Kashmir built its identity on a feast for four. It is now paying for a feast for eight hundred. Four voices ask whether the wazwan has stopped being hospitality and started being a wall between the young and their nikah.
Count the dishes at the last wedding you attended. Then count the years the host will spend paying for them.
For most of the six centuries that wazwan has been cooked in this valley, the two numbers had nothing to do with each other. Seven dishes came to a trami of four. The waza worked through the night over a wood fire, the guest was honoured, the family gave what it had, and the account closed with the last course. The feast was a language of respect, not a statement of net worth.
That balance has broken. The trami now carries twenty four dishes, twenty eight, in some halls thirty six. The guest list has swollen from the people who know the family to the people who must be seen to have been invited. Around the food has grown a second economy of tents, halls, furnishings, crockery, service staff, transport, dry fruit boxes, jewellery, trousseau and multiple functions spread across days. And behind all of it, in household after household, sits a loan.
This page brings together four Kashmiris who have arrived at the same conclusion from different directions. Syed Shakeel Qalander sets out a practical code with numbers attached. Rafeeq Masoodi delivers a moral indictment and asks where the cash is coming from. Peerzada Masarat Shah traces the social machinery of shame that keeps the spending going. And Maulana Showkat Hussain Keng places the question inside the boundaries of faith. None of them wants wazwan abolished. All four want it rescued.
How seven became thirty six
No single family decided this. That is what makes it difficult to undo.
The mechanism is simple and it is social rather than economic. One family serves more. The next family, invited to that wedding, calculates what will be said if it serves less. It matches, and adds a little. The family after that inherits the raised figure as the new floor. Nobody in the chain believes they are being extravagant. Each one believes they are being adequate.
Mr Shakeel names the same trap: the concern, he writes, is not wazwan itself but the competition and extravagance that have become attached to it. Masoodi puts the arithmetic in the mouths of the participants: one family did twenty five trami, so the next must do thirty. Peerzada Masarat Shah finds the identical logic operating in the dry fruit shops, where an expensive gift box is bought not out of desire but out of fear of being judged, so that one family’s expenditure becomes another family’s obligation.
That is the engine. It runs on the fear of what will be said, and it has no brake fitted anywhere.
The arithmetic nobody prints on the card
Most of the public argument fixes on the number of dishes. The bigger driver is the number of guests.
Mr Shakeel’s point deserves to be read twice by anyone planning a wedding. Expenditure rises less with the length of the menu than with the length of the list. More guests mean more meat, a larger tent or hall, more furnishing, more crockery, more cooks, more service staff, more transport. Add competition over dishes and quantity on top of an inflated guest count, and the cost does not rise, it multiplies.
Cut the list and the savings arrive from several directions at once, most of them invisible on the menu card. This is why the reformers keep returning to guest numbers rather than to the menu alone. A seven dish wazwan served to eight hundred people is still a wedding a middle class household cannot pay for.
Figures circulate freely in public discussion about what a daughter’s wedding now costs in Srinagar, Anantnag or Baramulla, commonly quoted in the range of twelve to twenty lakh rupees, with the high end considerably beyond that. These are estimates that families exchange among themselves rather than audited numbers, and this newspaper reports them as such. The absence of hard data is itself part of the problem. Nobody publishes what a wedding costs, so nobody can argue with the figure the neighbourhood has settled on.
The middle class cannot afford it and cannot escape it
The households under the greatest strain are not the poorest and not the wealthiest.
Mr Shakeel describes the position precisely: the middle class can neither comfortably afford extravagance nor easily escape the pressure to match it. Savings are exhausted. Money is borrowed. Land is sold. Gold is mortgaged. And this is before clothing, jewellery and the associated ceremonies are counted.
Masoodi sharpens it into an image that should be printed on every wedding invitation in the valley: the loan remains for five years, the wazwan remains for five hours.
Both men connect this to something the valley discusses constantly and analyses rarely, which is the rising age of marriage. Marriages after thirty have become common, some extending into the late thirties and beyond. Public conversation frequently attaches large numbers to the count of women in Kashmir who remain unmarried or who married far later than they wished. Peerzada Masarat Shah is right to insist that such figures be verified rather than repeated as sensation, and this page endorses that caution. But the underlying mechanism does not depend on the statistic being exact. When a wedding requires borrowing on the scale now considered normal, cost becomes one of the barriers standing between young people and marriage. A father with several daughters is not managing a celebration. He is managing a sequence of financial events he cannot fund.
