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]
O
ne 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 curious
others 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 lm (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 eldwork done primarily
among the ThiyyasFa caste group concentrated in
north Kerala, in southern IndiaFalthough now spread
across the country and the world. The Thiyyas
5
are a
large, heterogeneous intermediate caste. They were con-
sidered a polluting caste, and suffered considerable
disabilities due to practices of untouchability and
unapproachability. 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 kinship
5
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.
The eldwork 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 eld-
work I attended marriages and did eldwork in houses,
and in photograph, video, and video-mixing studios. In
houses, 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 Ofciator 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 lmed 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 rst
time a child is fed rice. Among the middle class in Tha-
lassery, other occasions such as the rst 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 of
these 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 inuence 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 side
bring 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 shufing about; technology that clicks and
ashes; wires that run across the oor 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 wedding
guests 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 ashing 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
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 a
photographer 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 panchayat
or village adjacent to Thalassery town, at which the
nattumukhyastan or 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 groomto sit in the right place, or suggested the order
in which the ceremony should proceed: the bride puts
the garland on the groom rst, then the groom puts the
tali (gold necklace with pendant) on the bride, then gar-
lands her, then they exchange rings, then they exchange
ower bouquets.
In interviews about the differences in customs be-
tween different communities, cameramen in Thalassery
and in Palghat tended to effortlessly list the different
customs: 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 the tali, and the exchange of bouquets, he asked
where the kumkumam was.
8
Somebody rushed into the
house and brought out a box of kumkumam. The use of
kumkumam at a marriage was in fact a new addition and
one 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 REVIEW Volume 26 Number 2 Fall 2010
regions, this knowledge is inuenced by his own ideas of
what denes 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 rst
gauged the character of the person ofciating 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 1980s
and 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 lmed and
presented 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 lms 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 into
the 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 for
varied 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 owers 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 yearsFlming 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 technologies
of digital mixing.
9
Added to this routine is lming 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 lming 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 lm 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 the
camera. The videographer here is the choreographer and
director of the lm. 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 signicant 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 partyikku
outdoor 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 signicant ways.
Wedding Videos in North Kerala ABRAHAM 119
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 between
1987 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-
eosFdifferent from the home video, the documentary
lm, the feature lm, 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 signicant
changes in the technologies used to photograph and
lm, and in how the nished 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 lm were left blank at the beginning
of the tape to be lled 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 lmed by mechani-
cally placing the lettering against a background, and
inserting some scenery, often by lming postcards (as
shown below) or inserting lm 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 lm 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 the
cost 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 lled, 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 lming and editing (ca. 1987).
FIGURE 2. The marriage videographer choreographs love and romance (ca. 2001).
120 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 26 Number 2 Fall 2010
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 lm reel coming out of
it or globes twirlingFan opening that clearly
mirrors the beginning of commercial lms 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 lm 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
rst 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 elds, 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 ocks of birds in ight, and owers are by far
the 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 conned 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 landscapes
of 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).
Wedding Videos in North Kerala ABRAHAM 121
hills, and greenery may conjure up images of well-being
and romance, images of the violin suggest style. This
hybridity of images is signicant, 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 of
images 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 lm 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 north
Indian 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
owers and greenery are mixed in, and the bride and
groom, respectively, are asked to pose in a garden among
trees, bushes, and owers. Hindi and Malayalam cinema
are clearly strong inuences in this. The outdoor
lming 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 lms. 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 ll 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 a
picture of the bride and groom within. Sometimes the
video-mixer and videographer
17
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).
122 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 26 Number 2 Fall 2010
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 the
string 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 lming. 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 to
mix in many other images, he said.
It is clear from the videos that in simpler homes,
the preferred technique of lming 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. While
the violin with the pearls is clearly added, the scene
of the gold sh 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 buffet
and 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 lm, 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 the
couple, 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, and
neighbors are invited for a meal.
North Malabar Thiyyas have a history of matrilineal
kinship and a rule of virilocal residence, wherein the
bride 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).
Wedding Videos in North Kerala ABRAHAM 123
which the bride is bid farewell by her natal familyFis a
signicant 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 not
exchanged 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 most
expressed by her sullen face but is not subject to focus
either through lming 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 lm 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 can
hear the priest or another functionary reciting shlokhas
and directing the marriage, or the nadeswaran and vad-
yam (wind instrument and drums) being played, the rest
of the video is dubbed with religious or devotional
music, lm 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 lm 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 lm 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 a
matter-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 lm 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 the
nature 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 lm industry and a huge number of lm buffs.
Many videographers aspire to be lmmakers, and some-
times marriage videos are the bread and butter for an
aspiring lmmaker. 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 lms 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 signicant 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
124 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 26 Number 2 Fall 2010
are similar to the trend in Bollywood lms 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 signicant 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, highlighting
the 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 in
Kerala 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 of
houses. Since 1996, when I rst visited Thalassery and
started eldwork, 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 lm at a neighbors house.
In the summer of 2007 it seemed as though all houses
in the two neighborhoods where I conducted my initial
eldwork 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 lm, and
often a Gulf connection. Of the lms that were played on
the DVD, the marriage video held an important place
along with commercial lms 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 room
during 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 doesFand
having 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 and
romanceFboth 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 inuences 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 must
be 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
lm marks it as the other of the Malayalam art lm
characterized by melodrama and melancholy, often
Wedding Videos in North Kerala ABRAHAM 125
ending in tragedy. Marriage videos are more akin to new
lms 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, Institute
of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, CDS, Thiruvananthapu-
ram, Anthropology Department, Kannur University, Pallayad, School
of 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 the
article I thank Prof. Roma Chatterji and Dr. G. Arunima. I am grateful
to the India Foundation for the Arts for support for the project of
which this research has been a part. For assistance on this larger
project I thank Aarthi Ajit. I would like to acknowledge the numerous
people in Thalassery who have helped in this research in various
waysFby 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 scores
of questions
Notes
1
These references are only indicative and should not be
read as an exhaustive list.
2
The rst 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-specic 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/lm the
event? How are these visual cultures inuenced 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 landFthe tharavadFwould 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 nal 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 ofciate 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 bear
the 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
lms, 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 dened 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,
126 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 26 Number 2 Fall 2010
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 studio
and the cameraman, the names of the couple, the date, and
so on.
13
This is indicative of the inuence of the Parsi theatreFa
strong inuence seen in Bollywood lms.
14
In turn, Hindi cinema draws from multiple inuences, 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 elds 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 they
would 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 eldwork 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 the
brides 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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