Planning a Wedding? A Guide for the Modern Indian Couple

Pick a wedding date

Before you can start diving into Indian wedding planning, you need to pick a date. There are several factors that feed into picking a date:

• 1. Parents want you to get married asap: You’ll often find that it’s the parents who want you to get married tomorrow. South Asian parents typically want their kids to get married as soon as possible. If you have parents who want you to plan a wedding in two months, make sure you understand everything that goes into planning your dream wedding before you commit to the date.
• 2.You want to get married to move in with your significant other and start your life together: With parents, it’s usually marriage before moving in together – we’re not saying this is true for all families or that this is the right thing, but we’re just saying this is the reality a lot of  couples have to deal with. A lot of couples want to get married quickly to move in together. While this might be the right decision for you, please note that you can always get court married and still give yourself time to plan a larger, more thought-out wedding a few months or even a year later.
• 3. Muhurat / Auspicious date: In Hindu weddings, the pandit or priest will look at your time of birth and recommend an auspicious date (and sometimes even time). Typically, auspicious wedding dates are between April – June and November – December with a handful of other dates across other months. August – October is often a drier wedding season. 
• 4.Weather: Depending on where you are planning to host your wedding, you may want to avoid specific seasons. For example, a July wedding in Texas, especially with outdoor events, may be a no-go unless you account for tents and plenty of fans and water for your guests. 

Determine your wedding guest count

After you have a couple of wedding dates in mind, the next step for Indian wedding planning is to determine your guest count. You may formalize your guest count before you have a budget or work backward from your budget to determine the max guest count you can have. Some families and couples even pick a venue first to cap their guest count.

Finalizing your guest count, especially for South Asian weddings, can be a challenging and heavily analytical exercise! The easiest way to approach this is to start with an existing guest list from a close family member’s or friend’s wedding if you know there will be overlapping guests.

Alternately, have both sets of parents and the bride / groom come up with a list of family members, close family friends, and friends they want to invite. Before diving into table seating and writing down every single Indian wedding guest, for the initial wedding guest list, we recommend including the family name and number of guests (kids / significant others). From there, you should assign priority groups to each family (1 = closest family and friends you will definitely invite; 2 = invite in round two ; 3 = maybes or last-minute invites if you have headcount). For Indian weddings with multiple events like a mehndi, garba / sangeet, wedding ceremony, and reception, you may actually want to add a column for each event and indicate whether or not you will be inviting the family (or the number of people invited to each even if you don’t want to include children at the wedding reception as an example) to each event.

If you are nervous about a high guest count or planning an intimate wedding ceremony, you may want to lock down a venue first and then determine how many seats you’ll have at the physical wedding. Destination weddings are another way to cut down on the guestlist as usually fewer people are willing to take the time and money required to travel. Even if you start with a guest list, you may need to come back to it after selecting the venue and play around with the guest list a bit to make sure you invite only as many guests as there are seats at the table.

Finally, with the pandemic, we’ve learned that virtual weddings are here to stay. While you may not invite round two and round three priority guests to a physical wedding, if they still have significance in your life (or your parents have the need to invite their friend’s cousin’s colleague), you can always send them an invite for the virtual wedding ceremony or virtual wedding reception.