India’s celebrities have spent the last few years proving that lavish weddings don’t need a passport stamp to dazzle. If anything, Indian celebrity weddings have become the gold standard for scale, spectacle and star power, often rivaling anything a European chateau or Caribbean resort could offer.
The conversation is resurfacing now because Prime Minister Narendra Modi has a new mantra for the nation’s biggest spenders: keep the shaadi at home. In a selfie-style video shared after India’s economy recorded a robust 7.8% GDP growth in the April-June quarter, the Prime Minister urged citizens to skip foreign holidays, avoid destination weddings abroad and buy gold only when truly necessary.
His pitch, wrapped in the language of Swadeshi and Atmanirbhar Bharat, was blunt: hold celebrations in India rather than overseas and let that spending fuel the domestic economy on the road to a Viksit Bharat by 2047.
The Ambani Blueprint
The wedding of Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant remains arguably the most extravagant Indian celebrity wedding in recent memory. The nearly week-long affair unfolded almost entirely on home turf: the family’s Mumbai residence and the Jio World Convention Centre, and pulled in a guest list stacked with Bollywood royalty and global A-listers, alongside headline performances that turned Mumbai into the centre of the celebrity-wedding universe for days on end.
Rajasthan’s Royal Draw
Rajasthan has quietly become India’s answer to Tuscany or the Amalfi Coast when it comes to luxury celebrity weddings, with its centuries-old forts and palace hotels offering a scale of grandeur that few overseas venues can match.
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Kiara Advani and Sidharth Malhotra chose the dune-fringed Suryagarh Palace in Jaisalmer for their nuptials in February 2023, complete with a no-phones policy and a multi-day run of rituals across the property’s courtyards and lawns.
Katrina Kaif and Vicky Kaushal picked the centuries-old Six Senses Fort Barwara near Sawai Madhopur for their hushed, heavily guarded 2021 wedding: proof that intimacy and extravagance aren’t mutually exclusive on Indian soil.
Even international names like Priyanka Chopra have leaned into Rajasthan’s palace circuit for the kind of grandeur once reserved for European royalty, marrying Nick Jonas at Jodhpur’s Umaid Bhawan Palace in December 2018 across a multi-day affair with both Christian and Hindu ceremonies.
From Udaipur To Chennai
Telugu and Tamil cinema stars have also kept the celebrations firmly on home soil. Vijay Deverakonda and Rashmika Mandanna, chose a plush palace-style hotel in Udaipur for their February 2026 wedding, with back-to-back Telugu and Kodava ceremonies marking both sides of the couple’s heritage.
Nayanthara and filmmaker Vignesh Shivan opted for a seaside resort in Mahabalipuram near Chennai for their 2022 wedding, drawing a guest list of Tamil and Telugu cinema’s biggest names to the temple town.
And Naga Chaitanya and Sobhita Dhulipala kept things rooted in tradition with a ceremony at a centuries-old temple in Telangana’s Wanaparthy in 2024, proving that regional heritage sites can rival any Rajasthan fort for old-world grandeur.
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Together, these weddings make Modi’s case better than any speech could. Between heritage forts, palace hotels and convention centres built to rival anything abroad, India already has the infrastructure and the imagination for extravagant celebrity weddings.
What the Prime Minister is really asking is for that pattern to trickle down: fewer chartered flights to Tuscany, more candlelit sangeets under Rajasthan’s desert skies. If the country’s biggest weddings are anything to go by, the mantra of “Wed in India” isn’t aspirational. It’s already happening, one lavish celebration at a time.
