india love project

‘Love Storiyaan’: The Series is Proof That Love Conquers All (Even Middling Craft)

What hurts the six-episode show is its brisk 25-35 minutes runtime per episode, which results in complex issues being magically resolved or narrative lighthouses appearing out of nowhere.

Dharmatic’s Love Storiyaan, created by Somen Mishra and featuring a roster of six (seriously diverse) directors, comprises choices ranging from the awkward and ordinary to the sublime.

Just like The New York Times’ Modern Love column – which has now spanned two seasons of a hit series (including two Indian offshoots in Modern Love: Mumbai and Modern Love: Chennai), this one is inspired by India Love Project – curated by Priya Ramani, Samar Halarnkar and Niloufer Venkatraman – featuring real-life accounts of people defying social norms to complete their love stories.

What remains befuddling is the hybrid approach, where the filmmakers interview the real-life couples and their next of kin, but then shoot scenes reconstructing the anecdotes using lookalike actors, with the real-life person’s voiceover in the background. In theory, I think I can see what the filmmakers are going for – but the choices are not quite as seamless as one might imagine.

What hurts the six-episode show is its brisk 25-35 mins runtime per episode (quite possibly prescribed by the streaming service to make the series as ‘bingeable’ as possible) It results in complex issues being magically resolved or narrative lighthouses appearing out of nowhere and oversimplifying the challenges of relationships spanning decades into bite-sized pieces of ‘content’, so it can be described as ‘wholesome’. Which again, is not to say Love Storiyaan is an insincere show. It’s fully aware that by releasing in a time when conforming is the rule, merely endorsing these trailblazers is a political act. Most of these episodes here, despite some stretches of dubious craft, ensure they end up as cathartic at least – a solid starting point.

A still from ‘Love Storiyaan’.

An Unsuitable Girl

Directed by Hardik Mehta, who has shown a wild range of temperaments from his breakout in Amdavad Ma Famous (2015) to Netflix series Decoupled (2021), this episode is an urban Bollywood rom-com setup. Aekta, a 33-year-old writer/editor based in Delhi, meets Ullekh, a journalist based in Mumbai, the old-fashioned online way—in the comments section of her lifestyle blog. The conflict arises when Aekta’s two daughters from her first marriage have to approve of their mother’s partner before they can take it forward. The way Mehta reconstructs it using actors, I could imagine Manav Kaul and Shefali Shah playing Ullekh and Aekta in a fictitious version of this story.

The strongest bit of this episode is Aekta confessing to discovering her self-worth in her job as a writer/editor, the ‘light’ in a dark, lonely marriage. There’s a playfulness to the story which makes it ripe for a Bollywood adaptation. Mehta employs that in a reconstruction scene, like one of Aekta’s daughters showing her hostility to Ullekh in a sweet, savage manner. The story is all trumps and the “cuteness” of it is all that remains in the end, overcoming Mehta’s stagey craft.

A still from ‘Love Storiyaan’.

Love On Air

The Northeast has always been a tricky place for Hindi films, and the cultural awkwardness continues in Vivek Soni’s Love On Air – following two rival radio jockeys falling in love in Meghalaya. Soni’s directorial debut Meenakshi Sundareshwar was infamous for Hindi-fying Madurai, and here you see him trying to be more cognisant of that fact with Nicholas and Rajani’s love story. However, the gaze continues to be an outsider’s, with hints of exoticisation most visible in a voice-over straight out of Bollywood.

Nicholas is a Christian man, divorced, playing up the facade of a casanova (he brags about how he would go on multiple dates every week), which is a way to mask his drinking problem. Rajani, a headstrong, Hindu woman, in a steady relationship when she meets Nicholas, slowly begins to embrace the ease she feels around him. The surprise package of this segment is their cupid – Mandira, a devoted, visually-impaired listener for both Nick and Rajani’s programmes.

