Shifting Social Awareness: From Monsoon Wedding to Made in Heaven

Abstract

Monsoon Wedding (2001), a film directed by Mira Nair, is a comedy of manners which portrays what wedding movies offered to the global, western palate until the turn of the 20th century. Nair’s novelty and great success is putting India in the center and not in the margins. If Monsoon Wedding acquainted a western audience with the sights and sounds of the new global India (Sharpe 2005), Made in Heaven, an Indian drama web television series directed by Zoya Akhtar, Alankrita Shrivastava and Nitya Mehra, premiered on Amazon video on 8 March 2019, attempts, on the other hand, to make a shift in Indian social awareness addressing a global/glocal (Ritzer 2003) audience. This “Big Fat Indian Wedding” blends the old and the new India, showing a postmodern India where modernity coexists with traditional rituals. Made in Heaven breaks barriers and represents a progressive and daring show within the Indian market. The voice-over that closes each of the nine chapters acts as a wake-up call for its global/glocal audience. Kabir Basrai (Shashank Arora) - the voice-over - disrupts mainstream conventions and redefines the nature of the margins allowing minorities a resistant space in which to be heard (Moodley 2003).