10 Unexpected Wedding Traditions From Around the World (and Their Indian Cousins)

There is a moment at many an Indian wedding when a guest from somewhere else leans over and asks, very politely, why the groom's shoes have been stolen. We explain. They nod. And then, if you are lucky, they tell you what happens at weddings where they come from, and you realise that the tar, the chamber pot, the dried fish and the whale's tooth are all doing the same job as the shoes. Culture after culture has decided that two people cannot simply be married. They must be tested, teased, blessed, fed something unpleasant, or made to clean up after themselves first.

This is a tour of ten such decisions. We have kept to wedding traditions around the world that a museum, a university, a heritage body or a named publication describes, and we say so where the popular lists go further. Each one is told properly, with the place and the reason, and each ends with the Indian ritual it most resembles, because the more of these you read, the less foreign any of them seem.

Quick answer: Unexpected wedding traditions around the world include Scotland's blackening (the bride or groom is covered in soot, treacle, flour and feathers before the wedding), Germany's Polterabend (guests smash porcelain and the couple sweeps it up together), France's pot de chambre (guests interrupt the wedding night and the newlyweds drink from a clean chamber pot), South Korea's beating of the groom's feet with a stick or a dried fish, the Tujia bride's month of crying in south-west China, the Maasai bride in Kenya who must not look back as she leaves home, Fiji's tabua whale-tooth proposal, Sweden's kissing rule at the reception, Greece's krevati bed-making with money and a child thrown on the sheets, and south India's Kashi Yatra, in which the groom pretends to leave for Varanasi and must be talked back to the mandap.

In this article

1. Scotland: the blackening
2. Germany: Polterabend, and the log
3. France: the chamber pot
4. South Korea: beating the groom's feet
5. China: the Tujia crying month
6. Kenya: the Maasai bride who must not look back
7. Fiji: the whale's tooth
8. Sweden: the kissing rule
9. Greece: making the bed
10. India: the groom who walks out

1. Scotland: the blackening

In rural Scotland, notably in Orkney, Aberdeenshire, Angus and Fife, a person about to be married can expect, at some point in the days or weeks before, to be ambushed¹.² Friends or workmates seize the bride or groom, strip them to about the waist, tie them up, and blacken them with whatever is to hand: soot, tar or treacle, then flour and, traditionally, feathers.³ One folklorist's list of ingredients adds raw eggs, yogurt, baked beans and left-over chicken curry.² Then they are paraded through the streets, often on the back of a truck, with tooting horns and clanging pots,² and often left tied to a lamppost or railings while their friends go to the pub. In Orkney the bride or groom may end up in the sea.³

Scotland's intangible heritage register lists it without euphemism, and the University of Aberdeen's Elphinstone Institute hosted a lecture on its history in 2015 under the title "A Filthy, Dirty, and Abominable Practice."⁴ The likeliest origin is gentler than the result: a solemn pre-wedding feet-washing, first recorded in the early seventeenth century, that had become a game of blackening the feet with soot by the nineteenth and, by the twentieth, something closer to a public humiliation with love in it.² The noise, the register suggests, may once have been the point: it was thought to drive off evil spirits and bad luck.³

Indian cousin: the haldi, at which the closest family and friends cover the couple in turmeric paste on the wedding day or the day before.⁵ Same run-up, same logic, same friends, same willingness to ruin a good shirt. The turmeric is prettier and kinder to the skin than tar, but the idea that a person must be smeared, laughed at and photographed before they are allowed to marry is identical. If you are planning one, the haldi inspiration gallery is the place to start.

2. Germany: Polterabend, and the log

On the eve of a German wedding, traditionally the Friday before a church ceremony, guests arrive at the bride's family home carrying porcelain.⁶ Old plates, stoneware, flowerpots, tiles, the occasional sink. Nothing made of glass, though: breaking glass, by the old rule, brings bad luck rather than good,⁷ and mirrors are spared for the usual seven-year reason.⁶ On the signal, everything is smashed on the ground, with a noise meant, in the oldest reading, to drive off evil spirits.⁷ These days the evening often moves to the wedding day itself or a week or so before.⁸ Scherben bringen Glück: shards bring luck. One theory offered by the Meissen porcelain manufactory is that in some regions "Scherben" once meant the clay storage pots themselves, and a well-filled pot meant a fed household.⁹

Then the part that matters. The couple, and only the couple, sweeps it all up. Every fragment, in front of everyone, while the guests drink. The broadcaster WDR's Planet Wissen calls it a Harmonieprobe, a test of harmony,⁷ and the explanation Germans give is unsentimental: you will have to clear up worse than this together, so begin now.⁶ After the ceremony comes a second test, the log-sawing, in which the newlyweds must saw through a thick log with a big two-handled saw, one pulling while the other pushes, while the guests heckle.⁷ Cooperation, made literal and slightly exhausting.

