Love Storiyaan, an anthology of six real-life stories sourced from the archives of India Love Project, is now streaming on Prime Video. A look at love which is heartwarming, courageous and unconventional, each of the episodes has been helmed by a different director and produced by Karan Johar’s Dharmatic Entertainment.

t2 chatted with directors Shazia Iqbal (whose episode looks at the love story between a Hindu and Muslim in Bangladesh and traces their return to their roots more than 50 years later), Collin D’Cunha (who focuses on a trans couple in Calcutta) and Akshay Indikar (whose love story has an upper-caste revolutionary falling in love with a Dalit revolutionary).

What has been the most heartwarming comment that has come your way for each of your films?

Shazia Iqbal: For my episode (Homecoming), reviewers have been kind and so have friends and family. What touched my heart is that my father — who was strongly against my siblings’ interfaith marriages — got emotional and said he liked the episode. That is a big deal because this (interfaith marriage) has been an issue in our house for a decade. A lot of my growing-up years have been spent dealing with the trauma of what was going on at home. My father told me that Homecoming could have been told in a very political way but he liked the way we have told it... which is personal and emotional. I don’t think any other feedback can top that for me.
Collin D’Cunha: What struck a lot of people about my segment (Love Beyond Labels) is that it has been treated very sensitively. I got a voice note from a friend who said that being an educated, urban woke woman, she thought she knew so much about trans lives, but she told me: ‘I never thought that this is what they go through. You have portrayed that so sensitively.’ My intention was always to make a heartwarming, life-affirming story, because (the protagonists) Teesta and Dipan have led extremely tough lives.

But they are very positive people today. I had to find the balance where I don’t go down a path which is emotional and hurtful about their past but one that celebrates their present and the future that beckons them.
Akshay Indikar: The audience has spoken about the feeling of interconnectedness and inclusivity that is there in my episode (Raah Sangharsh Ki). The fact that people can coexist, whatever the circumstances are, has come through well. In the process of making this episode, I have experienced the beauty of diversity and co-existence that is present in our country.

What do you think makes this series relevant in today’s times?

Shazia: When we talk about love, we generally use the word ‘unconditional’. Contrary to that, we grow up in a society where people tell you to look at caste, religion and gender when you fall in love.
So all these conditions apply, right? What the series is trying to say is that one can find a connect with anyone... their background, country, religion, caste, gender don’t matter. It is a pure, emotional thing.

What made you pick these particular stories out of so many from India Love Project?

Shazia: We were asked to go on their (social media) page. We were roughly given a theme... like my story deals with interfaith relationship. We scanned about 200 couples for the six that we eventually settled on.

Anything that you personally thought you really wanted to do and something that you wanted to keep out?

Collin: In the case of my story, I was very sure that I didn’t want to get into the actual transitioning process. There is a sort of voyeuristic gaze that people have towards queer individuals. They are inquisitive about things that only seek to marginalise them as opposed to making them feel accepted like regular folk in society.

I didn’t want to get into showing and saying how the (gender-reassignment) operation is done. All of that can be Googled and found out. I wanted to celebrate the individuals and their emotions and normalise them to show that everyone feels the same way when they are in love.
Shazia: Very early on, we cracked upon the idea of them (Sunit and Farida) travelling to Bangladesh. There is a documentary format called observational documentary — where you just be with the people rather than coax them into doing something. In this style, things happen automatically. We wanted to observe what they were feeling rather than what we were feeling via them. That was the ‘do’ part of it.

Because we were telling a story which spans over 50 years, we didn’t want to get into a lot of recreation because then we would have to get a set of actors in their 20s, 30s, 40s and so on. We knew that we didn’t want to do that. And anyway, the journey is the crux of the film. The thing about documentaries is that you discover a film while you are making it, unlike fiction where you have everything on paper already.

Was there anything specific in your respective stories that gave you a little bit more creative satisfaction than the rest?

Shazia: Farida and Sunit meeting their respective families in Bangladesh. Just to be there in person and seeing these people reconnect with their families was special. Sunit had last met his aunt in 1971. We were in 2023 when we shot them meeting again. There were a bunch of such moments which were life-altering for me and my co-director (Rahul Badwelkar). Also, Farida meeting her brother Bachhu after so long was a huge moment. We were told that the village of Chandpur is small and could be a troublesome place for us to shoot in. So my DoP (director of photography), the sound guy and I were the only people who followed Farida into her house. We were apprehensive about how things would pan out. But as you saw in the story, Bachhu was quiet and he took his time to deal with it. He visited his sister in the guest house she was staying in and called a truce the next day. But he requested us not to film that.
Akshay: A special moment for me was how Subhadra communicates with the villagers where they work together. And they have opened a school too. Interacting with the students of that school and seeing the difficulties they face was an eye-opener for me.
Collin: At one point, Teesta wanted to be an actress. She came to Bombay and tried but there were no roles for trans women at that time. And so, in one of the recreations in the episode, because she was so enthusiastic, she meets her younger self. That was a sort of eureka moment, a very cathartic moment. Also, we shot on Dashami during Durga Puja at a pandal. It was so special. Calcutta is amazing at that time.

Finally, what do you think of the title? Love Storiyaan, of course, comes from that line in Brahmastra’s Kesariya, which invited some criticism when it released...

Shazia: I am a big fan of Amitabh Bhattacharya (who wrote the lyrics) and I am not a purist at all. I think you can use words as you want. That is what artistes do, right?
Collin: It just made sense for Dharmatic, after all that trolling, to reclaim the title in style!