Vivāha — the rite the texts describe, and the wedding we hold
The popular claimThe wedding in the sūtras takes about an hour. Everything else is ours.
A family planning a wedding is planning three days, two venues, several hundred people and a great deal of money. The sūtras are planning about an hour, and it is worth seeing what that hour contains, because it is the marriage; the rest is the celebration of it.
What the sūtras give
Āśvalāyana and Pāraskara agree on the core, which follows the Ṛgvedic wedding hymn — the tenth maṇḍala's eighty-fifth — in its shape.
Kanyādāna. The bride's father gives her, with water, to the groom, and the groom accepts. The verse names what is given and to whom.
Pāṇigrahaṇa. The groom takes the bride's right hand in his, with the verse gṛbhṇāmi te saubhagatvāya hastam — I take your hand for good fortune, that you may grow old with me as your husband. This is the act the sūtras treat as the marriage's first binding.
Aśmārohaṇa. The bride steps on a stone: be firm as this stone.
Lāja-homa. The bride's brother pours parched grain into her joined hands; she offers it into the fire, three times, for the husband's long life.
Agni-parikramaṇa. The couple circles the fire — three times in the sūtras, not seven; the seven pherās of the North Indian wedding are a later conflation with the seven steps.
Saptapadī. The seven steps, north-east, each with a word: for sap, for strength, for wealth, for comfort, for cattle, for the seasons, and the seventh — sakhā saptapadī bhava, be my friend with the seventh step. The sūtras are explicit that with the seventh step the marriage is complete and cannot be undone.
Dhruva-darśana. That night, the couple are shown the Pole Star, Dhruva, and Arundhatī beside Vasiṣṭha in the Great Bear, and asked to be as constant.
That is the rite. The sūtras add small things — a mantra at the threshold, the mixing of the bride's and groom's water — and are silent on nearly everything else.
What is not in the texts
The mehndī, the sangīt, the haldī, the bārāt, the varmālā, the horse, the ring, the mangala-sūtra itself, the sindūra — none is in Āśvalāyana or Pāraskara. Some are ancient in their regions; the mangala-sūtra is in southern practice from at least the medieval period; the sindūra is attested widely. But they are regional customs that attached themselves to the sūtras' hour, and a family that knows which is which can hold the celebration it wants without believing every part of it is scripture. This page is not against any of them. It is for knowing where they came from.
The seven steps, and the law
One thing the ancient text and the modern state agree on. The Hindu Marriage Act of 1955, section seven, says that where the saptapadī is part of the rite, the marriage becomes complete and binding on the seventh step. The Act took the sūtras' own definition of the moment and made it the legal one. Of the whole three-day event, the law is looking at about a minute.
The forms
Manu lists eight forms of marriage — Brāhma, Daiva, Ārṣa, Prājāpatya, Āsura, Gāndharva, Rākṣasa, Paiśāca — of which the first four are approved and the last four are not, and the Brāhma form, the gift of a daughter to a man of learning, is the one the sūtras' rite assumes. The list is worth knowing mainly because Gāndharva — marriage by mutual consent alone, without the family — is on it and is approved for some varṇas by some authorities, which surprises people who assume the tradition knew only the arranged form. It did not.
Timing
The muhūrta treatises give Vivāha their longest chapter. The Sun in a permitted sign — the months of Māgha, Phālguna, Vaiśākha, Jyeṣṭha and Mārgaśīrṣa are favoured; Caitra and Pauṣa, and the Cāturmāsya from Āṣāḍha to Kārttika śukla Ekādaśī, are excluded. Jupiter and Venus both visible. A nakṣatra from the marriage list — Rohiṇī, Mṛgaśira, Maghā, the three Uttarās, Hasta, Svātī, Anurādhā, Mūla, Revatī. A rising sign not the eighth from either Moon sign. The bride's lagna-śuddhi and candra-śuddhi, the groom's likewise. The compatibility of the two charts — the kūṭa matching — is a separate exercise and has its own page. This site's Best Date tool runs the timing table; the Compatibility tool runs the matching.
What this page does not say
It does not say a marriage without the seven steps is not a marriage — the Act itself allows other rites — and it does not say a wedding with a horse and a sangīt has strayed. It describes an hour the texts give, the moment the law took from it, and the celebration that grew around both. The marriage is the hour. The rest is the family being glad.
Source — Ashvalayana Grihyasutra 1.5–1.8 and Paraskara Grihyasutra 1.4–1.8 on Vivaha; Rigveda 10.85, the wedding hymn, from which the mantras are drawn; the Manusmriti 3.20–34 on the eight forms; the Hindu Marriage Act 1955, section 7, on saptapadi as the completing act
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