Indian cousin: the griha pravesh, at which the new bride gently kicks over a pot of rice at the threshold of her husband's home, in the hope that the household will have grain enough to scatter.¹⁰ It is the shards' idea exactly: abundance announced by a small, deliberate mess. What few Indian rituals do, and what might be worth borrowing, is making the couple clean up the mess together. If your sangeet wants a set piece with a moral, this is the one. The Journal's sangeet running order has room for it.

3. France: the chamber pot

The French have a reputation for refinement, and then there is le pot de chambre. The custom is said to come from Aveyron, in the south, and its premise is simple: the wedding night is interrupted. Guests burst into the bedroom carrying a chamber pot filled with a concoction of whatever food and drink the party has to hand, and the couple must drink from it, together with everyone present.¹¹ The pot, mercifully, is a clean one. In one account the brew is left-over alcohol, chocolate and, for good measure, toilet paper.¹²

The tradition has a prettier back-story than its contents. In one version the couple slip away the morning after the wedding, and half the young guests help them hide while the other half hunt them down. Once found, they drink from the pot with everyone, and that is the moment they stop being young people and become a married household.¹¹ The pot is a rite of passage disguised as a prank.

Indian cousin: the post-wedding games, and the mehendi game above all. Henna artists are often asked to hide the groom's name in the bride's design, and the rule, as one travel writer recorded it, is that the marriage cannot be consummated until he has found it.¹³ The French version simply moves the game to the bedroom door and adds a drink. Our mehendi artists will hide the name, and the Journal's guide to mehndi ceremony rituals explains the rest; the drink is on you.

4. South Korea: beating the groom's feet

After a traditional Korean wedding, before the wedding night, the groom is taken in hand by his friends, or by the bride's relatives and the young men of her village. His ankles are tied. He is hung upside down, often over a strong man's shoulder, so that the soles of his feet face the room, and he is beaten on them, lightly, with a stick or a wooden club, or, when someone has thought ahead, a dried yellow corvina¹⁴,¹⁵ the fish Koreans call gulbi.¹⁶ While it happens he is quizzed about his bride, and, in the classic version, asked what exactly he has come to this house for. "To marry" is not a sufficient answer. Wrong answers earn more fish.¹⁵

Koreans call it sillang darugi, "handling the groom", or dongsangnye; balbadak, the name that turns up in English accounts, is simply the Korean word for the sole of the foot.¹⁵ Korea's official portal calls it a playful test of the groom's strength, wits and stamina;¹⁴ the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture calls it a paradoxical congratulation, meant to honour him rather than hurt him.¹⁵ He has, after all, just married into a family that owns a fish.

Indian cousin: the joota chupai, in which the bride's sisters steal the groom's shoes and hand them back only for a negotiated sum,¹⁷ and the whole north Indian repertoire in which the groom must pay, perform, or persuade before he is let through. The Koreans have simply dispensed with the negotiation and gone straight to the feet. If your groom's side wants to hold its own, a good choreographer will have him ready to sing on demand.

5. China: the Tujia crying month

In Sichuan, and above all among the Tujia people, a bride traditionally begins crying a month before her wedding.¹⁸ Not privately. In the custom the western Sichuanese call Zuo Tang, sitting in the hall, she weeps for about an hour each evening as night falls, in the hall of the house, where the family can hear her. After ten days her mother joins her. Ten days after that, her grandmother. Sisters and aunts fall in too, until the last stretch before the wedding is an evening chorus of lamenting women, and the laments have words. They are the Crying Marriage Songs, a repertoire of grief that is, as China Daily puts it, a way "to set off the happiness of the wedding via falsely sorrowful words."¹⁸

