As the Ambani wedding ends, the festivities abate and people on the internet forget about this moment, it is time to reflect on what this wedding represents. Online chatter around the wedding seems to oscillate between– fangirling over the many celebrities at the wedding dancing to their own songs, and to calling out the garishness of the event. Even the opinion articles written on the event are calling it out for its ostentatious display of luxury– a performance in a country, where the average resident can scarcely afford two meals a day. Or they seem to hint at the seeming insincerity and absurdity of it all. Pictures of war torn, dead bodies in Gaza are juxtaposed with the glitz of this event, where every person in the world from Kim Kardashian to Beer Biceps dressed up in their best to pay homage to an  oil tycoon. Reminiscent of the French Revolution. After this you find Nita Ambani's head on the guillotine. 

What is most interesting about this garish display of wealth– and I say garish with a pinch of salt -- is that this wedding is an important part of the political project that has begun to take root in the country, especially post the 2014 elections. Let’s break it down first. To understand why this wedding seems tacky or garish to my more refined friends, it is because the Ambanis are not interested in hiding behind their wealth and luxury. They might have other motives with the wedding– maybe it is all a PR exercise in order to cultivate an image of the family in the world, maybe Mukesh Ambani actually wanted to spend hundreds of crores on just the wedding of his youngest son out of the love he has for him. We may never know.

But even as ostentatious displays of wealth are looked down upon and are called tacky and new money, I don’t think this is new money. New money or the way in which new money is traditionally understood would be associated more with cultural and social capital than with the display of money. If you have grown up surrounded by people who have generational wealth, their gripe with new money is that they don’t understand ‘class’. And what they really mean by that is, that these are people who don’t understand the unsaid rules about being rich and elite. You need to be quiet about how much you earn, “we earn just enough to get by”(you have a chalet in Kasauli and yet you summer in Europe every year). They wear linen clothes, which are simple but expensive. They wear clothes from brands that are unheard of, because shopping from popular luxury brands is how you spot the new rich. 

All of this is because the old rich are ‘classy’. They studied in educational institutions that are hard to access and incredibly liberal in the way their politics is postured. Their wealth, thus is not something they have to display with money or clothes or jewelry, it is with the way they speak, the music they listen, the art they consume. Old rich circles are incredibly hard to break into, you need the luxury of being ‘cultured’-- a stand-in for having grown up  knowing about Susan Sontag instead of accidentally stumbling upon her in an introduction to a visual arts course. Their wealth isn’t their money, it is almost a culturally ingrained practice. But as Shamus Khan notes in his work, it is with the advent of progressive politics, where affirmative action took center stage, that they began to  hide under their progressive values to ensure that they can maintain access to the erudite circles, talking and thinking about ideas that are generally associated with some version of how the left would like to think of themselves.  In summation, they want to indicate their wealth or even in some cases hide it as the success of a meritocratic system and not  because of centuries of exploitation of those that were less privileged.  

However that ‘embarrassment’ of wealth is imposed on them. It is a culturally ingrained practice of the way in which political elites have in the past postured themselves. Austerity in India is a virtue, one that is respected  and understood as a fact of life. But, with a strongman in power, austerity can also be seen as a weakness. Here it is helpful to draw a distinction between the public and private– not so in the way spaces are occupied but just in the way of how much the Ambanis owe to the general public. The social contract is in a sense between public servants and the populace, they are expected to be acting in servitude of the public. But the Ambanis are private people, in that their wealth is of their own merit and they are able to spend it because of their own hard work. I think this is a general movement of the economy from a state led venture to a more privatized, corporatized exercise. Where the political elite are able to clear a space for this conspicuous display of wealth, while still maintaining their own values of service and so on and so forth.

Thus, the Ambani family might be tacky but they are definitely not new money. Their use of their wealth is just less unabashed and they are less embarrassed to indicate that their family is in control of almost everything in India. In a single night they were able to convert the domestic airport in Jamnagar to an international one. They shut down the areas near their Jio world center in BKC, Mumbai to host their wedding. Their wedding was attended by current ministers, previous presidents and political stalwarts. Every person in Bollywood, influencer on the internet, Hollywood actors, John Cena graced the event. Justin Bieber and the Backstreet Boys performed. Lollapalooza had a worse line up than the pre wedding events of the Ambani wedding. 

But why is all of this important? Well, the idea here is not just to see the objective disparity between the rest of India and the participants of this wedding, but to think about this as an exercise in nation building and myth making. Since 2014 the Narendra Modi led government has pushed for a rather strong “India has arrived” narrative. Boasting a strong outward approach, Modi and his allies seem to be obsessed with projecting India as an equitable global player– someone that can lead the ‘developing’ world. Their nation building project hinges on the whims of this projection. It is a double edged sword. On one hand they argue that India has faced terrible things in the past, that history has been unkind to the Hindus and that they are the victims of a hateful islamic project. But on the other, it is the Hindus that will lead India into a successful future, that would elevate their position in the western world. Think about the Howdy Modi event in Houston , or the Australian Prime Minister revering Modi like he is a pop star. This has not just emboldened Indians abroad to speak with ‘pride’ about their home country, but to also capture the narrative in India that we are no longer an upstart democracy, but rather a strong country led by a strong leader. 

And this wedding fits seamlessly into this narrative. The ostentatious display of wealth signifies the arrival of India. That by having Rihanna, one of the biggest pop stars of this generation, perform at the wedding, the Ambanis have laid bare that India is not a “poor country”.  That under this regime the growing inequality is not the result of a collapsing welfare state but of the success of a meritocratic society. If the western world can use consumerism to display material and ideological wealth, it is a postcolonial developing world success story that India has been able to match that in just little over 75 years of existence. The bygone era of India’s nationhood which was tied to the more Nehruvian socialist ideas of austerity and equitability have given way to a more capitalist, consumer driven way of life. Just look around the markers of new India. Step into Gurgaon and you can see the nation building project in full force– the DLF city center and the rapid metro on one side and right across the road, slums. An aesthetic blot on the corporate fancy offices of Deloitte and Mckinsey. 

You can compare this with the relative muted aesthetics of Chandigarh– once the gift of New India. To mark the advent of India’s independence, the country commissioned famed architect Le Corbusier to plan a city. And thus Chandigarh was born. With a brutalist facade, and roads intersecting at 90 degrees, Chandigarh is a haven of the ‘old elite’. Retired bureaucrats, army officers, professors, Chandigarh is where you cannot find a skyscraper even if you tried(it is illegal to build one). Again, it isn’t so different in the way it is unequal, in that Chandigarh is still deliberately anti poor, unlike other cities in India that have expanded and contracted as when the need has arisen. But the way in which wealth is displayed is different. It is not showy or garish, but presumably because it belongs to a different era and different version of India's history. 

Perhaps this wedding will fade away, as most things on the internet do. But I don’t think it will. It remains ingrained in  public memory and for many years to come this moment will  be more definitive than we can imagine.