Seven-year-old Indian girls 'marry' frogs
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The young ‘brides’, Vigneswari and Masiakanni, hail from the village of Pallipudupet in Tamil Nadu's Villupuram district. The wedding ceremony, a highlight of the annual Pongal (harvest) festival, was conducted to prevent the outbreak of mysterious diseases in the village.
The girls wore traditional gilded saris and gold jewellery and married their amphibian grooms in front of hundreds of villagers. The frogs were tied to long sticks decorated with garlands for the lavish marriage ceremonies. The subsequent celebrations had all the usual elements of a traditional marriage including a sumptuous feast.
Sadly, there was no fairy tale ending as neither frog transformed into a handsome prince. In fact, Vigneswari and Masiakanni weren’t even required to share a kiss with their husbands. Both brides simply bid their grooms farewell before returning to their normal lives. As for the frogs, they were thrown back into temple ponds after the ceremony.
The bizarre tradition of marrying frogs is rooted in the story of the Hindu God Shiva who turned himself into a frog following a quarrel with his wife Parvati. She cried for days causing disease to spread throughout local villages.
When the villages asked for help she sent them to find Shiva and plead with him to marry a young girl. She herself posed as the girl, and when Shiva agreed to marry her they returned to their original god forms and the outbreak was cured.