Tourists are paying to attend lavish Indian weddings. I can see why

You don’t turn down the chance to go to an Indian wedding. My sister and I were invited to a three-day one in Udaipur, which meant three parties, three outfits, three evenings of making polite conversation, three sessions of trying to look normal on a dancefloor.

And it wasn’t going to be just any old wedding. In the 1960s, while travelling in India, my grandmother befriended a brilliantly intelligent man who subsequently became India’s foreign minister. When Jagat Singh Mehta sent his son, Vikram, to school in England, she was his guardian. Our families have remained close ever since, and now Vikram’s daughter was getting married in a wedding that promised to be spectacular, with 600 people jetting in from around the world. Yes please, I replied quickly.

A company called JoinMyWedding made headlines in November when it was reported that tourists had started paying to join Indian weddings while on holiday in the country. Imagine Airbnb, but instead of a room for the night you’re looking for a wedding. Scan the website, find the details of a wedding near wherever you’re travelling — in Rajasthan? Gujarat? Uttar Pradesh? — and cough up between £120 and £150 to attend as a guest. “You haven’t been to India until you’ve been to an Indian wedding” runs the tagline.

Sophia Money-Coutts in a rickshaw with her brother-in-law and her sister

No kidding. After three days in Udaipur, I can see why people pay for entry. Forget warm champagne and salmon canapés in a Gloucestershire marquee. This wedding was extraordinary — Baz Luhrmann meets Bollywood: a kaleidoscope of colour and noise and drinking and eating, of bright pink turbans and jewellery so dazzling it looked like it should be in a Bond Street window. I danced to bhangra before nipping back to the buffet for another plate of rich bheja (mutton brain curry) and jalebi (deep-fried orange sweets, which I dipped in sweet milk). I cried at the speeches, and at the ceremonial dances the cousins performed with the bride, and fondly reminisced with those who’d known my grandmother. The sense of family at Indian weddings, the spectacle of one tribe welcoming another, and the rituals and careful, deeply respectful ceremony were — no offence to every single married friend of mine — infinitely more moving than any wedding I’ve been to in the UK.

But it was also exhausting. So, during the days between the parties, my sister, her husband and I strolled the rickshaw-clogged streets of Udaipur, Rajasthan’s City of Lakes, also known as the White City for its shimmering marble palaces. We played cards and drank banana lassis on a terrace overlooking one, the famous Lake Palace, where scenes for the James Bond film Octopussy were shot. There are more jauntily named backpacker joints in this city (Hostel Funky Bunky) than I remember from my first visit nearly 20 years ago, but the Lake Palace remains a pretty tranquil spot if you fancy dropping several hundred quid on a room with a view of the water. We were staying in a less glamorous hotel where a man playing a bansuri, an Indian flute, serenaded us every morning (“I f***ing hated the flautist at breakfast,” warned one online review), so escaped pronto to explore. The obvious choice is a trip to the City Palace, built on a hill over a period of 400 years by a succession of splendidly mustachioed maharanas.

Tourists have started paying to join Indian weddings while on holiday in the country

Depending on your point of view, it’s stuffed with treasures which, these days, will feel either poignant or appallingly imperialist. Silver-framed photographs of viceroys in ermine-trimmed cloaks, for example, and East India Company maps where British territory, and therefore almost all the territory, is shaded pink. Given the readdressing of colonial history in recent years, I felt a pang of guilt at the haughty stare of British toffs trussed up in their medals. Fortunately, outside the palace walls, most street hawkers in Udaipur wanted to know what football team I supported rather than have a chat about the British legacy (“I’m more of a rugby girl, to be honest.”)

If you’re invited to an Indian wedding, I recommend starting your trip with the festivities, then adding on several days at the end to recover. I danced and ate multiple types of curry and dal for three days, then headed to a recently opened safari-esque hotel an hour outside Udaipur to lie horizontal in its outdoor bath and go on the odd game drive when I felt lively enough. Chunda Shikar Oudi is a former hunting lodge set in 370 acres of forest stalked by leopards, jackals, blue bulls (imagine a chunky deer), wild boars and pythons.

I stayed in the private villa, separated from the main hotel by a lake, which comes with its own infinity pool and — while I was there at least — an inquisitive star tortoise, so named for the markings on its shell. There I was one afternoon, readying myself for a leopard-spotting trip in the hotel’s 4×4, when I almost tripped over him. My mistake had been to leave the villa’s front door open, and Esio Trot had meandered into my sitting room. Fortunately, the villa also comes with a butler, who swiftly whisked him outside.

