MUMBAI: Good food is the raison-d’être of a Gujarati wedding , a score on which Ruchi Parikh and Jay Thakkar ensured there were no compromises. Guests sampling the cake, gajar halwa and ice-cream at their wedding in Vadodara would have found little out of the way. But none of the sweets had a drop of cow’s milk; they were made from soy instead. And the paneer masala, a regular at weddings, was made with tofu.

Ruchi and Jay, both Bangalore-based software engineers, are part of India’s growing tribe of vegans, whose weddings reflect their lifestyle. Veganism involves giving up the use of all animal products in one’s daily life. In addition to being vegetarian, vegans do not have milk or dairy products.

“Before turning vegan, we thought cows and buffalos naturally produced milk. It didn’t occur to us that cows, like all mammals, need to get pregnant and deliver calves before producing milk. But the dairy industry needs cows to constantly produce milk for which they are put through repeated and unbearable cycles of pregnancy, delivery and milking,” said Ruchi.

“A happy occasion like a wedding shouldn’t be a sad one for animals,” said Preethi Shankaran, a Chennai-based story-teller who married aerospace engineer Raghav Venkatesan in vegan style. “At first we thought we’d have a small wedding as we weren’t too sure how people would react to a vegan wedding ,” said Preethi. But the couple changed their mind and decided on a big, fat South Indian wedding with which they could make a statement about veganism. The curd in the curd-rice was substituted with a grated white pumpkin pulp at their wedding.

There’s no dearth of curd substitutes. The curd rice at Arun Rangasamy’s wedding in Bangalore had peanut curd in it and the Mysore Pak was made with vegetable oil instead of ghee. And while curd is used to add a sour tang to avial, a popular Malayali dish, Mumbai couple Rithika Ramesh and Kaushik Ramakrishnan used tamarind as a substitute in the avial they served at their wedding. Rithika now runs a vegan bakery in the city, where she churns out vegan wedding cakes for other vegan brides.

Veganism is not limited to diet alone. Vegan brides wore cotton or polyester saris and ensured that the ones they distributed among family did not bear a hint of silk, a material for which scores of silkworms are killed. Rithika’s relatives were not chafed at receiving cotton saris, as her wedding was on a sultry June day and they sweated far less than they would have in silk. “The cotton saris we wore were as grand as silk,” she said.

Preethi ensured that the makeup she used at her wedding, from kajal to lipstick, was not tested on animals. And in place of shampoo, she uses shikakai, a herbal alternative.

Vegan grooms avoid leather. Jay wore shoes that shone like leather but were made of a durable substitute. Procuring vegan substitutes during religious functions took a good bit of planning. The fire at Preethi’s wedding was not stoked with ghee but with special oil made from the madhuca longifolia plant, procured from Cuddalore in Tamil Nadu. Ruchi and Jay used sesame (til) oil for their ceremonies.