Bilal Nasir rode into his wedding on a bejeweled white horse, wearing a gleaming golden sherwani. He was surrounded by an entourage of his friends in coordinated outfits, dancing to the beat of a dhol, a two-sided drum. Light streamed out from the venue, Low Library at Columbia University, welcoming the crisp spring air on the evening of March 3.

Then, under a gauzy blue canopy held afloat by many hands, Samar Iqbal, the bride, arrived — glittering in a white gharara and a dupatta over her head. Silver jewelry glinted on her wrists and forehead as she walked in to thunderous applause, surrounded by friends in vibrant lehengas.

Mr. Nasir, 23, and Ms. Iqbal, 22, then a senior at Barnard College, had never met before this moment — and they weren’t actually marrying each other. Instead, they were playing the roles of bride and groom in a meticulously planned pretend South Asian wedding known as a mock shaadi. In a Shakespearean twist, he was a boy from New York University and she was a girl from Columbia — two households alike in dignity.

When Mr. Nasir, then a graduate student from Oregon, learned that the Pakistani Student Association at his school was hosting a joint mock shaadi with Columbia University and that he had been nominated to play the groom, he was ecstatic. “Most people only get married once,” he said. “I had the chance to practice.”

It was the association’s largest event of the semester, with students who had never been involved with the school’s South Asian college groups turning up in droves. Mr. Nasir said he had never had the opportunity to see his own culture celebrated.

“I look to my left, and I see my desi friends having fun and listening to this music, which I expect; then I look to my right, and I see all my white friends from school who don’t understand this music, but they’re having the same amount of fun,” he said. “It’s kind of a euphoric moment.”

At colleges across the North America, the South Asian diaspora is joining in on the mock shaadi trend. Schools like the University of Texas at Austin, Stanford and the University of Toronto Scarborough are hosting pretend weddings. At Stanford, the event featured not one but four pretend couples.

Sumayyah Muhit, 22, helped organize a mock shaadi through the Bengali Student Association at the New York Institute of Technology, where they “don’t really have a lot of Bengali representation,” she said.

The event took place on Feb. 16 and featured performers, almost 500 attendees dressed in wedding finery, and a bride and groom who were selected after monthslong elections. The wedding drew students from India, Pakistan, Nepal and other South Asian regions, as well as those who are not South Asian. “Everyone at our school seemed to be excited for it,” Ms. Muhit said.

Throughout the event, the club’s executives stopped to narrate and explain the customs. Ms. Muhit said she had particularly enjoyed the opportunity to share Bengali traditions, like gate-holding at the door to playfully block the groom’s entrance and a day-after ceremony from her home region of Sylhet in Bangladesh, in which the bride comes home and cuts fish.

“So many people who attended the wedding had no idea where Bangladesh was, or that it was even a country in Asia,” she said.

Mock wedding events have existed in various forms for decades. Sororities and fraternities often host parties where students dress up as brides and grooms. In Canada, a musical group called Betta Boyz hosted a large mock Nigerian wedding at a Calgary banquet hall in July 2022. Similar events are also popular in colleges in South Asia. Students at the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan, for example, hosted a widely attended, elaborate mock shaadi in March; photos and videos of the event went viral on Twitter and TikTok.

Pop culture has played a significant role in creating demand for these events, said Rijuta Mehta, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto specializing in post-colonial studies. Bollywood films, reality television shows like “Indian Matchmaking” and magazine spreads featuring “ultrarich weddings” all contribute to wedding-related fervor. “There is this entire media industry around images of glamorous, luxurious, extravagant, highly indulgent weddings,” she said.

Many schools hosting mock shaadis are hoping to make them an annual affair. It’s becoming a new tradition that students of various South Asian ethnicities can look forward to and participate in together, similar to the American prom, said Aparna Kapadia, an associate professor of history at Williams College. On Western college campuses, she said, students from different South Asian backgrounds are able to meet and learn about each other at these events. “Political factors make it harder to do this back home,” she said. “A mock wedding without the wedding rituals transcends religion or nationality.”

As the trend gains momentum in North America, it can sometimes be met with incredulity.

“It does sound a little ridiculous at first,” said Neil Malur, 20, a co-president of the South Asian Association of Students at M.I.T. “It’s like, a mock wedding? Why would we be hosting a mock wedding at our school?”

Last semester, the idea began to circulate among students in the association after they noticed other colleges participating. “We sort of dropped it as a joke to a lot of our members, and then we received hugely positive community feedback,” he said. “Everybody was so excited about it — they all just kept asking us when the mock shaadi was going to happen.”

Between February and March, Tahah Malik attended three mock shaadis: one at his own school, the University of Connecticut, and two others at Boston University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Mr. Malik, 22, saw the events as rare chances to “dress up and kind of embrace the culture that we don’t really get to embrace living here,” he said.

For many South Asian American students and those who live outside of their countries of origin, the mock shaadi gives them a sense of belonging.

“There seems to be this kind of obvious yearning for a home that is so distant, and this kind of cultural event that one seems to be kind of nostalgic for,” Dr. Mehta said.

Devanshi Mehta, 22, a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has attended a mock mehndi event at U.C.L.A. for the past two years.

“In college, when you’re thrust into this new environment, you want to bring pieces of familiarity with you, and a lot of that can sometimes stem from culture,” said Ms. Mehta, who is not related to Rijuta Mehta, the professor. “It’s the opportunity to just be seen, and be heard, and be around people who feel like home.”

At the same time, Dr. Mehta noted, these events don’t necessarily reflect the experiences of many South Asian students from less privileged socioeconomic backgrounds, including those in South Asia who are unable to pursue higher education in North America. They can create a false impression that solely associates South Asian culture with affluence, she said.

When Mr. Malur first heard of the trend, he didn’t know what a shaadi was. As a person of Tamil descent, he wasn’t familiar with the Urdu or Hindi word for “wedding.” “South Asia as a region is incredibly diverse,” he said, adding that many South Asian minority groups and their wedding traditions are not represented at mock shaadis.

The student group at M.I.T. decided to hold off on hosting a mock shaadi until next year. “We had to make sure that we held a shaadi in a way that was sensitive to diverse traditions of South Asia, which would involve a lot of planning,” Mr. Malur said.

To make the mock shaadi as inclusive as possible, members of the association are working to connect with other student populations that aren’t as large on campus, including Bengali and Muslim South Asians.

Despite some of the mixed feelings mock shaadis inspire, they are here to stay.

“Instead of thinking of the campus shaadi phenomenon in positive or negative terms,” Dr. Kapadia said, “I would think of it in terms of the evolution of South Asian communities on American campuses.”