The inter-faith couple comes together despite opposition from her parents, and talks about how the ‘fairytale’ was tested during Nicholas’ periods of alcohol addiction. It’s a sombre moment that grounds the episode. When Nicholas, Rajani and their son Mahyaan pay a surprise visit to Mandira – a tearful reunion worthy of cameras – to Soni’s credit, he keeps rolling after they leave. After promising to ‘stay in touch’, Soni films the loneliness in Mandira’s life. It’s a touching ode to those who magnanimously bat for love, even if they only have their solitude to live with.

A still from ‘Love Storiyaan’.

Homecoming

Shazia Iqbal’s episode about a Hindu-Muslim couple eloping from Dhaka, Bangladesh, in search of their happily-ever-after in Kolkata – is one of the finer episodes here. Their daughter recounts how Sunit and Farida moved to Kolkata, thinking they were going to a large-hearted country. However, the recent polarisation has evoked the images of 1973 – the year Sunit and Farida had eloped from Dhaka – when they were surrounded by radicals on both sides.

Iqbal touches upon the hardships the couple had to face, especially with the contrasting pictures of their youth and their weather-beaten faces today. Sunit came from a rich family, while Farida was from a politically influential family. Neither could have imagined a time when they would be struggling for basic necessities. To Iqbal’s credit, the focus is always their unconditional love of five decades. The episode follows Sunit and Farida going back to their homes in Chandpur – which is hardly picture-perfect. Sunit’s parents and his close relatives have all passed, while Farida’s brother is frozen through most of their first interaction. However, a text slide later tells us how the brother meets Farida and Sunit, and requests the crew to not film them. While it could be viewed as a ‘happy ending’ the episode also draws focus to the pointlessness of the hurt and rage inflicted by people on themselves.

Raah Sangharsh Ki

Akshay Indikar’s episode is my favourite one in Love Storiyaan for how Utopian and idealistic it feels. Rahul, an IITian-turned-activist for adivasis meets Subhadra, a Dalit activist. Their common ground for social justice aside, they have very little in common. Rahul hails from a Brahmin family of engineers in Kolkata, something Subhadra knew nothing about when she agreed to marry him.

Indikar’s film benefits from Subhadra’s presence – a firecracker of a person, being matter-of-fact about her life and their relationship. Rahul, a man who speaks with sophistication and thought, almost comes off as the ideal partner. Hearing about where Subhadra began, and being witness to her personal, as well as academic growth is one of the most inspiring arcs I’ve seen recently. Indikar’s film doesn’t hide the fact that Rahul and Subhadra’s journey being rosy at all points, especially when Subhadra candidly confesses that she’s had thoughts of leaving Rahul. “But then I think – will I find anyone like him? Unlikely,” she says with a laugh. Seeing Subhadra find the vocabulary to voice her thoughts against patriarchy and caste bias, which has denied her so many opportunities, left me feeling giddy with its glimpse of what a just society would look like.

Faasle

Archana Phadke’s episode about a Malayali woman, Dhanya, and an Afghan man, Homayon, meeting during college in the USSR, is visually the most refined one. This is a rare episode, where the re-enactments of Dhanya and Homayon’s anecdotes seem organic, especially with Homayon mentioning how he was reminded of Rekha, the first time he laid eyes on Dhanya outside their Dean’s office.

In terms of sheer logistics, it could also be argued that Dhanya and Homayon’s is one of the most rigorous love stories in the show. The couple recount how she had to wait for four years to convince her parents to marry Homayon, who explicitly states that eloping was never an option like in the Bollywood movies. Shortly after they marry, Homayon is stranded in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, causing Dhanya to follow him there, which meant a significant mortal risk. It’s almost poetic how following her husband to one of the most oppressive environments for women on earth also becomes her key to lifelong freedom and equitable companionship.

