Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are getting married in Windsor this Saturday, and the couple has selflessly asked guests not to give them wedding gifts and instead donate to charities, including one in Mumbai.

It’s always good to start your marriage on a clean slate – put all your cards on the table, talk openly about expectations… and take steps to assuage your conscience for years of colonial exploitation.

Britain, it seems, is finally making the reparations it owes India for nearly 200 years of oppressive rule, one sanitary napkin at a time.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are getting married in Windsor this Saturday, and the couple has selflessly asked guests not to give them wedding gifts. Instead, guests have been asked to donate money to a handful of charities, the only foreign one being Mumbai-based Myna Mahila Foundation, which employs women in the production and distribution of sanitary napkins in Mumbai’s slums.

One thing is clear, the royal family definitely uses social media in their free time, and it’s likely that pictures of smiling celebrities holding up sanitary pads probably breached the discover section of their Instagram feeds one Saturday. If the right people make enough noise, women in slums get sanitary pads – the link is fairly obvious.

The greatest irony lies in the fact that Meghan’s own intersectional identity as a biracial, divorced American woman will be subsumed by her appropriation into the largest symbol of instutitionalised patriarchy today. A woman’s elevation to a position of seeming power and celebrity doesn’t automatically imply progress – it matters what your pedestal represents, and how many backs were broken to build it.

Back in 2011, Kate Middleton was celebrated for her fast rise from the status of ‘commoner’ to royalty as the wife of the future king of England. For many girls following the affair with wide eyes across the world, she came to represent an aspiration tied to the belief that “if she can, I can”. Prince William was the prize, and the entirety of Middleton’s lived experiences and personal ambitions somehow no longer mattered.

She was the wife of a king after all, what more could she want? The frenzy of celebration that surrounds Harry and Meghan’s royal wedding reiterates the belief that the greatest success of a woman depends on the status of the man she is able to marry.

The wedding should rather be marked by a moment of silence, for the loss of someone who could have been an incredible ally in the feminist fight for the rights of working women, immigrants, women of colour, women of religious minorties, or any of the myriad intersections of identity that by their mere existence challenge the narrative of a white man’s history.

Women in Mumbai might be getting sanitary pads, but the effort is nothing more than a CSR initiative to mimic the appearance of change. The reality is that every single thing about the wedding is a pretty distraction from the fact that it represents a perpetuation of inequity and injustice – for women, as well as marginalised communities everywhere.

I suppose one cannot blame her for falling in love; that experience, after all, is said to be blind, even to the fact that your partner is part of a system of historical and institutionalised discrimination. To expect Meghan to fight centuries of entrenched orthodoxy in one night is unfair, but to applaud the couple’s efforts to donate ‘gift money’ to poor brown Indian women is far more ludicrous.