Nikitaa And Durgesh's Wedding: When Kannada And Bihari Traditions Became One Ceremony | Indian And South Asian Wedding Photographers

The Team

Caterer — Bollywood Bistro — @bollywood_bistro
Dhol Player — GANESH JAGTAP LIVE MUSIC — @ganeshjagtap4866
Hair & Makeup — Afra — @makeupbyaafra
Mehndhi/Henna — Sravani — @hennabysravani
Photographer — Regeti’s Photography — @theregetis
Venue — Top of the Town — @topofthetown_dc

Nikitaa and Durgesh were married in a Hindu ceremony at The Hindu Temple of Metropolitan Washington that brought together two very different regional backgrounds — Nikitaa’s Kannada family traditions and Durgesh’s Bihari family traditions — into a single, unmistakably shared day.

It is a phrase we say often, and one we mean every time: Indian is not one culture. It never has been. What we walked into with Nikitaa and Durgesh was a reminder of just how true that is, even within a single religion, even within a single ceremony that on the surface might look familiar to anyone who has attended a Hindu wedding before.

Why does a Hindu wedding look different from family to family?

The rituals themselves may carry the same names from one wedding to the next — the sacred fire, the garlands, the coconut, the seven steps — but the order in which they happen, the language spoken over them, the specific hand gestures, even who is permitted to step in and assist, shifts depending on region and community. Nikitaa’s Kannada heritage and Durgesh’s Bihari heritage each carry their own version of what a wedding ceremony is supposed to look like. Neither family walked in expecting the other’s exact traditions. That negotiation, quiet and mostly unspoken, is part of what made this particular ceremony so layered to photograph.

The moments that are easy to miss

We have learned, after two decades of doing this, that the widest shot of the mandap is rarely the photograph that matters most years later. It is the smaller gestures around the edges of the frame. A coconut held steady in two hands while water is poured over it – known as Kanyadaan (aka Kannikadanam), not as some believe it to be just the stacking of hands during a ceremony by the brides parents. A mother reaching in to fix a strand of hair mid-ceremony. A necklace being fastened by one person while another adjusts it from behind. Durgesh’s hand closing gently around Nikitaa’s, henna and bangles pressed between them.

None of those moments are the ceremony’s headline. All of them are what the ceremony is actually made of.

What does it mean to photograph two family histories folding into one?

There is a difference between photographing a wedding and photographing the moment when two family histories start to become a single one. With Nikitaa and Durgesh, we watched that happen in real time — in the way both families leaned in during unfamiliar rituals, in the quiet cues passed between elders who were, in some cases, learning each other’s customs for the first time themselves.

We have seen this same kind of blending before. Shatakshi and Madhu’s wedding at The Omni Homestead Resort wove together her Bihari heritage and his Telugu heritage in much the same spirit, and their sangeet night before the ceremony was full of exactly the kind of in-between moments — a mother’s embrace, a grandmother’s lap — that end up mattering more than the staged ones. It is never really about the region. It is about paying enough attention to notice when two families are, quite literally, learning how to become one.

Photographs as family record, not just wedding record

This is the part we think about most. A photograph of Nikitaa’s hands, marked in henna from her own family’s tradition, wrapped around Durgesh’s — that image is not only documentation of a wedding day. Someday it may be one of the clearest visual explanations their children have of where each side of the family came from, what each brought to the marriage, and how it was carried forward.

That is a responsibility we do not take lightly. It is why we treat the tiny rituals happening off to the side with the same seriousness as the ceremony’s biggest moment — because we have learned, the way we learned it watching Isha and Kevin’s unhurried wedding day unfold in the gaps between the obvious photographs, that the smaller gesture is very often the one a family keeps closest.

What we hope Nikitaa and Durgesh’s photographs do

Years from now, we hope these images do more than show what the day looked like. We hope they show two distinct histories, side by side, choosing to become one.