Love an honest love story? This is the one Instagram account telling it as it is

In one of the several stories on India Love Project’s (ILP) page is that of a Punjabi man who grew up in a boarding school in the hills of India and a Muslim girl from UP who grew up in the US. They fought the odds till they could marry in Hawaii in 2010, with their families in tow. Their now-grown two boys, when asked to fill in their religion on a form, write “kindness...and Lego blocks”. Today, barely two months and thousands of followers into ILP, its Instagram and Facebook accounts (and private inboxes) are flooded on a daily basis with dozens of messages from readers who write in swearing the page moves them to tears. Or brings a smile to their face. There are several for whom ILP brings hope. And, if you’re simply the romcom-love story sort, it’s that warm fuzzy feeling. It feels great to hear a tale about how a couple made it, how they followed their heart. Essentially, ILP is a forum that carries first-person accounts (or narratives from offspring) of couples who surmount hurdles, revealing the possibilities of love without traditional straight jackets, love that can serve as a beacon of hope to others in the same or similar situations.

It was mid-October 2020 when jewellery brand Tanishq was pressured to pull off air an interfaith advertisement. Veteran journalists Priya Ramani, Samar Halarnkar and Niloufer Venkatraman went ahead and launched ILP online right after this happened, on the fly, without thinking through too many details, adopting a millennial entrepreneur strategy. One love story every day, on Instagram and Facebook. And they were absolutely inundated with responses. These are real stories of real couples and their very real love flooding your social media feed every day.

“We began discussing it actively last year, but launching a website is a lot of work and we never got down to it. When Tanishq happened, we just decided to go with the flow and see how we evolve,” says Priya Ramani, 50, editor, journalist, columnist and editorial board member of Article 14, a website focused on issues related to the rule of law in India. “We see ILP as an attempt at unity, a chronicle of love outside the shackles of faith, caste, ethnicity and gender,” explains Samar Halarnkar, 56, a columnist and editor of Article 14. He imagines a place where couples who pushed the boundaries of faith and caste could share their stories, inspire others like them and simply make everyone feel good about love.

“To me ILP is very personal,” shares Niloufer Venkatraman, 53, editor and writer. “It’s somewhat astonishing to me that over half a century after my parents broke tradition and had an inter-faith marriage, such unions are still thought of by many as radical or unacceptable.” Venkatraman was eight when she came home from school one day and asked her parents why her schoolteacher had addressed her as “mongrel”, a word used for mixed breed dogs. Her Parsi mother then shared her story from 1954, when she was a student and a Social Service League volunteer. She met and fell in love with another volunteer, a Hindu Tamilian nine years her senior. Amongst disapproving family, they left home and married under the Special Marriage Act, and sailed through 31 happy years with three children who were anointed with Parsi first names and a Tamilian last name.

What struck a chord for Ramani, Halarnkar and Venkatraman was that all these many couples actively wanted to be part of this venture. The trio decided ILP would go beyond interfaith love into intercaste and non-heteronormative love too. “It’s important for everyone to understand that many kinds of relationships do exist, various combinations make up families, our world is a diverse place,” says Venkatraman. Rainbow families, is as fine a word as any. As a very sweet post on the ILP page from a Marwari-Parsi couple goes: A little bit of his, a little bit of mine. A little vintage, a little modern. I want nothing else in life but this.

“The choice to love who you want is a privilege that few Indians have, yet so many Indians keep fighting for their right to love against all odds,” says Halarnkar. Zamrooda Khanday, a Kashmiri Muslim who works as part of the NGO Dhanak4Humanity (that helps individuals seeking interfaith marriages) married the love of her life 20 years ago, a Punjabi Hindu. They have moved four countries, changed many cities and had two children, but they’ve always been asked about the same things: about how they will bring up their children, which religion they follow. “Some tell us we live in an imaginary world of cultural integration,” writes Khanday on ILP. “Our response is always the same: We made this world together and we want this to be the new world.”

Lata Singh, who has been featured on ILP, ran away from home 20 years ago because she knew her brothers wouldn’t agree to her intercaste marriage. She fought many battles including a legal one that resulted in a landmark judgement. The Supreme Court said intercaste marriages were in the national interest. “I believe that these lovers are the real Indian patriots,” smiles Ramani. It is almost like all these contributing storytellers to ILP feel it is their responsibility to help change the narrative around love in modern India.

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