The songs had teeth once. In the era of arranged marriage, the most rebellious verse was the one in which the bride cursed the matchmaker, just before she stepped into the sedan chair, a rare licensed moment in which a young woman could say what she thought of a system that had never asked her. A bride who could not cry was looked down on by the neighbours as "a poorly cultivated girl", and China Daily records cases of mothers beating daughters who failed to produce tears. The custom was in vogue until the end of the Qing dynasty and faded after it, but the Tujia, who see it as a necessary part of marrying, kept it. The origin story China Daily gives is a princess of the state of Zhao, married off to Yan in the Warring States period, whose mother cried at her feet and begged her to come home soon.¹⁸ In 2011 the Tujia crying-marriage songs, sung in the Wuling Mountains where Hunan, Hubei, Chongqing and Guizhou meet, went on China's national list of intangible heritage, which notes that singing in place of crying is still common at Tujia weddings.¹⁹

Indian cousin: the vidaai, obviously, and the songs that go with it, in which the bride sings her sadness at leaving her family, her home and her village.²⁰ What the Tujia understood, and what the best Indian vidaais still know, is that the crying is not a failure of the celebration. It is part of it. If your family sings, give the song its own ten minutes in the plan and tell the photographer in advance.

6. Kenya: the Maasai bride who must not look back

When a Maasai bride leaves home for her husband's homestead, the procession begins with a blessing that outsiders tend to garble. Lists of strange wedding customs say her father spits on her head and breasts.²¹ What the Kenya News Agency describes, from Narok South, is an elder spitting out milk outside the bride's mother's house to bless the procession, and grass tied to her shoes, because for a people who live by their cattle, grass means milk. The same day the women elders of her family shave her head, and as the separation sinks in, she weeps uncontrollably.²² Spitting is a Maasai blessing in its own right: newborns were spat on constantly, and elders spat into the hands of juniors.²³

There is a second detail that matters. As the groom clears the path, the bride tries not to look back at her own home, for fear that she may turn to stone.²⁴ It is the rule given to Orpheus, who could lead Eurydice out of the underworld only if he did not look back, and turned, and lost her,²⁵ and the rule Lot's wife broke: "But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt."²⁶ The marriage begins when you stop looking back. At her husband's homestead she is handed a baby to cuddle, a sign that she will have many children of her own.²²

Indian cousin: the kanyadaan, at which the father places his daughter's hand in the groom's,²⁷ and the vidaai, at which a Bengali bride throws a handful of rice over her head, a symbolic repayment of what she owes her parents,²⁸ and a Punjabi bride throws puffed rice the same way.²⁹ Our families bless with water and rice instead of milk. The direction of travel is the same. The pandits on Shaadiwaale will know your community's version.

7. Fiji: the whale's tooth

A Fijian man who wants to marry brings his future in-laws something weightier than a ring. He brings a tabua: the tooth of a sperm whale, smoothed and polished until it glows anywhere from pale cream to walnut brown, on a cord of coconut fibre, pandanus or bark cloth,³⁰ which he and his family present to the bride's parents. Most noble families keep a stock for the day a son needs one; others save up and buy. A young technician in Suva, saving for twelve teeth, put it simply to The New York Times: "I give the tabua, and that means 'I love you' from the inside."³¹ The Australian Museum calls it perhaps the most valuable of all traditional Fijian objects.³⁰

The tabua is also the single most regulated object in a Fijian wedding. Tonga banned whaling by royal decree in 1978 and Fiji's supply from Tongan hunters dried up; about two decades later Fiji signed the global treaty on trade in endangered species, and sperm whale teeth fall under it. A cultural exemption permits the export of 225 tabua a year, importing one needs a special permit, and a single tooth can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. Plastic fakes circulate; the test, one Suva shop assistant told the paper, is a lit match: "If it melts, that's the fake one."³¹ A proposal, in Fiji, is also an exercise in conservation law.

Indian cousin: the roka, at which the two families formally bless the match and exchange gifts of fruit, clothes or jewellery before anything is signed,³² and more precisely the heirloom jewellery that comes out of a locker only for this. The tabua's lesson is that the object matters less than the fact that it has been in the family before. Shaadiwaale's jewellers can reset a grandmother's piece; what they cannot do is replace it, which is rather the point.

