Photo Project: Being Potrolekha the "Man as Bride" by Anindy Biswas

I had a question that refused to leave me alone: why can’t a man be the bride? Not the groom on a horse, not the best man adjusting a turban, not the cheerful cousin dancing at the edge of the ritual — but the bride herself. The one seated at the center, draped in red, layered in gold, carrying centuries of expectation on her body. In the Indian imagination, the bride is more than a person; she is a symbol. She embodies beauty, sacrifice, transition, fertility, family honor, and auspiciousness all at once. She is spectacle and silence, joy and solemnity, power and vulnerability. And I kept asking myself why this role, so elaborate, so performative, was considered off-limits to bodies like mine, to men, to those of us who do not fit the neat boxes society insists upon.

So I decided to become the bride. This was not for a wedding, not for comedy, not even for stage drag. It was an inquiry — deeply artistic, profoundly political, intensely personal. As a gender-fluid performer, I have worn many faces, many costumes, many histories. But bridal attire felt different. It did not feel like “dressing up.” It felt like stepping into an institution, into a centuries-old performance whose rules were written in silk, gold, and ritual. The transformation began slowly. Bridal makeup is not cosmetic; it is architectural. Layer by layer, my features softened, sharpened, dissolved, reappeared. My eyes seemed to enlarge, my lips to swell, my skin to glow with a reverence I had never worn before. Then came the jewelry: necklaces resting heavily on my collarbones, earrings tugging gently at my ears, bangles gathering at my wrists with a soft metallic chorus. Each piece added not just weight, but expectation. And when the saree was finally draped and pleated, the garment itself seemed to demand stillness, poise, and a language of gestures I had never had to practice before — smaller, quieter, more deliberate. My body, trained for years in classical dance, suddenly had to learn a different vocabulary: the vocabulary of reverence and display simultaneously.

Looking at myself in the mirror, I did not see a “man in women’s clothing.” I saw a bride. And that realization was both exhilarating and unsettling. If I could inhabit this so convincingly, what exactly makes a bride “real”? Is it biology, or social permission, or collective agreement? The social reactions I encountered when I stepped outside were equally revealing. Some stared openly, trying to resolve the contradiction in front of them. Some smiled with curiosity, unsure how to reconcile admiration and discomfort. Some looked away quickly, as if mere politeness could erase the tension. A few responded with warmth, even awe. What fascinated me most was how strongly people reacted not to exaggeration — which is the usual playground of drag — but to sincerity. A comedic “man dressed as a bride” might be palatable. A serious one unsettles the social order.

Photographer Andy captured these moments with a sensitivity that felt almost sacred. There was no attempt to sensationalize or mock. The camera did not treat me as an oddity; it treated me as a subject — composed, dignified, present. Through the lens, the images became more than photos; they became portraits of possibility, documentation of what happens when someone claims a space that has traditionally been denied to them. In those photographs, I was not performing femininity or masculinity. I was performing humanity. I was exploring the boundaries of who gets to exist in symbolic roles, and why. The calm I felt while standing fully adorned in bridal attire was unexpected. Not euphoria, not disguise, not performance — but calm. As if a part of me that had always existed had finally been given permission to surface, even if only for a fleeting moment.

Being the bride revealed to me the extreme performativity already inherent in the role. Every bride is, in some sense, enacting a script written long before she was born — learning how to sit, how to smile, how to lower her gaze, how to move carefully under the weight of fabric and expectation. The difference is that her performance is socially sanctioned, while mine is questioned. And yet nothing about the experience felt artificial. Clothing has no intrinsic gender. Silk does not care who drapes it. Gold does not choose the body it adorns. Ritual objects carry meaning only because we assign meaning to them. In stepping into this role, I realized that access, not biology, determines who may become the bride. Society has simply rationed beauty, vulnerability, and ceremonial centrality along rigid lines of gender, denying some of us the permission to exist fully in these symbolic spaces.

I did not become the bride to imitate women, nor to claim their experiences. I became the bride to question why certain forms of beauty and centrality are rationed, to inhabit a symbol and see what it might reveal. And what it revealed is this: there is no inherent reason a man cannot be the bride. There is only tradition, habit, and the fear of ambiguity. Somewhere between the pleats of silk, the quiet clink of bangles, and the careful attention of Andy’s lens, I realized that the most radical act was not how I looked, but simply allowing myself to exist in that form without apology, without explanation, without justification. In that space, I was not performing gender at all. I was simply present. I was the bride.