Mr Shakeel’s formulation is the one that should govern the debate. Society should make marriage easier, not financially intimidating.
The bins outside the hall
There is a second cost, and it is visible on the street the morning after.
Masoodi asks readers to look at the municipal bins outside marriage halls in Srinagar on any wedding day: uneaten meat and rice, in quantity. The menu has expanded past wazwan itself into chicken preparations, cheese balls, fish fry, salads and ice cream, and a large share of it is never eaten. Peerzada Masarat Shah records a recent high end wedding at which guests were served four kebabs, six rishtas, four gustabas, tabak maaz, rogan josh and a long list beyond that.
Two objections follow. The first is religious, and every one of the four contributors raises it. Israf, waste and excess, is forbidden in explicit terms. The second is a matter of plain decency in a society where a great many households eat carefully. Food is being cooked in order to be seen, not in order to be eaten, and then thrown away in public view.
The practice of the takeaway envelope compounds it. Meat is cooked in surplus because guests expect to carry a portion home, which means the host is budgeting for food that was never intended to be consumed at the function at all. Mr Shakeel wants the practice ended outright. What is served at a wedding should be eaten at the wedding.
This has been tried before
Kashmir is not attempting this reform for the first time, and the record of previous attempts is the most useful thing available to anyone attempting it again.
Restrictions on extravagant wedding practice were attempted during the administration of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, and recollections of that period describe resistance from sections of society. In 2004 the valley experimented successfully with a seven course wazwan, supported by the wazas themselves, which is a detail worth underlining: the cooks were not the obstacle. Earlier, the Samaj Sudhar movement associated with the late Mohammad Shafi Pandit, Dr G. Q. Allaqaband, Zareef Ahmad Zareef and other eminent citizens attempted guest and dish control.
Maulana Showkat Hussain Keng has recalled such efforts and expressed disappointment that they did not hold. Reading the record, the reason for their failure is fairly clear. Each attempt was voluntary, each applied unevenly, and each collapsed the moment prominent families opted out. A ceiling that the affluent are free to ignore is not a ceiling. It is a suggestion aimed at people who were struggling anyway.
Two contemporary precedents are cited by the contributors and both deserve documentation by this newspaper rather than repetition. Mr Shakeel points to the Chenab valley, particularly Doda, where community observance of restricted wedding menus is reported to be genuinely enforced, with social consequences for those who deviate. Masoodi points to villages in Pulwama and Kupwara where mohalla committees have already fixed a simple code. What distinguishes both from the failed valley wide efforts is enforcement by the community itself rather than appeal to individual conscience.
The question of where the money comes from
Masoodi takes the argument into territory the others do not enter, and this page prints it as his argument rather than as its own finding.
His contention is that a section of the most extravagant weddings are not funded by earnings at all. Cash to the waza, cash to the tent contractor, cash to the jeweller without a bill, cash for hundreds of kilograms of mutton: he describes the Kashmiri wedding as a mechanism through which unaccounted money is converted and displayed, and he asks why enforcement agencies pursue small taxpayers for decades while a hall billing sums far beyond any visible income attracts no attention.
Whether that description fits a few weddings or many is a question for investigation rather than assertion, and this newspaper makes no claim about any individual family. But one part of his argument stands independent of the answer. Whoever is paying, and by whatever means, the standard set at the top of the scale becomes the standard expected at the bottom. A driver, a teacher or a clerk in the same locality inherits an expectation created by spending he has no way of matching. That is the transfer mechanism, and it works regardless of where the original money came from.
What faith actually requires
All four contributors arrive at the same verse and the same principle.
The Qur’an instructs: eat and drink, but do not be excessive, for He does not like those who commit excess. The teaching that the simplest nikah carries the greatest blessing is not obscure. It is among the most widely known instructions in the tradition, and it is set aside routinely by a society that describes itself as devout.
Maulana Keng’s position, as reported, is careful and worth stating exactly. Islam does not condemn good food, hospitality or celebration. It condemns israf. The distinction matters, because reform framed as an attack on wazwan will be resisted by people who are right to defend their culture. Reform framed as the removal of excess from a tradition that never contained it has a far stronger claim.
