The Ambani Wedding Was a Grotesque Spectacle
The glitzy ceremonies underscored India’s dark new confluence of money and Hindu extremism.
What brings together Shah Rukh Khan, Kim Kardashian, Bill Gates, John Cena, and Boris Johnson? The marriage of Anant Ambani, son of the richest man in India, and Radhika Merchant in a wedding so expensive and tasteless it will go down in history.
The festivities began in March when the youngest Ambani held a three-day “pre-wedding” party in the family hometown of Jamnagar, Gujarat, where the Ambanis own the largest oil refinery in the world. In May, they sailed the Mediterranean on a luxury cruise with 1,200 of their closest friends, docking in Portofino where they shut down the entire seashore to the ire of locals so Andrea Bocelli could serenade the young couple. Justin Bieber sang at their sangeet in July, and then, some $600 million later, they were finally married. Performing fealty at this kind of grotesque spectacle in the face of India’s surrounding poverty should give off the same smell that attending a Chechen warlord’s party does. Yet, over the course of their louche celebrations, the Ambanis welcomed freeloaders such as Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, the Clintons, and the Blairs.
The family outdid each other night after night (and month after month), sporting obnoxiously extravagant jewelry. Nita Ambani, the mother of the blushing groom, wore a $59 million emerald necklace as she welcomed her guests with a terrifying rictus. To accommodate all the guests the Ambanis were flying over in a horde of private jets, the Indian government upgraded Jamnagar’s small airport into an international facility literally overnight, multiplying its staff and “deploying military and air force personnel in the service of the family.”
In 2013, Indian superstar Shah Rukh Khan was asked if audiences would ever see a film with Bollywood’s three biggest stars altogether, SRK, as he is known, Salman Khan, and Aamir Khan. “If you can afford, offer us a film,” SRK laughed before adding, “Son, you will go broke signing the three of us together.” But what is money to Mukesh Ambani – his $123 billion fortune makes him the 11th richest person in the world – who had all three Khans dancing at his son’s pre-wedding event like the sort of party entertainers a normal person might hire to perform magic tricks at their child’s birthday?
The Ambanis’ Reliance Industries is a $200 billion mega-conglomerate dealing in phones – they corner more than 40% of India’s mobile phone market – oil, online shopping, streaming, and more. While millions of poor Indians were forced to march by foot back to their home states during the COVID-19 pandemic, and an extraordinary 50% of Mumbai’s slum dwellers were infected by the virus, living in suffocatingly cramped quarters, Ambani senior faced no such hardship; he made $12 million an hour during that same period. In 2021, Oxfam calculated that it would take the average unskilled Indian worker “10,000 years to make what [Mukesh] Ambani made in an hour during the pandemic.”
The family is certainly no stranger to Versailles-style opulence. They live in Antilla, the world’s most expensive private residence, which can survive a magnitude 8.0 earthquake on the Richter scale. It is a 27-story monstrosity that cost between $1 to 2 billion to construct, has six floors of parking, a helipad, an ice cream parlor, its own temple, and a permanent staff of 600 servants. It takes a serious amount of shamelessness to flaunt one's hideous wealth in one of the most unequal countries in the world. Though it is the second largest food producer after China, India is home to a quarter of the world’s underfed, with approximately 190 million hungry people. The poorest Indian states have infant mortality rates that supersede sub-Saharan Africa, according to Oxfam, and every second, about two Indians are pushed into poverty because of rising healthcare costs. For all its growing economic power, India’s spending on public healthcare is one of the world’s lowest; instead, the country has put its energy into expanding the rising commercial health sector. The bride’s father, a multi-millionaire in his own right, is the CEO of Encore Health, a top player in the field.
This most recent Ambani wedding is not just significant in its extreme vulgarity; in their unrestrained flash, the Ambanis are the human embodiment of India’s dark confluence of money and right-wing Hindu extremism that has grown under Modi’s rule. Ahead of his nuptials, Anant was blessed by Mohan Bhagwat, the head of the Rashtriya Swamsevak Sangh (RSS), a quasi-fascist paramilitary organization that is the ideological heart of Hindutva, right-wing Hindu supremacy. Ambani senior is known to be a close associate of Modi – the prime minister is himself a lifelong RSS member – and the family was front and center at Modi’s inauguration of the Ram Temple earlier this year, a Hindu temple built on the grounds of a 16th-century mosque torn to the ground brick by brick by Indians in an orgy of violence in 1992. Modi was a star guest at the recent wedding festivities.
Without their ability to throw freebies at former presidents, prime ministers, Instagram influencers, and actors and court a voyeuristic curiosity over their haute couture clothes and gems, perhaps more questions would be asked about the danger of this kind of wealth being so close to halls of Indian and global power. “Legally, it may be their money,” Kerala politician Thomas Isaac posted on social media, “but such ostentatious expenditure is a sin against mother earth and the poor.”
What I find even more obscene than this wedding itself is the willingness of so many supposedly serious people to attend. What did they do, hand out Oscar-style $250k goody bags?
Such a disgusting display of selfishness. The good this family could do for their country if they just gave half of their wealth away. Nobody needs that much money.