Bengali Wedding In Kolkata, India
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Pre-wedding couple shoot on the grounds of the Victoria Memorial Hall.
(click on photos to go to gallery)
I have shot a Bengali wedding before but it was in Delhi. This Bengali wedding was special as it was shot in Kolkata itself. I had never been to Kolkata before and that made it more special. Kolkata has its fair share of good wedding photographers but the couple Shohinee and Prateek had me fly down from Delhi for the wedding. While I was touched by their faith in me, it also kept me under pressure.
Bengali weddings usually have a lot of rituals but in this wedding some of them were given a miss. This was a bit unusual as the older generation usually has its way on the wedding day. If you talk to a couple before their wedding, they will tell you their wedding will be different. That their wedding will be a bit more “chilled out” and wont have the usual repertoire of rituals. But on the D-Day the couple usually succumb to the admonitions of the milling relatives who make sure all wedding ceremonies are performed to the letter.
The couple just stood there waiting to hop on to one of the boats.
Everyone around me spoke Bengali and it was as exotic a wedding as I had shot. The haldi ritual was the shortest compared to the evening soirees I had seen in Weddings in Pune, Mumbai, Delhi , Goa and elsewhere. This was a Bengali Wedding so there was of course the fish. The trout was ceremoniously brought in to the bride’s house by the groom’s family and duly cooked and eaten.
We did a `couple shoot’ around the Maidan, the Victoria Memorial Hall and the Hoogly river. It gave me a good short glimpse of Kolkata before I ventured to explore it fully the next day. All in all this was a day long fun wedding.