When talking about her partner Sunit, Farada says, “He is just a boy,” questioning why someone’s faith should come in the way of matters of the heart. That summarises the beating heart of Amazon Prime’s latest Love Storiyaan.
Inspired by the stories featured in the India Love Project, an initiative by journalists Niloufer Venkatraman, Priya Ramani, and Samar Halarnkar, Love Storiyaan works best when we hear directly from the couples. That is the magic of the show – it’s based in real life.
Society insists on telling you that love is only possible when it's palatable; that love doesn’t have to be political. And for decades, films, books, and songs have told us that ‘love conquers all’ and that if you have love, you can survive anything. The couples in Love Storiyaan prove that this fictional adage is deeply rooted in reality.
Every episode, while directed by different people (Hardik Mehta, Vivek Soni, Shazia Iqbal, Akshay Indikar, Archana Phadke and Collin D'Cunha), follows a similar template. We meet the couples in present day (obviously) and they recount how they met and fell in love. Sometimes we see old pictures and videos, other times we see dramatised recreations.
This is after all a Dharmatic Entertainment show; it’s going to be filmy. There is no problem with recreation – when done right, it adds a certain sheen to an already effective story. And all these stories are effective because of how sincere they are. But love can never be performed and that is where Love Storiyaan stumbles. In some cases, the staging feels too artificial, making everything look more performative than it needed to be.
In Mehta’s A Unsuitable Girl, the recreations feel almost juvenile, taking away from what is otherwise a frankly adorable story of how a man built a connection with his partner’s kids by showing unfiltered affection and care for their dog. But it all ends up looking too cosmetic.
This ‘staging’ for a docuseries does work in other places – the most effective for me was the ‘love at first sight moment’ in Akshay Indikar’s Raah Sangharsh Ki. A Brahmin man Rahul Banerjee decides to work for tribal rights after he graduates from IIT Kharagpur instead of taking the path that others expect him to take. While at a Narmada Bachao Andolan rally, he is instantly taken by Subhadra Kaperde, a fearless and determined Dalit activist.
And yet, this episode too relies too heavily on dramatisation, which is a pity considering the sheer screen presence Kaperde has. This episode is also where I could put a finger on what makes Love Storiyaan so watchable. Love Storiyaan is at its most watchable when we see humans in conversation – when the couples are speaking to the people behind the camera and when they break into banter amongst each other.
The instances where Rahul and Subhadra interact with each other reveal more about their relationship than the recreations can – when they both laugh together at a memory and then go into a discussion about the connection between marriage and patriarchy, we get a glimpse into the very essence of them as people and their compatibility.
Then there are Sunit and Farida in Shazia Iqbal’s Homecoming, an elderly pair whose story most romantic films can’t even hold a candle to. Farida calls Sunit a ‘nayak’ and you can’t help but smile at how their love has grown over the years. After meeting in college in Bangladesh, they moved to Kolkata, dealing with the chasm that formed between them and their families. Their characters also feel so deeply authentic that they manage to overshadow the ‘structure’.
Perhaps most of the couples speak in Hindi to make the show more accessible to a wider audience but people tend to switch to their native tongue when they’re driven by emotion. When Farida reunites with someone from her family, she switches to Bengali in bits and we see another moment of Love Storiyaan being elevated. These are people whose identities have played a huge role in their relationships – their cultures, their religions, their gender identities, their caste identities, and even the most basic of circumstances. Naturally, watching them at their most relaxed, in their natural habitat will be the most effective.
Ironically (but also in a way that makes sense), one of the best things about Homecoming is that we don’t actually get to see the actual moment of closure. It happens off camera, perhaps unencumbered by the need to perform for the lens.
Perhaps the story I was most excited about was Faasley, based solely on the fact that it was being directed by Archana Phadke. Her documentary About Love is one of my favourite works in the genre – its understanding and portrayal of human relationships is so… what is the word I’m looking for? Profound? Unfeigned? Genuine? Maybe all.
Faasley, perhaps because of the structure (can you tell I’m really bothered by the structure?), doesn’t come close to About Love. But the touches of Phadke as a director are omnipresent.
Homayan and Dhanya, both alumni of St Petersburg University in Russia, bond over Bollywood movies. However, Homayan lives in Kabul and the Afghan civil war throws a wrench in their plans for a future that they didn’t see coming. This short comes closest to feeling like it’s a conversation with the audience – Homayon questions our privilege while he and his partner Dhanya recount how their relationship crossed borders.
The show comes to a close with Collin D’Cunha’s Love Beyond Labels, the story of a trans man and trans woman in Kolkata who recount not just their love story, but also their individual lived experiences. Trans people on screen are rarely viewed through an empathetic lens but Love Beyond Labels is as empathetic as it comes because it is trans people telling their own story.
The best thing about Love Storiyaan is that it recognises the importance of the relationship between the individual and the identity. “Everyone is an activist,” someone says at some point in the show and they’re right. When we see Tista Das and Dipan Chakraborty talk about their identities, we also see how the episode is balancing their love story with the significance of their love in society.
Seeing a trans couple live their best lives together is going to be extremely important for queer and trans kids to watch. But at the same time you can’t help but question why we’ve created a space where stories like theirs can’t exist without becoming landmarks. But that is their story.
If I had to pick, this would be one of my favourite treatments in the show – especially the moment where the person behind the camera calls out Tista for claiming she is ‘not dominating’. The couple breaks into banter, yet again giving us a classic Love Storiyaan unscripted moment.
We often say “reality is stranger than fiction,” and it is shows like Love Storiyaan that prove that love in reality is often more resilient, brave, sincere, and (sometimes) filmy than fiction. And that love does conquer all but maybe we need to work towards a world where love doesn’t have to. Where love can just exist – in light banter between couples and stolen kisses and compliments that make people blush even decades into their marriage.
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