Anglo-Indian weddings have their own character — not quite the Indian wedding around them, not quite a Western one either. As families spread out, much of it is quietly disappearing, usually because nobody wrote it down.
What is distinctive
The church service is the wedding. Not a component of a multi-day event — the thing itself. Everything else attends on it.
The reception is a party, not a ceremony. Dancing, a band or a good playlist, and everybody on the floor including the grandparents. The waltz for the couple, then everyone else.
The food is its own cuisine. Ball curry, pepper water, yellow rice, cutlets, and at Christmas the whole run of kul kuls, rose cookies and dodol. It is not Indian food and it is not English food. It is Anglo-Indian food, and it exists almost nowhere else.
The speeches are funny. Affection expressed through teasing. Anyone expecting solemnity is at the wrong wedding.
What tends to get lost
The music, first. Families that hire a generic DJ end up with a generic reception, and everyone notices without being able to say why.
Then the food, because caterers offer a standard menu and it takes effort to ask for the family's own dishes. That effort is worth it — it is what people remember.
Then the older relatives' role. There were customary things done by aunts and grandmothers that are simply not done now because nobody asked them in time.
If you are planning one
Ask the oldest person in your family what happened at their wedding, and write it down. Do it before the planning starts, not during.
They will have details nobody else remembers — a hymn, an order of things, something said at the door. Most of it can be kept at no cost at all, and almost none of it survives if nobody asks.
When the two families are from different backgrounds
Increasingly common, and it works best when both traditions are given real room rather than blended into something neither family recognises.
One ceremony from each side, done properly, beats a compromise that leaves both families feeling their part was tokenised.
The thing people regret afterwards is almost never that the wedding was too traditional. It is that they let something go without realising it was theirs.