Somewhere in Gujarat, a groom spends his own wedding day at home in a full sherwani, sword and all, while his sister walks around the sacred fire with his bride. The village considers this perfectly normal. It’s also just one of many weird wedding rituals in India still going strong today.
Indian weddings already run on excess. Three days, four outfits, one exhausted uncle on the dhol. Hidden inside all that noise are customs that outsiders rarely hear about. Some are sweet, some are baffling, and at least one lands people in court. This countdown starts with the merely odd and ends with the one that rewrites what a wedding even is.
10. Gaali Songs That Roast The Groom's Family
Most wedding guests expect speeches. In parts of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the groom’s family gets roasted in song instead. The tradition is called gaali or gaari geet, which roughly means abuse songs, and the women on the bride’s side perform them. They pick on the groom’s relatives by name, mock their stinginess and drift into jokes ruder than anything on late-night TV.
An essay on TARSHI, an Indian sexuality and rights site, describes the genre as bawdy, often obscene humour aimed at the other family, who must take every insult with a smile. A folklore archive at the University of Southern California recorded one family’s version, where singers teased the groom’s side about bald heads and moustaches at each step of the ceremony.
There’s real logic under the cheek. North Indian weddings involve heavy money talk, and the songs let the bride’s family hit back at the side holding the power. In some Bhojpuri homes, the singing runs through the entire dinner while the in-laws eat. Plenty of families would quietly love to borrow the idea. (10)
9. The Mother-In-Law Grabs The Groom's Nose
The groom arrives at a Gujarati wedding expecting flowers. He gets a hand reaching for his nose. In the Ponkhnu ritual, the bride’s mother greets him at the entrance, performs an aarti, which is a blessing with a small lit lamp, and feeds him sweets. Then she tries to grab his nose. He’s supposed to dodge, and everyone laughs at the scuffle.
According to the wedding guide from Pernia’s Pop-Up Shop, the point is to keep the groom humble in front of his new mother-in-law. Indianetzone’s account of Gujarati customs adds another layer. The tug reminds him that he came to their door to ask for their daughter, practically rubbing his nose on the doorstep.
Money buys no exemption here. When Akash Ambani married Shloka Mehta in 2019, video showed his in-laws gleefully pulling at his nose, with a few extra relatives joining in. A groom can walk in with one of Asia’s biggest fortunes behind him and still leave with a pink nose. It might be the friendliest of all the weird wedding rituals in India. (9)
8. The Groom Who Fakes Running Away To Kashi
Halfway through a Tamil Brahmin wedding, the groom announces he’s quitting. He’d rather leave for Kashi, the holy city better known as Varanasi, to study and live as a pilgrim. A wedding account hosted by the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai lists his gear for the trip. He carries an umbrella, a walking stick, a fan, a holy book, a bag of rice and a stout pair of sandals. Then he marches toward the exit of the wedding hall.
He never gets far. The bride’s father catches up, talks up the joys of family life and offers his daughter’s hand. The groom suddenly remembers why he came. Musicians follow the whole parade, and relatives tease him all the way back to the stage.
In some Telugu versions, the bride’s parents wash his feet once he agrees to return, which writers at Women’s Web have attacked as regressive. That criticism has a point. Still, as pure theatre, Kashi Yatra is hard to beat. Few weddings anywhere let a groom stage a runaway while his family cheers him on. (8)
7. Bengali Mothers Who Skip Their Son's Wedding
In a traditional Bengali wedding, one guest is missing on purpose. The groom’s mother stays home. She blesses her son before he leaves in a car sent by the bride’s family, and then she waits while the main ceremony goes ahead without her.
The reason sounds harsh today. According to SheThePeople, her presence was considered inauspicious, based on an old belief that she might cast an evil effect on the new couple. Some families apply the same rule to the bride’s mother. The custom echoes the first rice-eating ceremony for a Bengali baby, where tradition also keeps the mother out of the room, as one writer on Women’s Web pointed out.
Change has started, though. For Mother’s Day, the TV channel Zee Bangla ran a campaign with the agency L&K Saatchi & Saatchi. In the ad, a bride writes to her future mother-in-law and insists she come to the wedding. Plenty of modern Bengali mothers now simply show up, and their sons don’t seem to mind one bit. (7)
6. Kumbh Vivah, Where Mangliks Marry A Pot Or A Tree
Being born manglik in India can wreck a marriage proposal fast. Astrologers say a person with Mars in certain spots on their birth chart carries mangal dosha, a flaw believed to bring trouble or even early death to their spouse. The traditional fix belongs among the weird wedding rituals in India. Before the real wedding, the manglik person marries something else first.
Women often go through Kumbh Vivah, a full ceremony with a priest in which the bride weds a clay pot. SmartPuja, a site that books priests for the rite, says the pot then goes into water and takes the curse with it. Men usually marry a banana tree instead, a rite called Kadali Vivah, with the tree dressed in a sari like a real bride. Others wed a peepal tree or an idol of Lord Vishnu.
