Team ‘Made in Heaven’ on marriages: Not an endogamous monolith
The Hindu
Sobhita Dhulipala, Arjun Mathur, Jim Sarbh and team talk about the returning season of ‘Made in Heaven’, marriages in India and their bondings on set
Four years ago, when the first season of Made in Heaven released on Amazon Prime Video India, it was largely a shot in the dark. Despite the young cast, hip language and glittery trappings, its makers were unsure how a series that looks introspectively at Indian weddings will play in a society that gives undue centrality to the institution of marriage.
“We as Indians are too attached to the idea of a beautiful wedding,” says Alankrita Shrivastava, co-writer and co-director on both seasons of Made in Heaven. “It’s too momentous an occasion in every family and here we were using the wedding as a prism to look at life and society.” They were assured in their vision when the first reactions to the show started pouring in. “We were encouraged by how seen and heard people felt.”
Created by Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti — also behind the critical hit Dahaad earlier this year — Made in Heaven tracks two upstart Delhi wedding planners, Tara (Sobhita Dhulipala) and Karan (Arjun Mathur), as they arrange grand bespoke weddings for their wealthy clientele. The series examines class, patriarchy, identity, and social pretense, hingeing entirely on Sobhita’s and Arjun’s affable dual act. As Tara and Karan put out last-minute fires in the wings, their worldviews clash with an offensively rich, innately parochial social order.
“Our characters are caught between their own complex realities and the political undercurrents of a wedding,” Sobhita says. “Somewhere between the hustle and their loud beating hearts, they find their dance.”
Arjun, who was nominated for an International Emmy for his performance as Karan, a gay man living independently in pre-2018 India, remembers the day the Supreme Court read down Section 377 and decriminalised homosexuality. “Uncannily, I was shooting the scene where Karan is on television speaking for his rights when the news arrived,” Arjun says.
“The fact that the queer community in India felt represented by our show is something that I feel honoured about,” says Sobhita, who remembers meeting a young boy who said he could come out to his family after watching the show.
Karan’s conflicts, Arjun says, are more ‘inward’ in the new season. “The fact that a law was revoked does not mean it has necessarily changed anything for your lived experience. Maybe it’s worse.”
While residents are worried over deaths due to diarrhoea in Vijayawada, officials still grapple to find the root cause. Contaminated drinking water supplied by VMC officials is the reason, insist people in the affected areas, but officials insist that efforts are on to identify the disease and that those with symptoms other than diarrhoea too are visiting the health camps.