Raw Mango’s ‘Heer’ Weaves Intimacy Into Otherwise Over-The-Top Indian Weddings

I’ve spent the last two or three days thinking a lot about Heer. In case you haven’t seen yet, Heer is Sanjay Garg’s beautiful new Raw Mango collection that’s taken us by a storm. It’s a simple word isn’t it - beautiful - and yet I cannot remember when in recent times I’ve seen something from the fashion world that has truly struck me as just that. We have edgy and glamorous and sexy and fun, out-of-the-box and on the pulse and all those things. But fashion has somehow stopped being beautiful. And somewhere I suspect that’s linked to the fact that it has stopped telling stories.

When I first joined this industry I remember editors and fashion directors at magazines telling me and my photographer colleagues that they didn’t want “so much mood”. I never understood why. “Because it takes away attention from the clothes and that’s why we’re here…for the clothes,” one person offered. Somewhere along the way, we forgot that there were living, breathing, feeling people inside those clothes.

As I allowed myself to be immensely moved and transported by Heer last night, I also questioned why so many like myself were affected so strongly by the campaign. The messages and shares were piling in as Raw Mango and stylist Kshitij Kankaria’s Instagram feeds showed. Everyone from your teenage blogger to Dayanita Singh pronounced it wonderful. But what is Heer really? Put simply it is a wedding or festive collection whose corresponding campaign looks nothing like what we’re now used to seeing as wedding campaigns. It has no sphinx-like “family” all lined up unsmiling on the steps of some palatial mansion wearing completely unaffordable outfits and more jewellery than a Tanishq showroom window and more make up than a Ramlila cast. No, instead with Heer we are greeted by a house, a “home” readied for a wedding in nothing but white sheets draped over beds generations have slept in and that now prepare to be sat on by many. Simple black wood framed family portraits that aren’t the focus, and long uncarpeted corridors where the swish of the sharara echoes freely.

When you go through these images as a bride-to-be, which I am, you aren’t flooded with deep panic as to how much this will cost you, or whether you’ll ever wear it again. Instead, you are filled like Heer herself with a yearning for union. I certainly was. Not just with my beloved but with my family. Not just with the members that were a phone call away but those who had long left me. I missed suddenly the laughter of my bua who we lost a few years ago. I wanted to gossip on the cool floor tiles of my bedroom with my masi untangling my hair. I wanted to hear the stories I have heard and cackled over a hundred times already and to try on my mother’s jewellery and pose with my sisters in our home.

There is a word in Portuguese – saudade – that translates as a longing sort of nostalgia, and the imagery of Heer fills the heart with it. Because Heer is real. She breathes and lives and pulsates and sings. And there is no one single Heer. There is no blatant star to this show. The girls who are almost all actually Punjabi and non-models are radiant. With strong jaws, unruly locks escaping, proud noses crinkling into laughter and eyes a-twinkle, they are a refreshing escape from the wildly photoshopped women we see in other campaigns, dwarfed by grandiose architecture, arms like sticks, bodies unrealistically weightless beneath the pounds and pounds of fabric they wear. In a conversational sound clip released as part of the Heer story, we hear Heer and her friend chatting in Punjabi, parakeets in the background. She describes her preferred wedding clothing with unfiltered and practical joy, and finally when asked about jewellery, jokes cheekily, “Will I wear the jewellery or will the jewellery wear me?!”

Much of Heer’s century-old jewellery was sourced from Sanjay Garg’s own collection, but even the pieces from Kishan Das & Co. never overpower the outfits or the Heers. There is no pretence of wealth here. It is instead replaced by humility. There are no “sets”, as we have become so attached to in India. There are heirlooms and treasures and memories. So who is in charge of this marvellous reimagining of the Indian wedding? Sanjay Garg himself of course, and his team which includes stylist Kshitij Kankaria. They both believe is more a revisiting than a reimagining. Inspired by Garg’s younger brother’s wedding, which explains the authenticity (some of the girls in the video were actually at the wedding!), the shoot is a throwback to a simpler time. To pre-partition Punjab.

While Punjabis today are often called crass or known best for their heavy drinking, speeding cars and loud takeover of the capital city, the long story of the Punjabi migration is lost in this version. Pre-partition Punjab, as regal as it was simple, was practically a small country and had a population that was almost equally divided between Hindu and Muslim. Garg calls it a “place of composite cultures,” and Heer pays tribute to that culture and how it has fought to hold on to its traditions despite the violence of partition, the pain of migration, and the long years of rebuilding families, wealth, esteem and education. In a world where the stories of the past were possibly all many families had to hold on to, it must be a breath of fresh air to finally see and feel those stories come alive through fashion – a realm that has always seemed so deaf to pain.

Aptly created by documentary filmmaker Surabhi Tandon and musician Suryakant Sawhney, the videos accompanying Ashish N Shah’s images are Garg’s ace. Really, watching them is like watching an old secret memory on repeat, and I’m not the only one this week who has found tears in their eyes listening to the music, recorded live on set rather than in the confined space of a studio. And I am reminded, there is a Welsh word – hiraeth – which means nostalgia, or rather longing, for home, or a space one cannot return to. Heer is hiraeth.

After decades of Bollywood-esque pomp and unattainable glamour leaning towards vulgarity, it’s beautiful to see something in this cold world of fashion that turns your gaze gently inward to the heart, rather than outward to the world. Heer brides will not ask do I look as good as her, or how do I look better than everyone, or did mine cost more. They will ask – am I happy, is my sister happy too, I hope we match, I hope I remember this moment forever. And best of all Heer is all those important things we are talking about these days – body positive and feminist and handmade and sustainable – without being loud about it. It just is.

Though Kshitij Kankaria insists, “Like with all Raw Mango shoots the true hero is the clothing,” at the end of the bonanza that is Heer one is eager to correct him and say, “No, in fact, you are. All of you.” Even evocative is too easy a word here. Sanjay, Kshitij, Ashish, Surabhi and the rest of you…take a bow, you might be the first people since Gandhi to move a nation with textile.

Heer launches in store in Delhi on 7th September and Mumbai on 17th September.

Photography: Ashish N Shah
Art Direction: The Illiberals
Styling: Kshitij Kankaria and Naveli Choyal
Hair and Makeup: Anand Kaira
Venue: Baradari Palace
Jewellery: Kishan Das & Co.

Karuna Ezara Parikh is a poet and writer who lives in Calcutta. You can view more of her life here and poetry here.