Love Beyond Labels

A love story between transwoman Tista and transman Dipan is a lot of ground to cover in about 30 mins, but Colin D’Cunha does well to take us through the beats. Tista, assigned male at birth, found herself drawn towards sindoor khela – a ritual for married women to conclude Durga Puja festivities. Meanwhile, Dipan found himself drawn to sports and his father’s shirts. Growing up with shame in conservative localities, both Tista and Dipan talk about their struggles, periods of self-loathing, and finding peace with their identities.

There’s a sharp touch from D’Cunha, when Tista is recounting how neighbours would complain to her mother about her. She sighs saying she would feel bothered for a bit, but soon go back to acting like her favourite heroine. It’s a fine, irreverent moment puncturing all the trauma out of the picture.

There are moments in D’Cunha’s episode that feel staged, and voiceovers that take us out of the story. However, the Dharma aesthetic is most prominent here [in a good way], and if this has to be the gateway to sensitise the Indian middle-class about the trans community, then D’Cunha and his crew should consider themselves successful.

My Intergenerational, Interfaith Family and an Instagram Love Project

In a country obsessed with marriage and weddings, we intend to continue telling alternative real-life stories to spread the message that there is nothing wrong with selecting your own partner.

The man my mother chose to marry failed to check the conventional boxes. She came from a middle-class Parsi family; he was a Tamilian Hindu. She had eight siblings and a large extended family, he was parentless and mostly without a family. His mother and sibling had died of smallpox when he was one, and was raised by grand-aunts and grandparents, unaware of his father’s whereabouts.

Most Indian families are obsessed with marriage. By and large, parents tend to control the process for their children, beginning with the selection of a partner right down to the details of the ceremony and celebrations. This is true of today’s India and also the India of half-a-century ago when my parents got married.

After a long struggle trying to get her family to accept her choice of partner, my mother walked out of her maternal home on her wedding day. With their close friends supporting them, my parents started a new life together without the sanction or support of relatives.

Growing up with a multicultural name in a multicultural family, speaking mostly English at home was my normal. Learning about the Zoroastrian religion and reciting prayers in Avestan, even though I was not officially initiated into the religion, was my reality. I was exposed to many interfaith marriages and adoptions from the time I was very young, and perhaps because of that, I never felt there was anything unusual or uncommon about our family or my parents’ choices.

Also read: The Dangerous Agenda Behind Probing Interfaith Marriages

Years later, when I married someone from a faith different from both my parents, it was never a discussion at home. It was only in my 20s, when friends had trouble trying to exercise their personal choice to be with a partner from a different religion, that it struck me that my parents’ marriage wasn’t quite as ordinary as I had thought. It surprises me that, even today, people make comments about my name and assume that I must have gotten my surname from my spouse.

In today’s India, we increasingly hear that we must stick to our caste/religion/kind and that love or a relationship outside these narrow fields is illegitimate. All around us, we see this wave of hate that demonises interfaith, intercaste, and LGBTQIA+ relationships.

When Priya Ramani, Samar Halarnkar, and I started the India Love Project (ILP)* in 2020, it was our way of celebrating unconventional love. As journalists, we responded in the way we knew best: with a storytelling project.

Photo: Instagram/@indialoveproject

Through ILP, we share the idea that many kinds of non-conforming relationships thrive, various combinations make up families, and our world is a plural and diverse place. As a product of an interfaith marriage myself, I feel that this is very personal – we’re saying we do exist, and thousands of couples continue to make that choice.

My interest in divisiveness and those who try to counter it is not new. In my doctoral dissertation in 1998, I talked about the communal riots of the 1990s and the creation of hatred. I focused on the strategies, tactics, and various initiatives to fight the divisive narrative being nurtured in those times and researched small activist groups fighting communalism. I recall how Maruti, a young social worker and activist rallying against the communal discourse, echoing Ambedkar, once said to me, “The only way we can fight this is if we all marry someone outside our religion or caste. That’s what I’m going to.” I wonder if he found a partner outside the tightly drawn lines of caste and religion.