Chunda Shikar Oudi is a relaxing retreat near Udaipur

That night, I ate (more) curry in a spectacularly pretty forest camp the hotel staff arranged under a banyan tree, the light provided by lanterns and a firepit, before being motored back to the villa. A gaggle of Indian influencers were also staying there, photographing themselves in safari hats and fur gilets, which neatly illustrates the explosion in domestic tourism. India is now the fastest-growing major economy in the world and the most populous country (it overtook China last year, with a population that now stands at 1.4 billion), and its citizens are travelling accordingly; the number of domestic tourists has more than doubled since 2021. As I travelled across the former princely state, which Britain benevolently allowed to rule itself (sort of) during the days of Empire, this too felt like a shift. The Brits who process around India harking on about the days of chai wallahs and gin and tonics are now less important than the influencers encouraging the country’s own people to explore.

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If you have small children and fancy a hotel which isn’t quite so populated with wildlife, just north of Udaipur is a bigger, less rustic option. The ITC Ekaaya is a new, sprawling conglomeration of 117 suites and villas where you simply cannot move without a helpful member of staff stepping in. Ironically, I did feel quite like a vicereine here. I couldn’t pour my own water, open my straw or walk to the spa without assistance but, since I was still in post-wedding recovery mode, this was quite welcome. I spent a good deal of time lying in the bath (again) and eating, though not at the same time. There is an irritating and hackneyed trope about travelling in India and getting sick. “Don’t get Delhi belly!” one friend texted me. But I’ve never been sick on any trip here, and I’ve eaten almost constantly. High tea is a popular concept at Indian hotels, just in case you feel the slightest bit peckish during the long stretch between lunch and dinner, and I sat on the lawn at Ekaaya swallowing cucumber sandwiches while being serenaded by another musical act on a carpet in front of me.

Energy levels pepped up, I left Udaipur for the mania of Jaipur, about 260 miles northeast and Rajasthan’s biggest city, dubbed the Pink City after it was painted a light terracotta shade for the Prince of Wales’s visit in 1876. “It’s a welcoming colour,” my guide me.

You need vim for Jaipur. Rickshaws scuttle like beetles between buses, bicyclists, motorbikes and 4x4s. Historians can gorge themselves on the Amber Fort and yet more palaces. I was especially tickled by the two whopping silver urns, each weighing 340kg and standing 1.6m high, which stand in the courtyard at Jaipur’s City Palace. In 1902, the Maharaja of Jaipur sailed to Britain for the coronation of Edward VII and insisted on carrying Ganges water with him to bathe and drink so he could stick to his devout Hindu principles. Seven of these silver urns filled with 27,000 litres of water began the journey (along with 132 servants and 600 pieces of luggage), although only two made it home; five fell overboard during storms. It just goes to show that certain Indian rulers have been just as eccentric as ours.

Shopping is the other major activity here, either in the bazaar or, if you want a less hectoring experience, I’d try the Narain Niwas complex for tablecloths or the sort of embroidered shawls and block-print smocks that women wear to summer parties back home.

The Anopura hotel

REBECCA CONWAY

I spent my final two nights peacefully at a boutique hotel, Anopura, an hour’s drive east of the city, a journey that took me past a temple which appeared to have been taken over by monkeys, coexisting happily with cows. The hotel is a haven; quiet and sensationally decorated with wall hangings and sofas big enough for multiple weary bodies. Plus, several of the bedrooms come with their own pools, surrounded by lemon trees and marigolds, which means you often feel as if you’re the only guest there — heaven after the harum-scarum of the city. The majority of the food comes from the local fields and farms, and the most exercise I did was staggering from the pool to the dining room and back. There’s no menu: you eat what you’re given. But even by this point, day nine, I welcomed fresh paneer curry and buttered naan.

On the final drive to Jaipur airport, I cried behind my sunglasses — partly because it was sunset and the skyline was swarming with kites, flown by those practising for the forthcoming festival; partly because I didn’t want to leave; and partly because I was tired, since travelling in India is never, in my experience, as relaxing as, say, a week on a beach somewhere else. But that’s what makes it so extraordinary. So special.

“One of the wonderful things about India is that you can always go back,” my grandmother, the Indophile, told me many years ago, warning me ahead of my first trip against trying to travel the length and breadth of the country. Take it in bit by bit, in other words. How right she was. Dip into the cities for the bustle and the sounds and smells, then dip outside for respite in a restorative hotel.

The British relationship with India is undergoing reassessment, but after this trip, the wedding, and my subsequent explorations in Udaipur and Jaipur, I feel enormously grateful that my grandmother forged a connection with a country that I can still experience three generations on.Sophia Money-Coutts was a guest of Greaves India, which offers a seven-night rural Rajasthan tour from £2,599pp B&B, including all private transfers, three internal flights, private sightseeing and excursions (greavesindia.co.uk). Fly to Delhi

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