In India, turmeric doesn’t begin with symbolism. It begins in the kitchen: sometimes pulled from a packet, sometimes crushed fresh using a mortar and pestle into a thick yellow paste. It stains fingertips, simmers in milk, soothes wounds. It is antiseptic, anti-inflammatory, and antioxidant. A pantry staple. A home remedy. A humble beautifier.
But in weddings, turmeric transforms. Folded with flour or curd, stirred with essential oils, or bathed in milk and sandalwood, it’s lifted from the everyday and pressed into skin like a blessing made visible. It becomes sacred. Haldi. Manjal. Halad. Arisina. Across India’s dizzying sprawl of traditions and topographies, this root glows like a sunbeam that binds it all.
At 23, my mother was wrapped in a white cotton sheet at her Manjha, the turmeric ceremony observed in our Muslim community as a prelude to the wedding, meant to bless, beautify, and protect. The turmeric roots were chosen carefully and crushed on a sil batta (a traditional flat stone used for grinding), mixed with rosewater and milk, and placed into a ceremonial bowl. The paste was warm, fragrant, alive with purpose.
Her grandmother began the application, followed by her aunts, mother and cousins. Traditionally, it started with the eldest married woman and moved downward in age. In earlier years, only married women applied the paste, seasoned enough to pass on their wisdom. But time softens and circles widen. Cousins, sisters, friends—all who mattered to her were included. The ritual still began with the elder, but by the end, every hand had touched the bowl.
They applied it to her arms, legs, back, and face—smiling, weeping, teasing. Each woman offered a few words of advice. It wasn’t only for the bride; it became a ritual for every woman present, a reflection of where they’ve been and what they’re passing on. Afterwards, her mother and two aunts poured water over her in a rose-scented rinse, gently scrubbing her back, washing her free of her old self. Then came the yellow; she wore the color for three days, a walking ritual, glowing before the mehendi (henna) ceremony.
She laughs, telling me it’s harder to find good turmeric these days, especially outside India. “People use whatever they can get. Packet stuff, supermarket blends. It’s fine,” she shrugs. “As long as the haldi is there.”
I asked if she planned to make the haldi for my wedding. I’m 32, unmarried, career-focused—what some would still call a spinster. She said yes, without pause. Because it means something to her too: a passing down, a quiet continuity. I was surprised by how much that moved me. I hadn’t imagined the ritual, not really.
If and when I do marry, it will be an interfaith wedding. My partner comes from a different religion, and we hold onto our cultures while teetering between atheism and agnosticism. As an American Christian, on paper, these rituals don’t live in my partner’s memory, and may not have been built for the partnership we’ve made. But I do want a manjha. Not for the turmeric, not for the glow.
I want it for my mother. For her to gather the women she loves. For her to kneel beside me, infusing the married life she hopes I’ll live into my skin, one touch at a time. Not a ritual I need, but a milestone we both reach together.
I’ve seen what it could look like. At a friend’s wedding—a Gujarati bride marrying outside her community—both the families that spent years unhappy about the possible union gathered around a bowl of turmeric. Her aunts applied the paste first, followed by women from the groom’s family. The paste was different, turmeric mixed with saffron and a few drops of blessed sandalwood oil. Fragrant, warm, bright as flame. They laughed awkwardly at first, then easily. What might’ve remained two camps in stiff politeness became a collective. Turmeric did what years of negotiation hadn’t. It softened the space between them.
Across the subcontinent, turmeric shapeshifts with geography and language, but never loses its purpose. It’s ground differently, mixed differently, scented and prepared according to the land—and the hands—that shape it. In Tamil Nadu, it’s stirred into water with sandalwood for the Mangala Snanam, a pre-wedding ritual bath meant to purify and bless. In West Bengal, it’s ground with rice flour. In Rajasthan, the paste may include rosewater and chickpea flour. In Punjab, it’s blended with mustard or almond oil for the Maiyan ceremony. In Maharashtra, some use mango leaves to apply the turmeric mix as a part of the Halad Chadavane.
Each recipe is family-bound. Some swear by kasturi manjal (wild turmeric); others make do with what’s on hand. These aren’t written down. They live in early morning preparations, in what a grandmother once said and a cousin later swore by.
Yet always: turmeric.
The scent of it lingers long after the music stops. Earthy, bitter, floral. It gets into the crevices of jewelery, it stains clothes. Women often say they can still “smell” their wedding years later, not in perfume but in turmeric, a note that resurfaces in kitchens and prayer rooms.
Turmeric crosses state lines, meandering through communities with the easy authority of something sacred and practical. In a country too often narrated through difference, turmeric tells another story: one of continuity, of collective memory, of a shared yellow hue that runs through our weddings like strands of marigold.