Similarly, my friend and ILP co-founder Priya has long been obsessed with talking about interfaith love. In many of her columns, dating back from 2015, she addresses the question: How many times have we been told that our youth are not okay with inter-religious friendships or relationships? Priya has often talked about the right to choose. She says that her journey through north India with Harsh Mander’s Karwan-e-Mohabbat in 2017 only made her delve deeper into the worlds of love and hate through her writing. Just a cursory search through her columns throws up over a dozen instances where she’s discussed the topic between 2015 and 2020.

Samar’s connection to this issue began when he was a child and watched his parents counsel some of their best friends, Muslim and Christian, when their children chose Hindu partners. Always fascinated by the idea of love beyond traditional barriers, he was dismayed when the bogus concept of love jihad gained ground over the last decade.

Also read: The Interface of ‘Love’ and ‘Jihad’ Is a False Indian Articulation

For a long time Samar had been suggesting creating a website that shares such love stories and offers counselling and legal services to interfaith couples. In 2020, in response to the hate-mongering over an ad celebrating an interfaith relationship, we decided to go with a more millennial-friendly approach and took to sharing stories on Instagram.

When we launched ILP, we knew we wanted to go beyond that original idea of interfaith couples to share real-life stories of couples that broke the barriers of not just faith but caste, race, and gender. We wanted these stories to tell the world that the best way to counter narrow, hateful or fake narratives is to share those of diversity, hope, and love.

Photo: Instagram/@indialoveproject

As the child of an interfaith couple in an interfaith marriage, sharing these stories also helps us say “we’re here, we cannot be wished away, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with relationships that cut across majoritarian expectations”. We point out that interfaith and other non-mainstream relationships have been in India for decades; they continue and will likely expand, especially as young people migrate in search of education and work. We want to emphasise that the relationships they may have are not anomalies or deviant behaviour.

For us, ILP is important because it is a happy space that speaks to a plural and inclusive society. Who doesn’t like a good love story? When people read about how someone found love and managed to exercise the freedom to choose and love a person of their choice, it is reassuring, comforting.

The right to choose is central to ILP’s narrative. In a country obsessed with marriage and weddings, we intend to continue telling alternative real-life stories to spread the message that there is nothing wrong with selecting your own partner. For many couples, sharing their love stories is therapeutic, a release. If more and more people tell their stories about different expressions of choice – on social media, in films, in books, in whatever way they can – it will only give young lovers hope.

Niloufer Venkatraman is one of three co-founders of India Love Project (@indialoveproject). She is Consulting Editor at RoundGlass Sustain, a wildlife and conservation website documenting India’s species and habitats and their preservation.

*As the India Love Project (ILP) is one of 10 finalists for a global pluralism award, its co-founder reflects on the reasons three journalists began an Instagram account to spread the message of interfaith, intercaste and LGBTQIA+ love.

‘A Love Letter to India’: How Online Platforms Counter the Political Fable of ‘Love Jihad’

India Love Project and Project Anti-Caste Love are taking over the digital space to celebrate a love that goes beyond caste, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and age – all social markers.

Zainab Darukhanawala and Sinu Daniel have been married for two years now, but their love story has been 10 years in the making. They met each other 12 years ago, a meet-cute that translated into regular dates. By the time they set up a meeting for their respective sets of parents in 2014, they had self-confessedly fulfilled all tropes and cliches around love.

And then, reality rapped on the door. Their faiths – one was a Bohri Muslim and the other an Orthodox Syrian Christian – enforced an unsaid ban on any exchange of affection. Their families tacitly reinforced it.

“Conversion was always a topic of immediate fights on both sides since both families and religions need conversions to perform the marriage ceremony,” Zainab wrote on Instagram.

Zainab and Sinu’s post-wedding shoot on Vasai beach. Photo: Instagram/India Love Project

They briefly broke up. But when they went on to pursue their MBAs in the same college, the will to be with each other took over. In February, 2019, they registered their marriage.

