Love As Resistance

THEY SING OF a revolution together. “May the sun be free of trespassing clouds / May the rays of the sun shine through the glitter and glare / So that humanity isn’t stranded on the footpath / So people’s spirits aren’t bogged down at all times / That is why we chose the path of struggle / So our lives would not drown in tears.” He is 62, she is 55. He is an engineer from IIT Kharagpur, she is a Dalit activist from Madhya Pradesh. Together they have braved agitations, prison, ostracism from their birth families, and gov­ernment crackdowns. But they have survived, still finding time for each other, for their work of advancing the tribal cause, and for their son.

Rahul Banerjee and Subhadra Khaparde are just one of the six couples whose lives make Love Storiyaan a unique and heartwarming series in this Age of Hatred. Curated from the India Love Project, an Instagram account of real-life love stories in the face of tremen­dous odds, the six stories are directed by different directors.

The series showrunner Somen Mishra says Dharmatic Entertainment, part of Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions, which made it for Prime Video, initially thought it would fictionalise the stories. But they were so inherently dramatic that they decided to shoot the series with the actual couples.

The result is the sweetest and most unaffected entertainment you will see in a long time. There is a quiet handshake-cum-high-five between journalists Ullekh NP and Aekta Kapoor when their daughters, once mutinously opposed to their union, look happy. There is a convivial meal between Homayon Khoram and his in-laws, Dhanya Ravindran’s parents, at their homestay in Wayanad in Kerala. There is high energy banter between two RJs, concealing the depths of emo­tion between them. And there is a moment when Tista Das takes a picture of a butterfly in their balcony garden and sends it to her partner. “Don’t disturb it,” he tells her. “I won’t,” she replies.

In an age of violent block­busters on the big screen and gritty series on streaming, Love Storiyaan comes as a soothing balm. Says Priya Ramani of the India Love Project: “In 2020, when my husband Samar Halarnkar, our close friend Niloufer Venkatraman and I started India Love Project to counter the hateful narrative against interfaith love and created a safe space for couples who wanted to love, cohabit and marry outside the rigid rules of caste, religion, gender and age, we would never have imagined that Karan Johar would want to turn it into a series.”

She thinks Somen Mishra and his team of six directors have captured the essence of their venture perfectly. Real love despite the odds is always a powerful story and she hopes young lovers who find themselves in similar relationships take courage and strength from these stories. “Love as resistance is a much-needed idea in today’s India,” she adds.

The vision of each director is differ­ent, and yet adds to the mosaic of the series. Hardik Mehta who has an intercultural relationship could identify with Ullekh and Kapoor—he the son of a former minister in Kerala, she the divorced daughter of a Punjabi business family. Yet the twain did meet. Mehta says Love Storiyaan was very special because he got to choose the story. “Aekta and Ullekh are both articulate, writers themselves, so half the job was done. What interested me as a filmmaker was that in India, love is not just between two individuals. The family and friends are involved and everyone needs to be at peace with each other. My wife is from UP and I am from Gujarat, so I had personal experience of marrying outside the community. I empathised with them. And in most love stories, the parents are the villains, but here the children are the antagonists, so it was fun.” Indeed, and it is dogs that bring the family together, with the girls persuad­ing their new dad to take care of them.

Mishra says they shortlisted about 50 couples from the India Love Project and started talking to them on the phone and on Zoom. The filmmakers would then do a recce and see how com­fortable the couples were on camera. A former journalist, Mishra grew up in the coal town of Dhanbad in a cosmo­politan township where children from different cultures, communities and castes studied and played together. “Our Durga Puja celebra­tions had qawwali on day one, Jatra the next day, Biraha geet on day three and an orchestral perfor­mance on the last day. It is unimagina­ble now,” he says.

As a society, we are far more agitated and violent now, he says, which may explain the absence of love stories from the big screen. But if one sees Love Storiyaan, one realises that love is what saved us as a society, as a collec­tive of families. Like Prime Video’s Rainbow Rishta (2023), directed by Jaydeep Sarkar, there is an authenticity to it that doesn’t need chiffon sarees, snow in Gulmarg, or indeed weddings curated by Manish Malhotra. In most episodes, the wedding ceremony itself is incidental, a mere confirmation of a lifelong commitment.

Love Storiyaan uses recreations to show the characters in their youth because, as Ramani says, in the pre-digital era many of us were poor at personal archiving. The show is also about friend­ship, between people, with animals, sometimes, but most often with our­selves. As the last episode, directed by Collin D’Cunha, shows in spades, it is only when a transman, Dipan Chakraborty, finds a transwoman like ac­tivist Tista Das, who shows him respect, helps him let go of his insecurities, that he become the man he wants to. Das stands out among the many heroes of Love Storiyaan, for her passion for freedom, her attachment to it, and her belief that even if she had to kick the door open, she can hold it open for others to walk through.

For many, watching Love Storiyaan will be therapeutic too. As one watches Shillong’s beloved RJ Nicky (Nicholas J Kharnami) in Vivek Soni’s episode talk about his struggles with a broken heart, his exuberance stripped away, you see him for the man he is, who has learnt to accept and live with his flaws. Equally watching his partner, Rajani Chhetri, professor at a mass media department, you see the calm that a good relationship can bring and what love can do. And when you see the visually impaired FM listener who brought them together, you realise truth is warmer than fiction. You cannot plan for love, says Rajani, it comes when it must.

“Love comes with many wounds but also the power to heal.”

Is there a poet in Bollywood who could articulate it better?

castesculturesIndian societylove storiesLove Storiyaanreal-lifereligions