Using AI to "bring the deceased to the wedding": Kanavu Kadha pioneers India's deepfake family-recreation business

Kanavu Kadha (meaning "a story born from a dream"), a startup in Thiruvananthapuram (formerly Trivandrum) in southern India, and The Indian Deepfaker, based in Pushkar, Rajasthan, are offering a business that recreates deceased family members using generative AI and produces videos that let them "attend" weddings, births, and family occasions. A one-minute video costs ₹18,000 (roughly ¥32,000), and a custom wedding video costs ₹50,000 (roughly ¥90,000). US outlet Rest of World reported on this in detail in 2026, and alongside India's new deepfake regulation that took effect on February 20, 2026, a new genre dealing with grief and celebration, "grief tech," is emerging. For Japanese companies designing AI-related services in India, this is an important precedent on three fronts: regulation, ethics, and the revenue model.

The originating news: real cases of the family-recreation business reported by Rest of World

Rest of World's 2026 feature centered on the cases of Kanavu Kadha founder Akhil Vinayak (29, Thiruvananthapuram) and The Indian Deepfaker's Divyendra Singh Jadoun (Pushkar). The specific cases reported were as follows.

• A wedding in Ajmer: recreated with AI a father who had passed away more than a year earlier, and played a video of him blessing the groom, Jaideep Sharma, and his wife during the ceremony.
• A client in Thiruvananthapuram: had a deepfake video made of a deceased mother-in-law embracing a grandchild she never got to meet. It topped 1 million likes on Instagram, becoming a case where family-recreation content spread far beyond a personal circle.
• A family event in Pushkar: a case of playing a 3D-rendered video of a deceased father at a family celebration.

Kanavu Kadha operates with a team of five and is also planning to establish its own "AI film school" to train AI video creators.

Background: India's family culture and "technologized grief"

The Indian custom of holding family events, weddings, funerals, births, on a large scale is especially pronounced in South India, home to many families with members who have emigrated abroad. Demand for "including" distant family members or the deceased through video surfaced rapidly during the Covid period, and over the past two to three years, as editing tools became mainstream, it has become normal for individuals to commission such videos. Kanavu Kadha's business model is a workflow in which it gathers photos, audio, and stories about the deceased from the client and turns them into AI video within limits that avoid licensing issues.

Jadoun of The Indian Deepfaker is a "hyper-real" creator who originally built a following with Bollywood face-swap videos, and has a track record of being covered by international media for deepfakes made for political campaigns. Family-oriented grief tech is built in as a revenue stream for the periods outside election season.

The data: pricing, tools, and project scale

Reaction locally and in the industry

• Behavioral scientist Bhaskar Malu: commented to Rest of World that this creates "an artificial reality in which the deceased is simultaneously alive and dead, with unknown long-term effects." He warns that grief tech is a genre where expert review of its impact on users' psychological well-being has not yet caught up.
• The Indian Deepfaker (Mr. Jadoun): said that thorough family consent and verification of each episode's backstory make it possible to distinguish the service from misuse. It is reported that the company requires written consent from all of the deceased's family members before accepting an order.
• India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY): Under new rules effective February 20, 2026, platforms are required to label AI-generated content and remove it promptly when required. Family-use content will also need to be clearly marked as "AI-generated."

Implications for Japanese companies: key issues when handling "grief tech" in the Indian AI market

When Japanese companies roll out generative AI services in India, family-oriented use cases such as weddings and funerals are technically easy to enter but prone to stumbling over ethics and regulation. The following three points are areas Japanese companies need to prepare for.

• Dual-layer consent: Obtain both testimony from surviving family members about the deceased's wishes while alive and written consent from all current family members. This requires sorting out Japan's Act on the Protection of Personal Information and publicity rights domestically, and when entering India, compliance with the DPDP Act (India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act) 2023 is also required at the same time.
• AI-generated content labeling operations: Under India's new regulation effective February 2026, AI-generated content must carry an identifying label. Even for private family screenings, build in a labeling workflow from the start, assuming the content may end up posted on social media.
• Consideration for psychological impact: As behavioral scientists have warned, the long-term psychological effects of grief tech remain unverified. Japanese companies entering this space can differentiate themselves by setting up a mental health expert advisory board and building post-use follow-up into the product design.

Industry impact: the "family-oriented" expansion of India's AI services market

India's generative AI market is splitting into a "family" segment covering weddings, birthdays, and memorial events, and a "commercial" segment covering politics, advertising, and entertainment. The family segment has a lower unit price but spreads rapidly through word of mouth and social media, and studios such as Kanavu Kadha that package the production process are emerging from regional cities, and this trend is expected to continue. For Japanese AI-related companies (media tech, photo/video SaaS, and funeral-related businesses), India's family-recreation business is an area with substantial room for collaboration as a technology-providing partner or through licensing models.

Practical information: a checklist for designing AI video services in India

Summary: the design capability to balance technology and ethics in "family-oriented AI"

What Kanavu Kadha and The Indian Deepfaker have commercialized is a service that uses AI to fill the gap left by a family member "they never got to meet". This is an area where India's new government regulations intersect with the characteristics of family culture, and if Japanese companies enter it, they need to design consent, labeling, and psychological follow-up with the same priority as the technology itself. A small business that starts at 18,000 rupees per minute raises the next question in corporate ethics: how technology should handle family stories.

Sources

• Rest of World: AI deepfakes for grief and celebrations are growing in India
• Scroll.in: In India, AI deepfakes of the deceased are a lively business
• AI News International: AI Deepfakes in India’s Grief and Celebrations