When Love Wears Gold: How Kerala Turned Marriage into a Marketplace

What if Kerala’s obsession with weddings has less to do with love—and more to do with capital, control, and performance? As gold prices soar and marriage celebrations grow increasingly extravagant, the Malayali wedding has quietly transformed into a profitable spectacle where women carry wealth on their bodies, culture is rented by the hour, and happiness is measured in consumption. This piece looks beyond romance to ask an uncomfortable question: when did marriage become Kerala’s most successful industry?

Let us begin with a provocation that would make polite society uncomfortable: what if marriage, as we know it in Kerala today, is less a social institution and more a highly efficient economic apparatus? Not an expression of love, not even primarily a cultural ritual—but a marketplace where capital circulates, labour is feminised, and tradition is monetised with remarkable efficiency.

For generations raised on the promise that marriage guarantees stability, happiness, and completeness, this thought borders on sacrilege. But Marx reminds us that institutions rarely survive because they are moral; they survive because they are useful—to capital. Marriage, in contemporary Kerala, is extraordinarily useful.

Take gold. The recent spike in gold prices has triggered a collective anxiety that appears far more urgent than landslides, shrinking paddy fields, or contaminated water bodies. This hierarchy of fear is telling. Ecological collapse can wait; a wedding without sufficient gold cannot. Gold, after all, is not just ornament—it is accumulated value made visible, and crucially, it is displayed on women’s bodies.

Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, argued that monogamous marriage emerged to secure inheritance and property transmission. Kerala’s weddings prove how alive that logic remains. Gold functions as movable property, disguised as affection, justified as “security,” and normalised as tradition. The dowry system may be legally outlawed, but culturally it has simply refined its language. It now calls itself gift, choice, or custom. The transaction remains intact.

Silvia Federici would urge us to look more closely at the gendered labour sustaining this spectacle. Weddings demand enormous amounts of unpaid, feminised labour—emotional work, aesthetic preparation, social compliance. Women are expected to look radiant, behave gracefully, adjust seamlessly, and embody family honour. The gold they wear is presented as empowerment, even as it silently confirms their role as bearers of family capital. What is celebrated as adornment is, in fact, discipline in decorative form.

From a Marxist perspective, the modern Malayali wedding is a textbook case of commodification. Engagements are no longer announcements; they are pre-launch events. What follows is a familiar production line: haldi, mehndi, pre-wedding shoots, drone videography, teaser reels, and carefully curated Instagram aesthetics. Each ritual creates surplus value—for photographers, event managers, designers, influencers—while masquerading as emotion.

Here, Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital becomes unavoidable. Weddings are performances of class. Taste, decor, guest lists, venues, and even “traditional” art forms signal distinction. Kathakali or Mohiniyattam appears not as living practice but as cultural currency—borrowed briefly to authenticate respectability. Culture is no longer inherited or practiced; it is rented by the hour.

The irony is sharp. Kerala prides itself on literacy, progressive politics, and social development. Yet its weddings increasingly resemble neoliberal exhibitions of excess. Reception halls turn into Bollywood-style dance floors, complete with choreographed performances and LED spectacles. Participation is compulsory; dissent is embarrassing. Those who refuse to dance are labelled joyless. Those who question waste are accused of ruining the mood. Meanwhile, food—prepared to signal abundance—is discarded in quantities that would horrify any ethics committee. Hunger, like labour, is rendered invisible.

What makes weddings such a profitable site for capital is precisely this convergence: gender norms, emotional blackmail, caste respectability, and class aspiration all working together. As Marx would say, this is not accidental—it is structural. Weddings succeed as markets because they mobilise fear: fear of social judgement, fear of inadequacy, fear of not performing marriage “correctly.”

So when gold prices rise and Kerala panics, the crisis is not economic alone. It is ideological. It reveals how deeply our imaginations have been colonised—how difficult it has become to imagine celebration without consumption, commitment without spectacle, or companionship without market validation.

Perhaps the real question, then, is not whether marriage will survive the future—but whether we are willing to confront the uncomfortable truth that it has already been fully absorbed by capital, leaving women to carry its weight, culture to decorate its stage, and society to applaud its excess.