I’m Indian. Am I Allowed to Have a Small Wedding?

Reported by Vogue.

There is a particular kind of guilt that lives specifically in the chest of a South Asian woman who dares to want something smaller. Not shameful, exactly — just persistent. The writer behind this piece knows it well: born in Kolkata, raised in London, deeply Indian and just as deeply herself, she wanted, at most, a civil ceremony and cake with 35 people. According to Vogue, what followed was a quiet reckoning with everything weddings mean in Indian culture — and everything they sometimes don't mean for the couple at the center of them.

The tension is real and worth naming. Indian weddings have technically gotten "smaller" over the decades — but smaller, in this context, means roughly 300 guests instead of 800. The writer recounts attending weddings as a child where she never once saw the bride or groom, arriving instead with aunts to celebrate a neighbor's son's doctor's daughter's friend's granddaughter. A great time was had. The couple looked haggard. This is the template she was expected to replicate. When she declined — politely, with a compromise already in place — the questions came immediately: Could she host a second reception in India? How could she possibly exclude relatives she barely speaks to? The answer, apparently, was that she could not.

The Guest List Is Never Really About the Guests

What she articulates — carefully, honestly — is something many women from South Asian communities understand but rarely say directly: the traditional Indian wedding is frequently not designed for the couple at all. It reflects family status, community standing, and the social ledger parents have been quietly maintaining for decades. Her mother, who spent years attending her friends' children's weddings, won't be able to return those invitations. Her daughter is an only child. The math is brutal, and the guilt is real. She names it without flinching. She is also, she says, sticking to her plan.

The more urgent point isn't about guest counts or canapés — it's about who gets to decide what a wedding is for. Some women genuinely want the full, magnificent, multi-day South Asian extravaganza, and that desire deserves every bit of celebration it gets. But the woman who doesn't — who wants a small room, the people she actually talks to, and a moment she might actually enjoy — shouldn't have to build a case for her own marriage.

Wanting a wedding that reflects your actual life is not selfishness dressed up in modern language; it's just clarity, and it's worth more than any guest list your mother's friends will ever see.

Read the original at Vogue.