Mahesh Shantaram, a 41-year-old from Bangalore, has no qualms saying that he is best known as a wedding photographer. But it wasn’t exactly what he had in mind when he left his homeland to study photography in Paris. “In the 00s, if you were a wedding photographer, you would not reveal it,” he laughs. “When I got back to India, people were a bit shocked, saying, ‘You spent all that money, you should do advertising or something.’ But weddings gave me excellent access to society across India. And I was one of the first photographers to use a, let’s say, western approach to photojournalism and apply it to weddings.”

Shantaram’s new book, Matrimania, is “an alternative wedding album”, one that features not only the bride and groom, but also guests and workers. Some of the “mania” in the title is obvious, such as an Alice in Wonderland-themed set on which the bride’s parents spent £50,000 on lighting. A typical wedding that Shantaram photographs might have 1,000 guests, but some have as many as 400,000. “You did hear that right!” he says.

But many of his images deftly cut through the glamour, a technique familiar to admirers of Martin Parr or Lauren Greenfield. The photograph here is of a young bride at her family home in Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya state in north-east India. She appears euphoric, but her wedding has not been straightforward. First, hers is a “love” marriage – “to differentiate it from an arranged marriage”, says Shantaram, which is still “rare”, he notes. Second, the bride and groom are from different castes and her new husband’s entire family has boycotted the ceremony in protest.

“I really like the picture,” says Shantaram, “because it’s a happy occasion, but there’s also something sad, a little disturbing about it.”

Matrimania is out now (Hatje Cantz, £45)