

is $65,000 with 500 guests, says Ruchir Mewawala, a wedding planner who specializes in Indian ceremonies. The average cost of an Indian wedding in the U.S. The average American wedding costs $29,000 and has 140 guests, according to. They also sit at the juncture of two cultures that fetishize weddings: American bridezillas and Indian Bollywood.

They are young they are in love they have money to spend. Their average income is $88,000, compared to the overall American average of $50,000, according to the Pew Research Center. Today, the children of these immigrants are in their 20s and 30s. The next wave of Indian immigrants in the 1990s came on H-1B visas, which require that applicants have a master’s degree.
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Still, thousands of middle-class Indians poured in, driven away by India’s mounting economic problems and lured by America’s educational and professional opportunities, Kapur says. Indian immigrants had to be well educated to qualify for a green card. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act lifted this ban, but the barrier to entry was high. A 1924 act banned immigration from Asia, including India, to “preserve the ideal of American homogeneity,” according to the Department of State’s Office of the Historian. Pinky Rangi and her family were the forerunners of the Indian immigration wave. Members of the second generation want to combine Indian and American wedding traditions, which results in what he calls “the big fat Indian” wedding. has grown enormously over the past few years. Professor Devesh Kapur, director of University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Advanced Study of India, points out that the Indian community in the U.S. The Indian wedding industry in America is booming. But she has a plethora of vendors to choose from, and the venues are all familiar with the ins and outs of Indian weddings, from the ceremonial fire to the horse for the baraat. Rangi is worried about the table settings and trimming the guest list. They considered a destination wedding in Greece or Turkey, but finally decided New York City would be more convenient for family members. in 1964 to open the Indian office at the World Fair.īut today, Rangi is helping her son Karan plan his big day. Rangi’s father asked a friend to provide a racehorse for the baraat, the groom’s procession.Īt that point, Rangi says her family was among only a handful of Indians in America. There were no DJs well-versed in Bollywood, so the women sang and played tapes. There were no Indian caterers, so Rangi’s mother did all the cooking, using spices the family had brought over during trips back to India. There were no wedding halls large enough to accommodate the number of guests that’s requisite for a big, splashy Indian wedding.