Peerzada Masarat Shah locates the contradiction sharply. A society deeply rooted in Islamic values has allowed extravagance and social comparison to govern one of the central institutions of life. Islam encourages marriage to be accessible and dignified. What has been constructed instead is an entry fee.
What would actually work
The four contributors converge on a short list, and the convergence is the significant thing.
A fixed and uniform ceiling, applying to the wealthiest families exactly as it applies to everyone else. Mr Shakeel is explicit that without this, extravagance by a few becomes an expectation for all. Seven dishes for common guests, with a small allowance for the baraat. A fixed quantity of meat per trami, settled in consultation with the wazas rather than imposed on them. Buffet service in place of extended course by course serving, which reduces both waste and the long waits that stretch a function. An end to takeaway envelopes. Fewer functions and shorter guest lists. Nikah and walima on a single day.
And then the part that decides whether any of it survives contact with the first wedding season. Enforcement cannot rest on the host. A family that reduces its wedding alone absorbs the entire social penalty by itself, which is why individual restraint has never scaled. Mr Shakeel proposes that guests themselves enforce the code by declining to attend, or by walking out of, functions that deliberately breach the agreed limits. Masoodi calls for a boycott of such weddings and for the ulema to refuse to solemnise nikah in halls holding seven hundred people. Whatever mechanism is chosen, the cost of breaking the code has to fall on the family that breaks it rather than on the family that keeps it.
Mr Shakeel’s call for the religious leadership, particularly the Mirwaiz and the Grand Mufti, to convene a cross section of civil society and evolve a common code is the most workable route on offer. Kashmir has already shown that collective thinking can shift entrenched practice: dowry and elaborate gift exchange have declined considerably in many sections of society without any law being passed. The same social force, directed at wedding hospitality, would be sufficient.
The waza should keep his art. The guest should be honoured. The family should celebrate. The daughter should not be a debt.
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BOX: THE SEVEN POINT CODE ON THE TABLE
The measures proposed by Syed Shakeel Mr Shakeel, offered as a starting draft for wider consultation:
1. Seven dishes for common guests, five non vegetarian and two vegetarian, with two additional dishes permitted for the baraat.
2. Meat fixed at around 1.5 kg per trami for guests and 2.5 kg for the baraat, chicken included, settled in consultation with the wazas.
3. Buffet service for both men and women, reducing waste and cutting the long waiting periods built into course by course serving.
4. An end to takeaway envelopes. Food served at a wedding is for consumption at the wedding.
5. Reasonable guest lists and fewer functions, which lowers spending on tents, furniture, staff and transport automatically.
6. A single uniform ceiling observed by affluent families on identical terms.
7. A common code evolved by religious leadership with civil society, enforced by guests rather than left to the host.
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THE FOUR VOICES
1. A SOCIAL COMPACT, NOT A SERMON
SYED SHAKEEL MR SHAKEEL
BLURB: “The middle class can neither comfortably afford extravagance nor easily escape the social pressure to match it. Society should make marriage easier, not financially intimidating.”
Wazwan has been rooted in Kashmir for nearly six centuries and has become an inseparable part of our culture, our hospitality and our collective identity. Sharing a trami symbolises warmth, togetherness and respect for the guest. The concern today is not wazwan itself. It is the competition and extravagance that have become attached to it.
Wazwan is the centrepiece of a Kashmiri wedding and society can hardly imagine marriage hospitality without it. There is neither need nor justification to discard the tradition. What needs checking is the race for ever larger guest lists, more dishes and excessive quantities of meat. Wazwan should remain a celebration of hospitality, not a demonstration of wealth.
The expenditure rises not merely with the number of dishes but with the number of guests. More guests mean more meat, larger tents or halls, additional furnishing, crockery, cooks, service staff, transport and other arrangements. When families also compete over the number of dishes and the quantity served, the cost multiplies substantially.
The middle class can neither comfortably afford extravagance nor easily escape the social pressure to match it. Families exhaust savings and sometimes borrow merely to maintain perceived social standards, besides spending on clothing, jewellery and associated ceremonies. This rising financial threshold is one of several factors contributing to delayed marriages, with marriages after thirty becoming increasingly common and some extending into the late thirties and forties. Society should make marriage easier, not financially intimidating.
