Love Storiyaan review: A riveting ode to human emotions

Love is a universal and profoundly human experience. Yet at the same time, romantic love and its expression are often curtailed by families, social norms of caste and class, and increasingly today, by the State. It is ironic that in an age where finding love, whether offline or through the plethora of dating apps available today , seems easier than before, and where young people fall in and out of love with impunity, that Love Storiyaan should seem so radical.

The series beautifully captures the dichotomous nature of love as deeply personal and yet political. It feature's six carefully curated stories of real couples, featured on the Indian Instagram handle India Love Project, a Humans of Romance initiative. The stories feature couples who have overcome hurdles of caste, religion and familial opposition to be together. Each story is unique and subverts stereotypes.

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The anthology begins with the love story of Ullekh, a journalist and blogger, and his wife, a woman who found love after a divorce and while raising her children. While it is a story of giving love a second chance, it is also one rife with struggles- a Malyali Christian man falls for a Hindu woman based in Delhi. The story is refreshing and subverts popular romantic tropes in many ways- for instance, the male partner is less successful than his lover, and familial opposition presents itself in the form of the female protagonist’s daughters , rather than in the familiar trope of overbearing parents. This poignantly depicts the conflict, mentioned by the protagonist herself, between motherhood and womanhood, and reveals the norms of ageing in a country where elderly or middle aged women are expected to subsume all sexual and romantic desires, sacrificing their happiness for the family and where a mother is never seen as a feminine or womanly person in her own right but is desexualised.

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The depiction of romance- featuring the couple coming together despite, or perhaps because of their ideological differences, (he is a Marxist who advocates for collective struggle, she a successful Feminist writer who fights for individual rights of women), reconciling after a breakup, indulging in quiet moments of affection in a park- is both authentic and relatable.

More stories follow- from an elderly Bangladeshi couple who are still very much in love, shown through tiny gestures of affection, to a blend of romance and revolution, in the love story of a middle class Brahmin man, an engineer from IIT , and a poor Dalit woman, to the story of two trans individuals who connect in an unexpected manner and fall in love. While the elderly couple has to overcome the familiar, but increasingly powerful, hurdle of religious differences, the Dalit woman faces discrimination not only from society at large, but also in the personal sphere from her husband’s family.

The series is extremely thought provoking and eerily familiar- contemporary discourses on citizenship and who constitutes a citizen can be juxtaposed with the struggles of the Bangladeshi lovers to maintain their cultural heritage, while escaping religious persecution and political unrest to seek haven in India. She is Hindu, he a Muslim, which would raise eyebrows even today.

Playing with tropes of inter caste marriages, familial opposition and love triumphing over all odds, the IIT graduate’s story could still resonate today in an age where external forces conspire against young love. Repressive social norms and political polices of the time, set in Madhya Pradesh against the backdrop of Adivasi resistance, the story is one of thwarted expectations as much as love- a promising and bright boy from a family of engineers devotes his life to social service rather than the stable career his family desired. Romance, through the beauty of one’s lover and his eyes, soft masculinity, sensual glances, is depicted with an unusual tenderness.

Queer narratives play a part in this series, with the idea of exploring ones sexuality in a clandestine manner, in a society that doesn’t encourage such exploration. While songs are used to showcase political unrest and resistance in one story , this story depicts the clandestine nature of expressing a discomfort with ones gender through mirrors and clothing. It is interesting that while Indian society only values heterosexual procreative sexuality, the tender love story of a trans couple is shown through heterosexual tropes and meet cutes.

In a similar vein, a story unfolds of a couple who face political oppression in Afghanistan, juxtaposed with their ordinary romantic dreams of a home,a dog and walks in the park, reminiscent of the American white picket fence.

Overall, this is a beautiful ode not only to romance, but to individuals who dare to forge their own path, professionally and personally, facing their families and social milieu with courage, and to the resilience of the human spirit in the faceofpersecution.