You could be forgiven for believing that pharmaceutical heiress Radhika Merchant and Anant Ambani, the youngest son of the richest man in Asia, had already wed a few months ago. After all, since December, the rich Ambanis—who oversees the biggest business in India, Reliance Industries—have thrown a number of opulent wedding celebrations.
Wedding Extravaganza In March
The family’s refinery township in Jamnagar, Gujarat, hosted an engagement party in January and a three-day pre-wedding extravaganza in March. The 1,200-person guest list, which featured tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner, as well as an exclusive performance by Rihanna, attracted worldwide attention to the star-studded event. The Ambanis embarked on a four-day European cruise in May, beginning in the Italian city of Palermo. Backstreet Boys, Pitbull, and David Guetta performed on deck. However, the enormous celebrations have not yet culminated in Anant Ambani and Merchant’s official marriage ceremony. The year’s most extravagant wedding is expected to occur at the Jio World Convention Centre in Mumbai on July 12, with celebrations continuing until July 14.
With a projected net worth of over $122 billion, Mukesh Ambani, the father of the groom, was anticipated to throw an opulent Ambani wedding. Big Indian weddings are a means for India’s corporate elite to flaunt their wealth, prestige, and social capital in addition to making lifelong memories. WedMeGood, an Indian wedding planner, reported that the country’s largest celebrities, fashion designers, and entertainment influencers attend Indian luxury weddings, with wealthy Indians now spending over $75 billion yearly on these events. The Indian luxury wedding market has developed to such an extent in recent years.
Lavishness Of Ambani Wedding Has Unsettled Others.
The Ambanis have also previously garnered media attention for their extravagant celebrations. In 2018, for example, they threw the priciest Indian wedding to date for Isha, the daughter of Mukesh Ambani, at an estimated cost of about $100 million. The wedding, which took place in Lake Como, Mumbai, and Udaipur, had Beyoncé as the main attraction.
However, the lavishness of the most recent Ambani wedding has unsettled others who find the extravagant display of riches startling in a nation where income disparity is on the rise due to the emergence of Indian billionaires. According to Anuradha Sajjanhar, author of The New Experts: Populist Elites, “the magnificence of this wedding is evocative of existing, and widening, inequality in India and the cultural ease with which this privilege is sometimes flaunted.”
More than 200 million people in India still live in poverty, and according to Credit Suisse estimates referenced in a 2023 Oxfam research, the richest 1% of the nation’s population owns about 40% of its wealth. According to a March research by the World Inequality Lab, there was, on some metrics, greater equality in India during British colonial rule than there is now, due to the size of the difference between the country’s rich and poor. It is further described in the study as a “Billionaire Raj.”
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