A ceremony of traditions

Many of the traditions we uphold today were passed down from our ancestors. One such tradition is the Hindu wedding.

The religious aspects of the wedding are intriguing, and originated from those who came as indentured servants from India. Although the Hindu wedding ceremony became elaborated as time went by, the basic structure has remained the same.

It was the parents of the parties concerned who first decided that their children should be married to each other. A pandit(or priest) was then consulted as to an auspicious day for the celebration of the nuptials. A few days before the wedding, the bride and groom each organize a haldi ceremony (sometimes called pithi ceremony) at their respected homes where the lagan (date) is fixed.

On the day of the wedding, the bridegroom was taken in procession to the bride’s parents’ house and conducted to a tent specially erected for the wedding. In due time, the bride, “being shrouded in thick folds of muslin or variegated hues and patterns”, joined the groom and the ceremony commenced in the presence of the bride’s relatives, invited guests and the bridegroom’s baraat (a bridegroom’s wedding procession made up of relatives and friends).

The ceremony sometimes lasts for hours. During this time, the bride and groom sit in a square marked out in the centre of the tent in front of the ceremonial fire. In front of them, sits the officiating pandit.

The pandit reads passages from the saved books, and offers a prayer that the deotas (deities) will witness the union and bless it with happiness and make it fruitful. The father of the bride gives her to the bridegroom with appropriate words, and the garments of the couple are knotted together; they then make a circuit of the bamboo a stated number of times, and returning in their seats, the bridegroom touches the head of the bride with sindoor (a vermillion powder).

The application of the sindoor to the parting of the bride’s hair is the climax of the ceremony; it was also the first time, perhaps, that the bridegroom glimpsed his future wife’s face as he raised the purdah (veil) covering her face, to apply the sindoor.

The ceremony outlined resembles the shaadi ceremony of a northern India caste of those times.

Another caste marriage ceremony was the dola. In the dola, the marriage ceremony took place at the bridegroom’s residence, to which the bride came on the day before the ceremony.

Her coming was marked by an attitude of humility befitting a party importuning marriage on behalf of a poor girl.

In British Guiana, because of the scarcity of suitable girls for marriage, there was little need for a father to importune on behalf of their daughters; consequently, the dola was hardly practised.

But practices associated with the dola survived. These included the ceremony of matikore or “dig dutty”, the ceremony of thappa lagana, in which the drum is featured, and the worship of Sharti Mata (Mother Earth.)

In all of these ceremonies, women are featured prominently. The dola further lent its name to the bride and groom who were called  dolahin and dolaha respectively.

In the ceremony that evolved on the plantation, the dola rites were regarded as preparatory to the marriage ceremony itself. What seemed to have happened on the estate was that the dola and the shaadi were fused in the development of a ceremony that became widely used. By the 1890s, this fusion had already taken place. (From the text by the late Dale Bisnauth)