Gaya: It is a common tradition for grooms to enter the wedding venue, riding a horse accompanied by a ‘baraat’, but in Bihar, a bride turned the tables and how! Challenging patriarchy and tradition, a bride rode a horse to her wedding venue in Gaya. Anuskha Guha, a senior air hostess with Indigo airlines, on Tuesday, led her marriage procession on a horse with her relatives and friends following her dancing to the tunes of catchy numbers belted out by the band party. Clad in a white ‘lehanga’, the bride first reached the house of groom Jeet Mukharjee, a Kolkata-based business, who joined the procession in a car.
Guha is a native of Chand Chaura locality and her mother is a music teacher in a prominent private school.
“Since childhood Anuskha would question as to why only a groom rides on mare and goes to the bride’s house. Why can’t it be the other way round? We used to tell her that these are traditions being followed from generations but could never satisfied her. She always said that she would break the tradition and do the opposite,” her mother Shusmita Guha said.
“Its not enough to talk about women equality and entitlement. We should also practice it and allow our girls to take the procession if they wish. We should let our daughters-in-law also to do the same,” the groom’s father told the local reporters of Gaya.
Not just Anuskha, recently, a Rajasthan bride too rode a horse and wore sherwani to mark the pre-wedding ritual of ‘Bandori’ with an aim to convey the message of equality between the genders. Breaking stereotypes, Kritika mounted a horse wearing a sherwani and a pagdi, just like a groom. What’s more special was the fact that the bride made the sherwani with her own hands.
With these modern brides subverting age-old norms, it sure is a welcome change.