The most famous case is a rumoured one. BollywoodShaadis reported that Aishwarya Rai, said to be manglik, went through a tree marriage before her 2007 wedding to Abhishek Bachchan. Somewhere out there, a lot of clay pots are technically widowers. (6)
5. Doodh Pilai, Rajasthan's Last Feed Before The Baraat
Before a Rajasthani groom rides off with his baraat, the wedding procession, his mother calls him back for one last feed. In the Doodh Pilai ritual, she covers him with the pallu of her sari, the loose end that drapes over her shoulder, and offers him milk as if he were a baby again. No actual breastfeeding happens. NewsGram describes it as a symbolic act that mimics infancy, sometimes performed by another elderly woman of the family. If the mother has died, BollywoodShaadis reports that the brother’s wife takes her place.
The ritual hit the national spotlight in February 2026, when a clip from Bijolia, a town in Rajasthan’s Bhilwara district, showed groom Suresh Bhadu receiving milk under his mother’s pallu. The internet split fast. Some viewers found it disturbing. Others pointed out that the custom marks a son’s exit from boyhood into married life.
Versions also exist in Haryana, Bihar and western Nepal. Rajasthan’s gets the most attention, mostly because the family does it in full view of the waiting procession. (5) (5)
4. Frogs Married For Rain And Divorced To Stop It
A frog couple got married in Bhopal on 19 July 2019, and the whole point was the weather. Madhya Pradesh was dry, so locals held a full Hindu-style wedding for the pair to please Indra, the rain god. Assam calls the same ceremony Bhekuli Biya, and parts of Karnataka call it Mandooka Parinaya.
The rain came. Then it refused to stop. By mid-September, Bhopal had logged 81 per cent more rain than normal, according to the India Meteorological Department, and the state counted 198 rain-related deaths. So members of the Om Shiva Shakti Seva Mandal held a divorce ceremony at a Mahadev temple in Bhopal and formally separated the frog couple.
Politicians love weird wedding rituals in India too. In June 2018, Madhya Pradesh minister Lalita Yadav attended a frog wedding in Chhatarpur and told the news agency ANI she had prayed for rain in drought-hit Bundelkhand. An animal rights group from Haryana then asked police to file a case against her. Nobody, at any stage, asked the frogs. (4) (4)
3. Girls Who Marry Dogs To Break A Curse
Mangli Munda was 18 when village elders in Jharkhand decided she needed to marry a dog. A local guru had told her parents she carried an evil spell, and the cure was a wedding to a stray. Her father found the groom, a dog named Sheru, and in 2014 the animal arrived at the ceremony in a chauffeur-driven car.
Mangli wasn’t thrilled. She told reporters she went along with it because the elders believed her bad luck would pass to the dog, which would give her future human husband a long life. Afterwards, she only had to keep Sheru as a pet for a few months. No divorce was needed before she could marry a man.
She wasn’t the first. In 2008, News24 reported that a seven-year-old tribal girl in Jharkhand married a stray because a tooth had grown from her upper gum, which her tribe saw as a bad omen. The same report mentioned girls in Odisha married to dogs and even snakes. Sheru, for the record, stayed on as the family pet. (3)
2. Pakadua Vivah, Bihar's Groom Kidnappings
Avoiding dowry in Bihar sometimes involves a gun. Pakadua vivah, which roughly means catch-and-marry, is a practice where the bride’s family kidnaps an eligible young man and forces him through the wedding rites. Gulf News lists Begusarai, Patna, Lakhisarai, Munger, Jehanabad, Gaya and Nawada among the districts best known for it.
The motive is money. Families want a groom with a steady job without paying the dowry such a groom commands. Teachers, a veterinarian and a junior manager have all been grabbed. The practice peaked in the 1970s, when local strongmen ran it almost as a business, according to a policy paper in the Brandt School’s bulletin.
Courts do push back. On 10 November 2023, the Patna High Court annulled the marriage of an Army man who had been kidnapped and married at gunpoint 10 years earlier. A family court had dismissed his case in 2020, partly because he didn’t file fast enough. The High Court called that reasoning flawed. Plenty of these marriages never reach a courtroom at all. (2)
1. The Sister Who Marries The Bride, Top Of All Weird Wedding Rituals in India
In the tribal villages of Surkheda, Sanada and Ambal in Gujarat, the groom misses his own wedding on purpose. He still dresses for it. He puts on a sherwani, ties a safa, a traditional turban, around his head and carries a ceremonial sword. Then he stays home with his mother.
His unmarried sister does everything else. She leads the baraat to the bride’s house, performs every ritual a groom normally would and takes the mangal phere, the sacred circles around the fire, with the bride. Then she brings the new bride home and hands her over to her brother.
The explanation comes from local religion. According to SheThePeople, which credits NDTV, villagers believe their male deities were bachelors, and keeping the groom at home shows them respect. News24 adds the belief that a groom who attends his own wedding risks a failed marriage. Strip away the reasoning and the scene is still remarkable. A woman marries a woman on her brother’s behalf, and the whole village treats it as the safest possible start to a marriage. (1)
Every family has that one weird rule or awkward tradition that makes outsiders raise an eyebrow at weddings. Tell us which of these weird wedding rituals in India deserves the top spot, or which one got missed completely, in the comments.
Check out our other list 10 New Wedding Rules Indians Secretly Follow (But Won’t Admit).