Reducing this requires a collective social compact applicable equally to the rich and the middle class. Kashmir already experimented successfully with a seven course wazwan in 2004, supported by the chefs themselves. Earlier social reform initiatives, including the Samaj Sudhar movement associated with the late Mohammad Shafi Pandit, Dr G. Q. Allaqaband, Zareef Ahmad Zareef and other eminent citizens, had also attempted guest and dish control. The Chenab valley, particularly Doda, reportedly provides a useful local precedent of community observance of highly restricted wedding menus, where those deviating face social consequences.
A renewed reform could begin with practical measures. Seven dishes only for common guests, comprising five non vegetarian and two vegetarian, with two more permitted for the baraat. By any reasonable standard, such a spread is itself a rich and dignified feast. The quantity of meat could be fixed at around 1.5 kg per trami for guests and 2.5 kg for the baraat, including chicken, subject to wider consultation with the wazas and with society.
Buffet service should be encouraged for both men and women. Guests take what they actually wish to eat, wastage and meat consumption decline, and considerable time is saved compared with repeated course by course serving. Traditional trami service often involves long waiting periods, as the host waits for a sufficient number of guests to assemble before the meal is served.
The practice of takeaway envelopes should end. Food served at a wedding should be for consumption there. The host should not be socially bound to provide surplus meat for guests to carry home. Reasonable guest lists and fewer functions would save on food and automatically reduce expenditure on tents, furniture, staff and allied arrangements.
One standard must apply to everyone, affluent families included, with a uniform ceiling. Otherwise extravagance by a few becomes an expectation for everyone else. There are already encouraging signs in society against dowry and elaborate traditional gift exchanges, which have declined considerably in many sections. Similar collective thinking can rationalise wedding hospitality.
The guiding principle can be stated simply. Preserve wazwan, reduce the guest list, limit it to seven or nine dishes, serve what can be eaten rather than what can be carried home, and make simplicity a mark of social responsibility rather than of financial inability.
It is high time the religious leadership, particularly the Mirwaiz and the Grand Mufti, took the lead by bringing together a cross section of civil society groups to evolve a common code for simple marriages. Once agreed, it should become a social norm applicable to all, with guests themselves enforcing it by declining to participate in, or walking out from, functions that deliberately violate the agreed limits.
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2. WE HAVE TURNED SUNNAT INTO A BUSINESS DEAL
RAFEEQ MASOODI
BLURB: “The waza gets paid. The tent contractor gets paid. The loan remains for five years. The wazwan remains for five hours.”
For centuries wazwan was not food. It was tehzeeb. Seven dishes, cooked with patience by a waza, served with love on a trami of four. It meant respect, brotherhood, mehmaan nawazi.
Today wazwan has become a weapon, and lavish weddings have become a wall between our youth and their nikah. I oppose this culture of extravagance and I say it plainly as a Kashmiri.
We have turned sunnat into a business deal. Nikah is sunnat, and the Prophet, peace be upon him, taught us that the simplest nikah is the most blessed. What have we done with that teaching? Twenty four dishes, twenty eight, thirty six. Five hundred to eight hundred guests. A middle class father in Srinagar, Anantnag or Baramulla is now looking at sums running into many lakhs for one daughter’s wedding. Where is he to bring it from? This is no longer hospitality. It is competition. One family did twenty five trami, so we must do thirty. That is not Kashmiriat. That is dikhawa.
It is making marriage impossible. Talk to any imam, any matchmaker, any mother in Kashmir today and you will hear the same account. Boys of thirty four are unmarried, not because they do not wish to marry but because they cannot afford what will be expected of them, the wazwan, the jewellery, the hall, the trousseau. Girls above thirty are waiting because their parents cannot afford the display that society has made compulsory. We are delaying marriage by years to pay for one day’s feast, and then we discuss late marriage and social distress as though the cause were a mystery. We are the cause.
The poor are crushed and the rich are setting the rate. A wealthy man holds a destination wedding with forty dishes, imported qehwa, dry fruit stalls and LED screens. The next day a driver or a teacher in the same locality feels obliged to do the same, taking a loan at heavy interest, selling land, mortgaging his mother’s bangles. The waza gets paid. The tent contractor gets paid. The loan remains for five years. The wazwan remains for five hours.
