For Subiksha Subramani and Tina Dass, “marriage was always on the cards”, as Subramani says over FaceTime, sitting next to her wife just days after their wedding. The couple met six years ago on Her, a dating app for queer women and gender-diverse people. Subramani had swiped right several times (“something was pulling me towards her”), but it took Dass some time to do the same. When they finally met up for coffee in Toronto, they discovered fragments of life they shared: both Hindu, South Asian, and living in Calgary, a city in the western Canadian province of Alberta. Dass, who is Bangladeshi, said she never thought she would find someone whose background resembled her own.
They only moved forward from there. Months into their relationship, Subramani introduced Das to her parents. And a few years later, the couple proposed to each other, finally stepping forwards to the joint future they had envisioned from the beginning. It was the wedding, not their lives, that seemed out of reach: both brides sought a traditional wedding, one that would take place in India, weave together aspects of their faith, and blend bits of their respective Tamil and Bengali cultures.
This dream took close to two years of planning, with the help of Subramani’s parents, wedding planner, Krishna Bezawada, and vendors. Over the course of two days in Miththam, a traditional courtyard house within a charming village outside of Chennai, the wedding unfolded. The setting mirrored the intimacy of the event: a hundred guests deemed the dearest to the couple, attended the wedding and stayed in the venue itself. While Subramani’s family was present, Dass’ was not. “When I talked to my family, they didn’t help me at all from the beginning,” Dass says. “My plan was whether they come or don’t, I was getting married.” A few of her relatives and friends traveled from Bangladesh to show their support, which Dass says was “a big deal”.
With a cross-cultural groundwork in place, the events kicked off with a Bengali Mehendi ceremony called “Gaya Hould”. Guests were given Bengali chaat, South Indian filter coffee, and coconut water; decorations reflected both Tamil and Bengali aesthetics, from hand-painted fans by Bengali artists to fish-themed motifs to palm-leaf origami parrots. Age-old Bangladeshi folk dancing and singing were performed. From there, the wedding itself took place: a four-hour-long Tamil Brahmin ceremony conducted by Saurabh Bondre, a queer, Sanskrit scholar, and priest. Bondre explained the ancient significance of marriage, without using any gendered terms, also intertwining several queer references from scripture and history. Bezawada, says that they intertwined local elements throughout this portion of the wedding, which was themed “South Indian modern”. They included “silver and gold-painted mango leaves”, which covered “the periphery of the mandap” and palm leaf thoranam, or hanging decorations long used at temples and during auspicious occasions.