8. Sweden: the kissing rule

Swedish weddings are, by reputation, orderly and long on speeches. They also contain one of the most anarchic rules in European wedding custom. When the groom leaves the room to go to the bathroom, the men get up and kiss the bride. When the bride leaves, the women line up to kiss the groom, and, as The Local was told, there is almost always a male friend who gets up to kiss the groom as well.³³ The result is that neither of them leaves the room much, and that a trip to the bathroom becomes a tactical decision discussed with the toastmaster.

It survives because it is funny and because it keeps the couple at the table, which is where a Swedish wedding wants them, since the table is where the speeches happen. The Local counts eight to twelve of them at a typical dinner, all co-ordinated by a friend of the couple acting as master of ceremonies, and a dinner that lasts three or three and a half hours is, in Sweden, a short one.³³

Indian cousin: there is none that involves kissing, and we are not suggesting one. But the instinct, that the couple belongs to the room for the evening and must not vanish, is pure sangeet. Anyone who has tried to extract a bride from her own reception for a wardrobe change knows the Swedish rule exists in India in spirit. Plan the changes with your bridal wear designer accordingly: the quicker the outfit, the shorter the absence.

9. Greece: making the bed

Before a Greek wedding, often on the night before, the couple's friends and family are invited to the house for to krevati, the bed. In many families only unmarried women may make it, with fresh sheets, in front of everyone.³⁴ Then things go onto it: money, rice, small gifts,³⁴ flower petals and koufeta, sugared almonds.³⁵ And then, in the part that makes first-time visitors reach for their phones, somebody's baby. A young child is thrown onto the bed, as The Greek Herald puts it, to promote prosperity and fertility,³⁴ or in gentler households rolled across it. Superstition holds that the sex of that baby decides the sex of the couple's first child.³⁵ The coins are for prosperity, the petals and almonds for love, the child for the obvious.

It is one of the most purely domestic rituals in this list. No priest, no crown, no church; those come on the day, when the stefana, two crowns joined by a ribbon, are swapped over the couple's heads three times by the koumbaro.³⁴ The bed-making is the family's own ceremony, held in the room where the marriage will actually be lived. If it has given you ideas, our guide to planning a wedding in Greece covers the rest.

Indian cousin: the child placed in the bride's lap. It is written into the Grihya Sutras, the ancient Sanskrit manuals of household rites: in the Gobhila Grihya Sutra (II.4.7 in Hermann Oldenberg's 1892 translation), once the bride has reached her husband's house and been seated, the text says simply, "They should place a boy in her lap."³⁶ The Greeks simply put the bed, the money and the baby in the same room and invite the neighbours. Shaadiwaale's Shagun Registry is the modern bed: a place the relatives can throw their money without anyone having to make the sheets first.

10. India: the groom who walks out

We end at home, with the tradition that most reliably astonishes guests from abroad. In Tamil Brahmin and Telugu weddings, among others in the south, there comes a point in the proceedings when the groom announces that he has changed his mind. Not about the bride. About marriage. He has decided to renounce the world and go to Kashi, to pursue learning and a life of renunciation²⁷.³⁷ He picks up an umbrella, a bamboo fan, a walking stick and a grantha, a sacred book such as the Bhagavad Gita, puts on new slippers, and sets off.³⁸

In a Tamil Brahmin wedding the bride's father goes after him; in a Telugu one it is the bride's brother or cousin.³⁷ What follows is a negotiation conducted in full view of the guests, in which the groom is persuaded to choose the life of a householder instead, and the father offers him his daughter's hand.²⁷ Every family has its own script for the rest: the virtues of married life, the virtues of the daughter, the general unwisdom of walking to Varanasi in those slippers. The groom relents, hands over the umbrella and comes back. The Kashi Yatra, as it is called, marks the moment the groom ends his brahmacharya, the student's vow, and returns as a grihastha, a householder,³⁸ and in a tradition that took renunciation seriously it makes him choose the household out loud. It has also become the best comedy in the south Indian wedding, and the fathers-in-law who do it well are long remembered.

Cousin abroad: the Korean groom quizzed on the soles of his feet, the German couple sawing the log, the Swedish groom who cannot leave the room. Every one of them is a culture insisting that marriage be chosen in public, with witnesses, and preferably with a prop. For the Kashi Yatra the prop is an umbrella, and the kalyana mandapams listed on Shaadiwaale, in Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Kochi, are built for exactly this.

