There’s a hot new Indian wedding destination—and it’s a 25-hour flight away

“I wanted sexiness, I wanted class, I wanted drama, I wanted it to be regal, I wanted it to be bold,” Sanjana Sippy reflects on her wedding celebration in Mexico City, over our call. The Indian-born, Barbados-raised, Miami-based clothing designer tied the knot with wellness investor Sumesh Sachar in April this year. The three-day celebration saw all of Sippy’s criteria come to life. The city’s Gothic cathedrals, glitzy hotels, and sprawling equestrian estates proved a fitting backdrop for the couple’s lavish celebrations, which celebrated the best of Indian and Mexican cultures.

Over 200 guests flew in for the Sippy-Sachar wedding, from as far as Zambia, Bangkok, and Mumbai, and while that might seem like a mammoth project to willingly take on, the couple aren’t alone. Post-COVID, the Big Fat Indian Wedding has kept pace with the country’s growing appetite for international travel. In this pursuit of newness, meaningful personalisations, and a dose of ambition powered by insanity, the Indian wedding entourage has found a new foothold in Mexico—which is just a casual 25-odd hours by flight from India.

This naturally led to further questions: what is Mexico offering that stands out so distinctly from other locations? What’s making the country worth the long trip and the innumerable logistics that go into pulling off a wedding—one that’s extravagant and uber luxe—so far from home?

International couples make up more than 80 per cent of the clientele for Mexican wedding planner Lupita Tirado, and that includes a fair share of Indian weddings. Though a majority of these have been for US-based Indians, each wedding has a solid guestlist drawn from the subcontinent, ranging anywhere from 80 to 400 guests.

The wedding planner shares that Mexico’s rich cultural heritage and diverse natural backdrops are the primary attraction. The possibilities range from Mexico City’s historical and architectural brilliance to Cabo’s dramatic coastline, San Miguel’s vibrant, baroque charm, and the Riviera Maya’s white-sand beaches. Over the years, wedding planners and luxury hotels have mastered the ropes of Indian cuisine and grown more than familiar with native wedding traditions.

“It’s very easy for me and my team to work with Indian couples because our cultures are very similar,” Tirado notes over a phone call. “Families are heavily involved in our wedding planning, and there’s an emphasis on tradition. Our cultures are also rich in colour. I always try to include native flowers and handicrafts from local artisans, along with Indian cultural elements, in our weddings,” she shares. Sippy agrees on the harmony between the two cultures, highlighting how “they [Mexicans] celebrate life the way we do—you just feel so comfortable there”.

These might be less than convincing reasons for some to export an entire wedding halfway across the world, but for Sippy and Sachar, Mexico had special significance. After their first visit there for the latter’s birthday, it quickly became their happy place. The couple had three non-negotiables for their wedding destination: incredible food, rich culture, and non-stop vibes—and the country delivered.

Planned by experiential design firm Jerónimo Gaxiola Balsa, the events were peppered with local touches. An evening of ‘Taco, Tango, and Tequila’ featured a mariachi band, colourful papel picado banners, Tenango-embroidered tablecloths, and a playlist filled with Spanish pop and reggaeton. The sangeet was held at a historic gothic chapel, the Capilla del Instituto Cultural Helénico, and the couple’s Hindu wedding ceremony took place at the iconic estate of Cuadra San Cristóbal, designed by Mexican architect Luis Barragán, a site known for its striking pink walls, reflective pools, and geometric structures that blend modernism with nature. While the groom chose head-to-toe Tom Ford for the wedding reception, Sippy knew she wanted to wear a red look by Saisha Shinde “for both India and Mexico, because that’s our colour”. Finished with roses in her hair, Sippy’s look evoked the self-portraits of Mexico’s favourite artist, Frida Kahlo.

The conversation with Sippy opened a portal to extravagant nuptial maximalism, leading to a conversation with NYC-based couple Ikaasa Suri and Jaywin Singh Malhi, who also got married in Mexico earlier this year. For them, it was a convenient choice—with families based between the New York-New Jersey area and Texas, the country was easy to access. The pair also wanted to capture the essence of a relationship that developed over the course of a decade. “We were long-distance throughout the time and wanted to honour the important role that travel played in our relationship,” Suri notes. They got engaged in the charming town of San Miguel de Allende in central Mexico and had their wedding across multiple venues in Mexico City.

The couple held their Anand Karaj at a traditional hacienda with a jacaranda-clad mandap, the sangeet within the striking arches of a 16th-century former government building, and the reception at a former convent tucked away in a forest. Central to any Indian wedding, food was a major part of their celebration, and it’s what Mexico City does best. “It’s such a globalised city in the best possible way,” shares Suri. “Mexican food is obviously great in Mexico City, but so is the Japanese, Italian, Indian, and Mediterranean cuisine.”

“In some sense, Mexico is like the India of the West,” Suri observes. “In India, when you want something, you will find someone who will do it,” she says, “The people in Mexico are just like that.” She encourages couples to take advantage of this creative freedom and use the city as a canvas to build the wedding of their dreams. For Suri and Malhi, this translated to laser-lit entryways, patterned dance floors, massive ice sculptures in the middle of a forest, and even a unicorn-horse for the groom’s baraat.

Suri admits that there were elements to their Met Gala-esque celebration that were perhaps over the top, but everything bore a personal meaning. “It wasn’t gaudy for the sake of being gaudy,” she clarifies. To be fair, if you’re going to be flying in friends and family from around the world, you might as well drop a few jaws.

With year-round near-perfect tropical weather, Mexico seems to be the new destination for those with the bucks. And while the journey may seem daunting, there are plenty who are taking the leap (15,000 kilometres to be precise), proving that distance doesn’t just make the heart grow fonder; it also makes wedding grander.