How foreign media covered Ambani wedding: Extravagant, lavish, world’s most expensive

The Ambani wedding marked the culmination of months of pre-wedding festivities. The couple’s roka took place in 2022 at the Shrinathji Temple in Nathdwara. In early 2023, the Ambanis hosted a grand engagement party for the couple at their palatial Mumbai residence, Antilia. The engagement ceremony was preceded by a mehendi function in January 2023, which took place at a five-star Mumbai hotel.

Then, in February 2024, the pre-wedding festivities began in earnest with a Lagan Lakhvanu ceremony. In early March the same year, the Ambani family hosted a three-day extravaganza at their sprawling Jamnagar estate, which was attended by several national and international VIPs. The guest list included Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, besides a galaxy of Bollywood stars, athletes, business leaders and diplomats. At the Jamnagar festivities, guests were treated to private concerts by Rihanna and Diljit Dosanjh over three nights of grand parties.

The Ambani family then hosted a luxury cruise for hundreds of guests in late May. Many Bollywood stars like Shah Rukh Khan, Ranveer Singh and Ananya Panday were part of the cruise that had stops across the Mediterranean. The guests on the cruise got to enjoy private concerts by Shakira, the Backstreet Boys, Katy Perry and David Guetta.

The week leading up to the big day on July 12 was equally eventful. It featured a sangeet (with a concert from Justin Bieber), a mameru ceremony, a garba night, a haldi ceremony, a mehendi ceremony, a mass wedding for the underprivileged, a Shiv Shakti pooja and a Graha Shanti pooja.

Here is how the foreign media covered the Ambani wedding:

The Washington Post

“Asia’s richest man is hosting a ‘spectacular,’ ‘vulgar,’ star-studded wedding,” reads a headline on the website of the American daily newspaper. The piece noted how the extensive guest list attracted more attention that the couple themselves – “with pop stars, politicians, tech tycoons and Bollywood stars setting social media abuzz with their attendance.”

The Sun

UK’s The Sun called “the world’s most expensive wedding” in an article filled with statistics. The British tabloid reported that the Ambani family booked 100 private jets to fly international guests to India, decorated the venue with 20 million flowers, served over 37,500 meal options created by an army of 500 chefs and spent between ₹6 to 7 lakh on each invite.

“But in India, a country where the richest one per cent own more than 40 per cent of the country’s total wealth, Anant and Radhika’s wedding will have been a hard pill to swallow,” the newspaper noted.

Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera highlighted the criticism that the over-the-top festivities drew. “Star-studded Ambani wedding highlights India’s rich vs poor divide,” reads a headline on the news portal.

In another piece, Al Jazeera spoke of the public ire at traffic restrictions which were put in place in Mumbai for the wedding.

The Guardian

The Guardian ran a couple of articles on the Ambani wedding, one showing the several guests who descended upon Mumbai for the celebrations.

In an opinion piece for the publication, Hannah Ellis-Petersen said that Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant’s wedding “surpassed even the wildest of imaginations in terms of opulence, ostentatious displays of wealth and stamina.”