RSVPing
R.S.V.P. is a short form for “répondez s’il vous plaît” which translates to “respond please” and is actually a French phrase which is considered old fashioned and formal and not used these days. But you would see the use of RSVP in India for many wedding cards. I am no French expert but here is a pronounciation snippet for R.S.V.P
But how a French word became a common parlance in India and continue to do so. Lets try to delve into this a little and see what does the history say.
The idea of asking to RSVP is to make there is a response to the names or address given on the invitation. This helps to plan out the number of people who would turn out for all the inviation that goes out. Now this seems like a very relevant thing to do for any fucntion. But in India I don’t think this is strictly followed but generally on Inviations you would like to have as many names of your relatives on it as possible. This is generally done to make sure that nobody feels left out. And having RSVP on cards gives an opportunity to add few more names. This is one of the reason you would add RSVP on English wedding inviations.
Examples
Here was few examples from sometime back when R.S.V.P was almost of any kind on invitation from 1950’s
I guess when British got this custom of putting RSVP on the cards. They picked from the French as you would know anything French was considered more classy. And like many other things we Indians picked this up from the British.
Even one of the greatest wedding that ran for months had RSVP embedded on the Invitation. It would interesting to know how many messaged they received on the email ID and phone numbers :). Unfortunately my reach is very limited, we might have to just do guesstimate here. I don’t think there would be many refusals as there were numerous events and ideally they might need to have RSVP for each event.
Takeaway
The takeaway from this note is R.S.V.P is a French term that many would not be able to pronounce in India if said in full. The logic in India wouldn’t generally work out and mostly you send an invitation. Invariably call people up to make sure if they are turning up for the event or not. So we may do away with this all together and move to something else or may inform only is you are not coming or find a better way
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