Wazwan itself is being insulted in the process. Real wazwan is art: rista, rogan josh, tabak maaz, daniwal korma, aab gosh, marchwangan korma, gushtaba, cooked for hours over a wood fire. Now we have added chicken preparations, cheese balls, fish fry, salads and ice cream in its name, and half of it goes into the bins. Look at the municipal bins outside the marriage halls of Srinagar on any wedding day, full of uneaten meat and rice, while our own people go without. This is israf, which the Qur’an forbids in plain words: eat and drink, but do not waste.
I am not saying end wazwan. I am saying return to wazwan. The old seven dish trami is enough. Nikah and walima on one day, not functions spread across three. One hundred and fifty to two hundred guests, your actual relatives, not seven hundred people you do not know. Mohalla committees must fix a simple code, as some villages in Pulwama and Kupwara have already done.
There is a further question nobody wishes to ask aloud. Where is this cash coming from? Ten lakh to the waza, twenty to the tent contractor, twenty five to the jeweller without a bill, hundreds of kilograms of mutton, all in cash. When a man’s salary is known to the whole mohalla and his wedding is not, people eat the gushtaba and draw their own conclusions on the way home. The revenue authorities pursue small taxpayers for decades. The marriage halls, where sums beyond any declared income change hands, attract no such attention.
A father who has spent twenty lakh on wazwan cannot educate his daughter. A boy who has spent his savings on a hall cannot give his wife a secure home. We are eating our future in one night. The girl does not need thirty six dishes. She needs a kind husband and a peaceful home. The boy does not need a crowd. He needs a partner.
Boycott such weddings. Let the ulema decline to solemnise nikah in halls of seven hundred. Wazwan should be a fragrance, not a burden. Allah does not see your trami. He sees your niyat.
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3. RESCUE THE TRADITION FROM THE EXCESS
PEERZADA MASARAT SHAH
BLURB: “One family’s expenditure becomes another family’s obligation. That is how the cycle begins.”
Kashmiri weddings were once celebrations of family, faith and community. For many households they are now a competition of wealth, status and social standing. What was a cherished tradition is turning into a financial burden, and nowhere is that shift more visible than in the wedding culture that has taken root here.
At a recent high end wedding, guests were served four kebabs, six rishtas, four gustabas, tabak maaz, rogan josh and a long list of further items. Such a spread may impress for an evening. It raises a harder question: how much are we sacrificing to maintain the appearance of prosperity?
The problem is not wazwan. Wazwan is an important part of our cultural heritage. The problem begins when tradition becomes an instrument of social competition, when a family feels compelled to serve more, spend more and display more simply because another family did so first.
The same competition is visible in the dry fruit shops that fill during the wedding season. A family buys an expensive gift box not because it wants to but because it fears being judged. If the other side gave a particular box, anything cheaper can be read as an insult. One family’s expenditure becomes another family’s obligation. That is how the cycle begins.
A wedding that should unite two families can leave one of them paying debts for years. The pressure is severest on middle class households. Inflation has pushed up the cost of food, clothing, housing and education, yet wedding expectations continue to climb. For a father with several daughters the anxiety can be overwhelming. He is expected to arrange a respectable wedding for each, provide elaborate meals, exchange gifts and hold the family’s standing in place. What happens when his income cannot support these expectations?
This is not only an economic question. It is a social and emotional one. Our preoccupation with appearances has produced a situation in which people are ashamed of simplicity. A modest wazwan is criticised. A smaller gathering becomes a subject of gossip. Less expensive gifts are read as a lack of generosity. Families spend money they do not have because they fear what will be said.
The irony is sharp. We describe ourselves as a society rooted in Islamic values, yet we have allowed extravagance and comparison to dominate one of the most important institutions of life. Islam encourages marriage to be accessible and dignified, not an occasion for financial ruin.
What does the extravagance achieve? Does a larger wazwan guarantee a happier marriage? Does a costlier dry fruit box ensure a stronger bond between two families? Does a grand venue guarantee compatibility between husband and wife? A marriage is sustained by respect, understanding, responsibility and compassion, not by the number of dishes served to guests.