Which faith did their wedding belong to, then?

“Ironically, we went to a divorce lawyer to help confirm that our marriage is indeed not governed by either religion.”

They shared their tryst with love, religion, and societal maxims on India Love Project, a web initiative which is home to stories like theirs. Founded by the journalist couple Priya Ramani and Samar Halarnkar, and their friend Niloufer Venkatraman, the effort is a celebration of non-normative love – one that upends the boundaries of current societal imagination.

Within 120 days, the Project’s web pages have evolved into a community of more than 37,000 people. “In a country increasingly fractured by false narratives over religion and love,” Halarnkar says, “We see India Love Project as an attempt at unity, a chronicle of passion outside the shackles of faith, caste, ethnicity and gender.”

Also pioneering this resistance is Project Anti-Caste Love, a platform that started back in 2018, when conversations around non-normative love were grievously non-existent. It has rallied for a unique discourse around caste and its interplay on love and relationships.

Going strong on Instagram, it shares love letters of partners in ‘unconventional’ relationships and has now emerged as a learning archive to hold discussions on and interrogate social dogmas. It is the brainchild of actor, writer and activist Jyotsna Siddharth, who is also the founder of the Dalit Feminism Archive. Caste, she aptly notes, is inextricably linked to all social experiences.

As platforms like these upend narratives around one of the oldest institutions in India, they manufacture hope, giving it faces, voices, and emotion.

‘Chronicle of passion’

The desire to establish a discourse around love firmed up last year for Samar, Priya, and Niloufer. “A year ago, as this ‘love-jihad’ nonsense worsened, we imagined a place where couples who pushed the boundaries of faith, caste, etc. could share their stories, inspire others like them and simply make us all feel good about love,” Halarnkar says.

In October, 2020, a Tanishq advertisement found itself in the line of sight of right-wing Hindutva activists, reviving the uproar around the rightwing bogey of ‘love jihad’, for which there continues to be no evidence. The conflict in this idea is apparent: the tenderness of interfaith love needed to be countered with a made-up anti-Muslim spectre.

The outrage against the Tanishq advertisement, depicting a Hindu woman in a Muslim household, was indicative of the fact that interfaith and inter-caste marriages have long carried the scarlet letter in conservative Indian families.

India Love Project was an immediate and robust response to this. The decision to breathe life into the Project happened overnight. They feared “love jihad” was being “weaponised and normalised” at an unprecedented scale. The first post was co-founder Niloufer Venkatraman’s account of her parents — Bakhtawar Master and S. Venkatraman. A Parsi woman marrying a Hindu Tamilian man had sought opposition from within family, but the couple remained unfazed and got married in the summer of 1958.

“My parents intentionally gave their three children Parsi first names and a Tamilian last name — they said we should be proud of ‘both identities’,” she wrote in the caption.

Niloufer Venkatraman’s parents Bakhtawar Master and S Venkatraman. Photo: Instagram/India Love Project

The intent and impact of the platform were clear. To the team, it revealed “the possibilities of love without traditional straightjackets, love that can serve as a beacon of hope to others in the same situation,” Halarnkar says.

The website, along with its Instagram and Twitter pages, pieces together an alternate reality of plurality, acceptance, and kindness. Each day brings a new story of people finding love across religion and caste, outside of gender binaries and class barriers. The stories pierce geography and time. Love can be seen blooming in the shadow of the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom and the 1991 Babri Masjid demolition; in cities big and small, with customs new and old.

What inspired over 100 couples to share their stories? “One type of people are those who want to share their stories,” Halarnkar explains. “But the majority are people who have taken the decision to make a statement…People saying that we haven’t really spoken about this before, but we are so disturbed by what’s happening.”