Ten traditions at a glance

What all ten have in common

Read them together and the pattern is hard to miss. Hardly anyone, anywhere, lets two people simply get married. They are dirtied first, or made to clean, or made to drink something, or beaten on the feet, or sung at for a month, or blessed with a mouthful of milk, or presented with a tooth, or kept in a room, or made to watch a baby thrown onto their bed, or sent walking towards Varanasi with an umbrella. Each one is a community saying the same thing in its own accent: this matters, we are watching, and you do not get to do it quietly. Why a wedding needed witnesses in the first place is an older story, and we tell it in The Story of Weddings.

Indian weddings are not unusual in having rituals. They are unusual in having kept so many of them, across five or six functions, with the guest list to match. That is the thing a family is really managing: not a party, but a sequence of small ceremonies, each with its own logic and its own aunt in charge. Shaadiwaale was built for that sequence. The planning tools hold every function in one place, the guest list knows who is coming to which, and if you would rather someone else kept the umbrella ready, our team will help, for free.

If you have a tradition in your own family that would surprise the rest of the country, tell our team about it. Every custom in this list had to start somewhere: one family, one strange idea, and enough years for everyone else to copy it. And for a wedding closer to home, read seven unknown facts about Ram and Sita's wedding.

Frequently asked questions

What is the strangest wedding tradition in the world?

Strange depends on where you stand. Three good candidates are Scotland's blackening, in which the bride or groom is covered in soot, treacle, flour and feathers and paraded through town; France's pot de chambre, in which guests interrupt the wedding night and the newlyweds drink from a chamber pot; and South Korea's custom of beating the groom's feet with a stick or a dried fish. To a Scot, a Frenchman or a Korean, the stranger sight is a groom pretending to walk to Varanasi with an umbrella.

What is the Polterabend?

A German pre-wedding party, traditionally on the eve of the wedding and now often a week before or on the day itself, at which guests smash porcelain and ceramics for luck. Glass is never broken, because that is thought to bring bad luck. The couple then sweeps up the shards together, a test of harmony and a sign that they will handle harder messes as a pair. The saying Scherben bringen Glück, shards bring luck, goes with it.

Why do Tujia brides cry before their weddings?

In the crying marriage custom of Sichuan, kept above all by the Tujia people, the bride traditionally weeps for about an hour each evening for a month before the wedding, joined after ten days by her mother and after twenty by her grandmother. The laments are sung, once included cursing the matchmaker, and are meant to set off the happiness of the wedding. The Tujia crying-marriage songs have been on China's national intangible heritage list since 2011.

What is a tabua and why is it given at Fijian weddings?

A tabua is a polished sperm whale tooth on a cord, which a groom and his family present to the bride's parents; tabua are also given at births and funerals and to seal an apology. The Australian Museum calls it perhaps the most valuable of all traditional Fijian objects. Because sperm whale teeth fall under the global treaty on trade in endangered species, Fiji allowed the export of only 225 a year, The New York Times reported in 2017.

What is the Kashi Yatra in a south Indian wedding?

A mock renunciation in Tamil Brahmin, Telugu and other south Indian Hindu weddings. The groom declares he will leave for Kashi (Varanasi) to study and renounce the world, takes an umbrella, a bamboo fan, a walking stick and a sacred book, and sets off, until the bride's father (in Telugu weddings, her brother or cousin) persuades him to return and marry. It marks the end of his brahmacharya, the student's vow, and his return as a grihastha, a householder.

Which Indian wedding rituals have equivalents abroad?

Most of them. The haldi resembles Scotland's blackening, the joota chupai Korea's foot-beating, the groom's name hidden in the mehendi the French chamber-pot games, the griha pravesh rice pot Germany's smashed porcelain, the vidaai and its songs the Tujia crying month, the rice thrown at the vidaai the Maasai bride's departure, the roka Fiji's tabua, and the child placed in the bride's lap Greece's krevati.

Are these traditions still practised today?

Many are, with variations. The blackening has died out in some places but is still enthusiastically practised in others. The Polterabend is still held in Germany, singing in place of crying is still common at Tujia weddings, the tabua is still given in Fiji, and the Kashi Yatra is still part of many Tamil Brahmin and Telugu weddings. Korea's official portal describes the foot-beating in the past tense, as a custom of the traditional wedding.