-laws---perhaps the most famous and well-regarded family in all of India---appear to have regressed heavily into a world of strong patriarchal traditions and deep-rooted superstition.
When Aishwarya was found to be “manglik” (born under mars, which is considered a sign of bad luck in India) she joined the Bachchans in a series of superstitious acts that were intended to protect them from her bad influence. She is said to have visited the Sankat Mochan temple in Varanasi in the dead of the night and had married to a tree (under the hope that any bad luck would befall the tree instead of Abhishek Bachchan). In a further display of superstition and blind-faith, her father-in-law Amitabh Bachchan and his confidants, industrialist Anil Ambani and Amar Singh, visited the Tirupati temple and offered Rs.5 million each to the temple trust, one of the richest in the country. Amitabh has also donated 100 kg of gold and placed a card for his son’s wedding at the deity’s feet. The pictures from these events show that his fingers were adorned with stones of many different types, all presumably to ward off the evil eye that may be brought by a manglik daughter-in-law.
Who Aishwarya Rai marries, and how she goes about it is her private business. Yet, I find her transformation from an independent-minded international superstar to a demure and quiet daughter-in-law who touches her husband’s feet (I believe she did that at her wedding) rather disappointing. It seems to suggest that all said and done, an Indian woman’s worth is still ultimately determined by the man she marries and the family she marries into. Worse, I think the very public displays of superstition, and the flagrant use of wealth and power to deal with superstition have undoubtedly setback the millions of so-called “manglik” girls of India. Besides legitimizing a rather dubious concept that is damaging to a woman, Aishwarya Rai and the Bachchans together seem to have legitimized the idea that bad horoscopes for a woman should matter, and worse, that they are best dealt with by paying and praying in the right temples of India.
Amitabh Bachchan’s role in all this has been as surprising as Aishwarya’s. He is aware of how well respected he is in India. He has been hugely successful in making a dent in the campaign against polio simply because he has such a huge following and people believe in him. To put his superstitions and put strong patriarchal values on public display seems to be a rather surprising.
I should wrap this up here! I don’t want to be guilty of participating in the frenzy surrounding this wedding for too much longer. I hope that Aishwarya Rai doesn’t lose her identity in her new marriage, or allow her career to be dominated by her in-laws. That would be most unfortunate for a woman who was capable of attaining so much on her own, and setting new examples of what is possible for Indian women today.
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