Also read: Legal Howlers in UP’s ‘Anti-Conversion’ Law Expose its Real Intent

What was ‘happening’ was the growing political, social, and now legal scrutiny around interfaith marriages. Three BJP-ruled state governments had recently passed laws to penalise ‘forced’ conversions for marriage, with others expressing support and proposing plans of their own. Halarnkar points out that these laws are constitutionally invalid, noting that last year, the government communicated to the parliament that no such term as ‘love jihad’ exists and no such cases have come to attention.

Inter-faith love is already rare in India. About 90% of marriages are within caste and only 2.2% of all marriages, by this estimate, are interfaith. “But these are still large numbers, and such marriages are more prevalent than we imagine,” Halarnkar points out. And what better way to counter something that is fake, he says, with something that is real.

“Nothing could be more real than these stories.”

Political and social mirrors

In India, love and marriage ought to fit into a mould. Or so we’ve been told, by self-proclaimed agents of culture, interpreters of scriptures, and rigid notions of purity. Caste, class, gender, and religion silently lend themselves to the complexity of love and relationships.

And that was Jyotsna Siddharth’s grouse with the world. Three years ago when she started Project Anti-Caste Love, she noticed the lack of conversation around this. Her experience of facing discrimination along the lines of caste in personal and professional relations — she herself identifies as a Dalit queer woman — prompted her to ask a question: what does it mean to come from a low-caste community and experiencing love and relationships?

Her exploration and answers, then in the form of an unpublished MPhil thesis, took the shape of a robust and evolving digital community. Love and relationships in South Asia were framed in intersections, and Project Anti-Caste Love was a lens at understanding this discourse.

Jyotsna Siddharth. Photo: Nausheen Khan

“When you choose to be with someone, that choice itself is political,” she says. “And our experiences of intimacy and love are essentially caste experiences.”

In India, caste considerations are implicit in all spheres. It determines and entrenches social standing, who one marries, what their political affiliations are, how they live and breath. Transgressions carry the weight of unthinkable, brutal consequences. By one estimate, between 2010 and 2016, the crime rate against Dalits rose by 25%. Hostility and violence against inter-caste couples or those from oppressed castes have been well-documented, indicating an upward trend.

Yogesh Maitreya posted a poem on the platform, undergirding the magnitude of caste barriers in personal relationships. “You loving me is not the same as I loving you,” it says, “I am betraying my ancestors who were killed by your ancestors.” The intangibility of a social bias can be felt all too well.

For Project Anti-Caste Love, love is political – rooted in our social, cultural upbringing which defines our understanding of love, desire and attraction. The platform shares love letters pulsing with emotion and expression, giving life to a feeling otherwise dismissed. These were like archives, she explains, while talking about letters as the right medium for the platform, that could provide a lens to relationships and the anxiety surrounding it. The letters themselves don’t feel obligated to talk about institutional moulds — their experiences act as a conduit in unerringly relaying caste discrimination.

Vidhi Kundaliya (left) wrote a goodbye letter in 2014 in Gujarati to her now-husband. Photo 2: Jagisha Arora shares the struggles of an intercaste relationship in a letter to Prashant Kanojia.

Over three years, ongoing conversations around inter-caste relationships, interracial and interfaith relationships have allowed people to unlearn and re-learn, respond and engage. Poignant and powerful love letters — cutting across cities and languages — ask what it means to desire and love under the unyielding lens of social structures.

“Love is courage, an outlier, love is powerful to break boundaries, biases and borders. Love is an antiseptic to our pain. Sometimes, love is enough,” one dispatch avers. These carefully-crafted letters symbolise hope and defiance, strongly making a case for how love and relationships are personal and political in equal measure. One can note how most do not carry a name or other details that can put the writer under scrutiny. Intimidation, threats, and violence are all tangible realities faced by inter-caste couples in India.

But the Project remains unfazed. “As the last act of our dissent nears, who will torch the next fire, I wonder,” a poem reads on the platform. Shared by Aditya Lakshmi, it frames the experiences of inter-caste couples between desire and resistance.

