The sixth episode of OTT series ‘Love Storiyaan’ on Amazon Prime starts with a scene from Bengali festival Durga Puja with young women dressed in magnificent red and white saris, big red bindis decorating their foreheads, playing sindoor (vermilion).
A woman's voice narrates her desire to do so as a child, however, not being allowed as “boys don't play Sindoor”. Shift to present, a young couple is seen breaking their morning cuddle to get out of the bed and start their routine.
A few minutes into the episode, we realise the voice is that of Tista Das, a trans woman who had to fight discrimination, exclusion as a child only to be fulfilled and loved as she bloomed into a confident young woman after her transition.
The episode ‘love beyond labels’ directed by Collin D'Cunha, traces the romantic journey of Tista and Dipan Chakraborty, a transgender couple from Kolkata, who fell in love while Chakraborty was undergoing his gender transition surgeries.
The couple narrates the story of their struggles: being unable to conform to the gender assigned to them at birth and also the love that bloomed when Tista helped Chakraborty sail through the transition with constant support and care. The episodes have been recreated with a mix of real life interviews of the couples and their loved ones, some dramatisation and powerful voice overs by the couples themselves.
However, like their coming together in real life, the episode again stirred trouble when released. The series was banned in six countries including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Indonesia, and Egypt. The objection was showcasing the relationship of this LGBTQI+ couple.
This path breaking episode and five similar episodes are part of the series which was released on Valentine's Day. ‘Love Storiyaan’ is Produced by Karan Johar and created by Somen Mishra and boasts a lineup of six directors, depicting real-life love stories of six couples.
The love stories are out of ordinary, ones that society resists hard against, that have always stood the test of time. Johar calls the love stories “Connections that go beyond the ordinary.”
These are indeed stories of common people who have lived and loved extraordinarily, people you see every day. Your friends, your colleagues. The stories are part of ‘India Love Project’ by a journalist couple Priya Ramani and Samar Halarnkar with another colleague Niloufer Venkataram. ‘India Love Project’ is a platform where people who have refused to follow the norms of region, religion, caste, and gender share their stories of love.
Like the stories, the story behind them is also extraordinary. ‘India Love Project’ was started after a jewellery company was forced to withdraw an advertisement depicting interfaith love following backlash and intimidation in 2020.
“In October 2020, Tanishq released an ad depicting interfaith love that shook India—not in the way you would expect. My husband Samar Halarnkar, our close friend Niloufer Venkatraman and I were aghast at the bullying that forced the company to backtrack on its message of love. We had, for many years, been planning a safe space online for couples who wanted to love, cohabit and marry outside the rigid Indian rules of caste, religion, gender and age–all perfectly constitutional. But everyone knows how difficult it is to convince Indian parents to allow them to marry a person of their choice. When the jewellery ad was withdrawn, we decided that we couldn't wait to build the website we had been planning,'' said senior journalist Priya Ramani.
The trio said they applied a strategy perfected by Generation Z— Instagram. “When we started it seemed like every family had such stories and many people dug out the ones in their memory chest for us. We found ourselves wrapped in a warm, cosy blanket of interfaith, intercaste and LGBTQ love,” she added.
The journey was launched with co-founder Nilofer Venkataram's parents' story, an interfaith couple. Now Ramani says they struggled with the bank of love stories. “Good news is resistance, we found, is an unbeatable idea. These days we post a story about once or twice a week. We have 501 stories on our platform so far and hope to collect many more,” Ramani said.
The screen adaptation was also smooth. “In March 2021, I shared a link of ILP’s Instagram page with director Karan Johar who loved it. He forwarded it to Somen Mishra who heads creative development at Dharma Productions and Dharmatic Entertainment. They approached us and that’s how it began. We put them in touch with many couples on our platform and each director picked their favourite. Somen picked six directors in such a way that many of them had something similar with the couple they eventually chose,” said Ramani.
Interestingly even the directors resonated with the stories- one of the Directors Akshay Indikar is himself in an intercaste marriage and Shazia Iqbal’s siblings are in interfaith relationships. Ramani described meeting the couples like meeting old friends, “like we are partners on an important, shared journey”.
Ramani says the idea was to mainstream these stories “It’s the only way to fight conspiracy theories that have been weaponised and normalised to the point that people believe they are a legitimate national concern”.
Whether it is story of Sunit and Farida, a 70-plus couple from Bangladesh who have moved to Kolkata after their families refused to accept the union, or a beautiful love story of Aekta with divorcee, single mother of two falling in love with Ullekh and acceptance of the love by her two small children, or that of an upper class Brahmin boy Rahul, an IIT Kharagpur graduate turned activist falling in love with a Dalit/ Adivasi activist Subadra. Each of the six episodes takes you on a journey where love triumphs in the most heartwarming way.
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