Sad Bollywood Wedding
Are you marrying someone you do not love? Did your whole family just die? Is the best man planning to kill himself at the reception? And perhaps more importantly: is someone singing about it? If the answer's yes, congratulations on your Sad Bollywood Wedding!
Your family and friends will help you walk to the altar if you're sobbing too hard to walk. The camera will lovingly linger on your tears and possibly those of the one true love you'll never get to see again because your parents disapprove - but hey, maybe you'll sing a last song together and all the guests will join in to tell us how dangerous it is to fall in love... And why your groom doesn't take off is anybody's guess.
A staple of Indian romance movies, the Sad Bollywood Wedding is what happens when marriage and melodrama collide to make people who watch the movie cry so hard they can't see the screen anymore. Depending on the movie, the reason why the wedding is sad changes but you can expect amazing saris, tears, drama - and maybe a last minute twist.
Truth in Television — even without the Bollywood or some sort of lost love undertone, some traditional Indian marriage ceremonies are based on the idea that the bride leaves her family forever to live with her husband and his family (who're supposed to be total strangers to her). This often involves a lot of crying and even mourning on the part of the bride and her family.
Film
- Kal Ho Naa Ho: The bride cries all the way to the altar because she's in love with the dying best man. They get to have a last duet about how much they love each other but have to let go.
- Kuch Kuch Hota Hai: The bride is in love with another man who accidentally ends up coming to her house on her wedding day. She cries and the groom drags her to the altar or so we think! He knows she's not in love with him and tells her to marry the other guy. HAPPY TIMES ALL AROUND.
- Kabhi Kushi Kabhie Gham: Anjali and Rahul get married right after her father's death and she cries at the altar.
- Veer-Zaara: When Zaara accepts to marry a man she does not love, her true love Veer accepts to be thrown in prison to protect her honor. Extract from the background song: "Why is love a crime?"
- Devdas: Paro's wedding, complete with song and unhappy mother.
- Dosti: Friends Forever has two!
- The first is Anjali's wedding. She cries, Raj looks crushed and at the end of the scene, Karan falls to his knees and cries. The chorus of the background song? "Never fall in love/ Never fall in love/ Never fall in love."
- The second is Karan's wedding, because Raj insists on literally dancing himself to death at the ceremony.
- Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi: The movie starts with Taani's sad wedding: she's supposed to marry a man she loves but he dies in a traffic accident. Her dying father asks her to marry Surinder because he doesn't want her to be alone.
- Love Aaj Kal: It seems alright at first but Meera can't keep her eyes off her former lover Jai during her wedding with Vikram. When they finally talk, Jai can't deal with the fact that she's married and leaves. She has to go back to the ceremony knowing she made a mistake.
- Referenced in Bend It Like Beckham: the cameraman at Pinky's wedding chides her for looking too happy. "Eyes down, don't smile! An Indian bride never smiles. You'll ruin the bloody video!"
- Played for uncomfortableness in Dangal, as the main female characters are invited to the wedding of one of their classmates. Note that at that point of the plot, the girls are in the 11-14 age range, making said classmate a child bride. A good chunk of the scene shows how everybody but the bride are having fun at the party. Later we learn that the bride would have preferred the Training from Hell the protagonists experience at the hands of their father to make them professional wrestlers that her sad destiny of marrying young with a person she didn't choose to and becoming yet another housewife never getting out of their village.