The platform, then, provides a safe space for intimacy to be explored and accepted. “In the last three years,” Jyotsna notes, “the platform has achieved an organic and beautiful camaraderie within the community that we’ve managed to create.” Love visibly transcended social dogmas, and these letters cemented this rebellion.

She has spoken to an overwhelming number of people in the course of this initiative, understood their trauma and experiences with families, friends and partners. The Project is a symbol of that resilience, she says.

“Through this platform, I’m able to have conversations with various kind of people because this is an aspect that is crucial and part of our lives. This resonates with people, who continue to respond and engage.”

Much is gained

The internet is no longer a novelty and that has allowed platforms like India Love Project and Project Anti-Caste Love to bloom into safe, kind places of affection, appreciation, and acceptance. Readers, contributors, and founders of both platforms see the internet has having inspired a revolution of love.

“From emojis to sexting, a large part of courting is online. Our stories, too, spread through social media, and it is through social media that people hear of stories that inspire them to write to us,” says Samar Halarnkar.

The downside, of course, is that a stream of trolls flood comments and messages with vitriol. For India Love Project, the trolls have been limited and ineffective, Samar notes. Whenever the hate comes, it directs itself at one particular content: stories of Hindu women marrying Muslim men. Any union like this invites Islamophobic sentiments mostly by people harbouring a Hindutva ideology.

Also read: The Trials and Tribulations of Being a Muslim in Today’s India

“It’s also a little difficult for trolls to argue with this because these are real people and these are living stories. So who are you to tell us that this cannot happen or is not happening?”

Another challenge is that of language – all stories are in English at present. Seeing how the narrative of “love jihad” is more rampantly being spread across the north Indian Hindi-speaking belts, ILP is self-aware of the gap. It hopes to eventually expand into carrying posts in Hindi and other regional languages for greater access and inclusivity.

Jyotsna concurs with the language barriers, and has been consciously giving a boost to narratives that are often overlooked. The Project has carried letters in Hindi and other regional languages, a reflection of the diversity that sits at the heart of it. As it gained momentum, it also makes an effort to organise Instagram Live interactions and conversations in Hindi for greater inclusivity and access.

While complex ideas such as caste and religion can only be covered to an extent in the digital space, the 33-year-old notes that the platform puts a formidable fight in challenging skewed social hierarchies.

‘Let there be love’

As a seasoned digital initiative, do concerns of longevity plague her? She answers in the negative, noting that the Project can go “as far and as deep as the people who find meaning and continue to participate.” The response to the Project has been surprisingly pleasant for her — the collective experience of interrogating love and redefining it has been affirming for her.

“Over three years, the Project has grown into something I never thought it would,” she says reflectively. “The Project continues to teach me and hopefully during the course of this, I’ll be able to have more insight into what the Project is becoming.”

A postcard from France to Hyderabad

For the Project, love is beyond meek abstractions. It takes the form of radical love, love of change, political love and love that goes beyond caste, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and age – all social markers. Jyotsna envisions a better, positive, and critically sound world, one that accepts. The stories and hopes these dispatches carry keep her ambitious buoyant. “It’s the people I work with and people who engage with me that have been inspirational and motivational,” the humbly notes.

While these platforms share wholesome narratives, they were a product of years of resistance.

“There are many struggling to battle their way through and we have been getting requests for help and advice. We have connected people involved in a couple of such cases with counsellors, but recognise that we need to streamline our efforts if we are to really be of assistance,” Samar says. The next step for India Love Project is to curate resources, get lawyers on board, and hold offline and online conversations to help couples navigate legal and social challenges.

Are these platforms an act of defiance, then, or unassuming love letters to India? “I think it is both,” Samar says. It is seen as defiant only because of the polarising times, he notes, referring to the “love jihad” furore.

But the true purpose these projects serve is in preserving gentle love letters across a nation at war over its heart and soul.

Saumya Kalia is currently an editorial intern at The Wire. She has previously written for The Caravan, Outlook, Arré and The Citizen, amongst other platforms.