There is also a demographic concern. Public discussion frequently cites figures about thousands of Kashmiri women remaining unmarried or marrying later than they wished. Such figures need to be carefully verified and understood rather than used as a sensational statistic. The underlying concern, however, is real. When marriage becomes prohibitively expensive, economic pressure becomes one of the barriers standing between young people and marriage.
The solution cannot come from individuals alone. A young couple may want a simple wedding and still find themselves trapped between parental expectation and community pressure. Real change requires collective courage.
Imagine communities deciding together that a wedding with ten dishes is as respectable as one with thirty. Imagine relatives ceasing to compare gifts. Imagine families celebrating simplicity instead of mocking it. Imagine the money saved on display going into the couple’s education, home or business.
Kashmir does not need to abandon its traditions. It needs to rescue them from excess. Wazwan should remain a celebration of hospitality, not a measure of financial capacity. Dry fruits should remain a symbol of affection, not a test of status. Weddings should remain occasions of happiness, not years of financial anxiety.
The real status symbol is not how much a family spends on one day. It is how wisely it builds the lives of its children after that day. If we want marriage to become easier for our daughters and sons, society must stop asking what people will say if we spend less, and start asking what our children are losing because we spend too much.
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4. THE SCHOLAR’S WARNING: EXCESS CARRIES NO BARAKAH
ON THE POSITION OF MAULANA SHOWKAT HUSSAIN KENG
BLURB: “The call is not to destroy wazwan. It is to reduce its burden, so that poorer families can also marry their children with dignity.”
Wazwan is one of Kashmir’s great culinary traditions, a symbol of hospitality, craftsmanship and the generosity for which Kashmiris are known. But a tradition carried to an extreme becomes a social burden. That is the concern religious scholars and social reformers have raised about the growing extravagance around wazwan at Kashmiri weddings.
Among those who have spoken on the issue is Maulana Showkat Hussain Keng, a prominent Islamic scholar of Kashmir. His concern is not with wazwan as a cultural tradition but with the expenditure and social pressure that have developed around it. He has recalled the efforts made to reduce the scale of wazwan and expressed disappointment that those attempts did not succeed.
The problem, as he explains it, is rooted in social attitude rather than in the menu. People have grown accustomed to increasingly elaborate wedding feasts, and many families believe they cannot reduce the number of dishes without inviting criticism from relatives and from society at large. What began as hospitality turns into competition, and the competition then presents itself to each new family as an obligation.
There is a historical dimension to this. Recollections of the period of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad and his administration describe attempts to address extravagant wedding practice, with the restrictions provoking resistance from sections of society. Accounts also connect Kashmiri wazwan with prominent visitors and political figures, including Jawaharlal Nehru. Such recollections indicate the cultural reach of Kashmiri cuisine, and they deserve careful documentation before being treated as established historical fact.
From an Islamic perspective the matter is more serious still. Islam does not condemn good food, hospitality or celebration. What it condemns is israf, excess and wastefulness. The Qur’an states: eat and drink, but do not be excessive, for indeed He does not like those who commit excess.
That principle should govern Kashmiri weddings. A poor or middle class family should not have to borrow, take loans or sell property merely to provide a feast beyond its means. The purpose of nikah is to establish a lawful and blessed family life, not to demonstrate wealth before society. A wedding that begins in debt has already compromised the household it was meant to found.
Maulana Keng’s message, understood correctly, is not a call to destroy wazwan. It is a call to reduce its burden. Kashmir may never entirely give up its culinary heritage, and perhaps it should not. Wazwan is part of who Kashmiris are. But its scale can be brought within reasonable limits so that poorer families can also marry their children with dignity.
The reform required is not the abolition of wazwan. It is the removal of the competition that has attached itself to wazwan. Let the waza preserve his art. Let the guest be honoured. Let the family celebrate, within its means.
A marriage should bring barakah, happiness and peace, not debt, anxiety and social humiliation. If Kashmir can preserve wazwan while restoring the values of simplicity, moderation and compassion, both its culture and its faith will be better served.
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The four contributions on this page were submitted to this newspaper. Cost figures cited in public discussion are estimates and are reported as such. Views expressed in the signed pieces are those of the contributors.
