Made in Heaven 2: New India’s woke wedding extravaganzas

Made in Heaven Season 2 released on August 10 on Amazon Prime.

The very first episode of the seven-episode second season of Made in Heaven has a lavish paean to India’s holy-grail wedding couturier Sabyasachi Mukherjee. Bride Team talks in hushed whispers huddled around the lehnga even as the bride and groom argue over the ethical implications of glutathione IVs to make the beautiful bride’s skin “brighter”. The women let out collective uplifting sighs as the ensemble unfurls, and the designer himself makes it to a couple of scenes himself, looking at his subject drenched in dusty pink and gold, with adoration and relief.

So, you know what to expect. The series creators, Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti (they also wrote the series along with Alankrita Shrivastava) and their directors Nitya Mehra, Alankrita Shrivastava and Neeraj Ghaywan, keep the flavour and concoction similar to the first season — every wedding is an opportunity to conjure grandeur out of luscious shaadi paraphernalia  and at the same time reveal common hypocrisies of papa-mummy (and in extension, society at large).

The lives of the two protagonists, Tara Khanna (Shobhita Dhulipala) and Karan Mehra (Arjun Mathur), the founders of the wedding planning agency Made in Heaven, and their reformist zeal (coming across as shallow and unhinged in most episodes) hold all the sub-plots and different elements of the story together. The diversity doff works most wonderfully with a character named Meher who joins the MIH team and who has a “dead name” — played by Karnataka’s first transgender doctor and social media influencer Trinetra Haldar Gummaraju.

Arjun Mathur in a still from Made in Heaven 2

The synthesis largely works. The best thing about the show is the emotional graph of Arjun’s life, his struggles with addiction, romance and his relationship with his mother. Tara’s journey is equally promising, but her character’s supermodel swag often overwhelms her emotional exigencies. But because this season is much more bullish on the visual exquisiteness that sensual and aesthetic cornucopia can create — there’s even a Bollywood wedding unfolding precariously on the French Riviera — it inadvertently midwives genre in itself. The Lifestyle Drama, of which I am sure we are going to see much more of in India. If Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking and Amazon Prime Video’s Made in Heaven have anything in common, it is playing into this grand old contemporary belief that a wedding and its garrulously happy guests make the ultimate Indian elixir. The show triumphantly holds up that old Indian belief — to beg, borrow or steal for laadli beti’s wedding — with high-octane glee, and in doing so, reinforces the age-old prejudice that a legal union solemnised in front of family and hundreds from the community is more a stamp of acceptance and validation for a relationship rather than what two people’s life stories bring to a relationship. And this validation often comes after days of excess and lavishness.

Sobhita Dhulipala in a still from Made in Heaven 2.

Weddings and Bollywood movies are in an old, deliriously happy marriage. The ’90s solidified this formula, and Bollywood hasn’t looked back. In 1994, when Sooraj Barjatya’s Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!, a three-hour long montage of various Hindu ceremonies and customs related to weddings and domesticity, came to theatres, little did we know that younger directors would follow suit, and find the untapped potential of creating baraat-and-bidai shenanigans to get people to come to theatres. Almost every Karan Johar film has a wedding and a wedding song — and usually this wedding is a Punjabi wedding. Film names around weddings are common, starting from the most iconic Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) to Dolly ki Doli (2015), Humpty Sharma ki Dulhania (2014), Mere Yaar ki Shaadi Hai (2002), Veere Di Wedding (2018) and a thousand more. Gurinder Chadha made the British-Indian version and called it Bride and Prejudice in 2004. In a sense, Made in Heaven is an extension — and contemporisation — of the idea behind the debut film of Ranveer Singh, the Yash Raj production directed by Manish Sharma, Band Baaja Baaraat (2010)? What would 2 States (2014) and Rocky Aur Rani kii Prem Kahaani be if both films didn’t end in two communities, two cultures and languages embracing around a shaadi mandap?

According to the Confederation of All India Traders, the apex body for India’s trading community, around 30 million weddings were scheduled to take place last year from November to December alone after a lull in the pandemic years, generating about Rs 3.75 lakh crore in business for India’s wedding industry. Last year, Timothy Chi, global chief executive of The Knot World-wide said one in every four weddings worldwide takes place in India — which essentially translates to 25 per cent of the world’s weddings.

Made in Heaven is quintessentially Indian and Bollywood in that sense. In season 2, the politics is bang on, and within acceptable norms of Gen-Z: there’s light on fair-skin obsession, on brutal misogyny (and the hint that the only way misogyny and abusive behaviour in men could possibly be cured is through therapy), on ageism, on gender fluidity and queerness (and the older generation’s refusal to accept it even on their death beds, despite their child’s imploring tears), there’s even a Dalit wedding in a gorgeously designed hotel lobby. It’s new India wrapped around the same zari-embroidered cloth of tradition that exalts, almost fetishises, crores of rupees worth of marriage ceremonies — six Hindu ceremonies and one Catholic. With weddings in deep focus, fascinating strands that weave some of the characters in the show serve only the plot. The Jauharis from Old Delhi, for example, led by Vijay Raaz and Mona Singh, investors in Made in Heaven the agency, is a story that gets tragically sidelined.

Mona Singh in a still from Made in Heaven 2.

Made in Heaven Season 2 released on Amazon Prime Video on August 10