'Prem Bhakri Det Nahi' And Other Love Lessons From Pune

When Tarang Asha Habib went to the RTO to complete the paperwork for a driving licence, the official there wanted to know why she hadn’t filled in the space for a last name. 

“I don’t have one,” she replied.

“You must have one,” he said. “What is your name then?”

“Tarang Asha Habib,” she said, explaining that Habib was her father’s name and Asha her mother’s.

“We only want first name and last name. You can’t use your mother’s name,” he said.

“My mother is important to me so I use her name,” Tarang replied.

“Many people give their children names from the heart,” Tarang explained to the bewildered gent, who eventually issued the licence.

“I love to confuse people and see how they perceive me,” Tarang, the child of an interfaith marriage whose first name is gender neutral, told me. 

For those who don’t discriminate on the basis of religion or caste, a name can be a powerful marker. “We didn’t give our children any family names, and instead used Suman, which means good mind or a flower from our garden,” said Manisha Gupte, founder of rural-women’s organisation MASUM (Mahila Sarvangeen Utkarsh Mandal) and a trustee of SM Joshi Socialist Foundation. “Every generation can make a difference, break the chain wherever possible.”

I heard these stories in Pune at an annual event organised by Chayan—a national network of organisations that work on the right to choose in marriage and association. Representatives from LGBTQIA+ organisations, anticaste groups and those who work with interfaith and intercaste couples were present. Many such couples were present at the event. India Love Project, which I co-founded in 2020, recently joined this network. 

The tone was set by a line from a popular socialist prayer emblazoned in big letters above the entrance at the venue, the SM Joshi Socialist Foundation: “The only true religion in the world is love.” In a week when Maharashtra announced that it would monitor all interfaith marriages, this simple truth was an extraordinarily political statement. 

The LGBTQAI+ speakers argued that the right to relate was more important than the right to choose. Omkar Shinde from Pune’s Queer Collective said his community struggled for the right to relate from the time you couldn’t tell your mother, your first key relationship, that you were gay. 

Activist Zameer Kamble said that though Bollywood had largely excluded LGBTQAI+ love, they had still managed to find acceptance on the big screen. “Shah Rukh’s open-armed embrace was so welcoming we imagined ourselves in Simran’s place,” he said, referring to the screen name of the female lead in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge, a film that ran for 22 years in the theatre.

The term ‘one nation’ used by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party to emphasise uniformity over diversity, took on a different meaning here. Nobody was monochromatic, everyone was a rainbow of multiple histories: 

"All religions and castes are my relations,” said Amitabh Pawdekar about the many interfaith and intercaste unions in his family. 

“My parents are intercaste and I’m married to a transwoman,” said Bappaditya Mukherjee, founder of Prantakatha in Kolkata. “The state doesn’t recognise my marriage.”

Shabana said she and Manish declared their love for each other in 2002, largely unaware of the riots that happened in Gujarat that year. They married secretly in an Arya Samaj ceremony before they began the process of convincing their respective parents. But Shabana got a reality check when she was ushered into a room separately to complete a purification ritual before she could marry under the Hindu law. Shabana and Manish were one of many couples who have been helped by Dhanak of Humanity, started by Ranu Kulshrestha and Asif Iqbal nearly two decades ago after they discovered how difficult it was to register their wedding under the Special Marriage Act.

There were other harsh realities to face too. Kathir from Chennai-based Evidence said he had conducted fact-finding exercises in 120 honour killings. Like that of Sripriya, from the Kallar community, who married Bhadrakali, a Dalit. The engineers went against the wishes of their family. One day her father arrived with sweets, flowers and fruits. He tried to convince her to go back and, when she refused, his companions hacked her to death. “When I visited Sripriya’s home the next day, the fruits and sweets were still there,” Kathir said. When he asked the imprisoned father if his caste was more important than his daughter, the man replied: “It is more important than god.”

Ranjit from Latur-based ANIS (Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmulan Samitee) had some tips for intercaste couples who wanted to marry: “Before you marry, convince your family. At least one of you must be working. As they say, ‘Prem bhakri det nahi’ (love doesn’t pay the bills). Improve your habits. Adjust but don’t compromise. Find cultural balance. Don’t say in yours it’s like this, but in ours we do it another way. Reflect and stop this discussion.”

When the microphone acted up, keynote speaker and well-known Marathi playwright Atul Pethe joked that it was a metaphor for our times. “Our awaaz (voice) is stopped by someone or the other. Even technology is trying to shut us down but technology doesn’t know we have both the desire and strength to speak up.” And the religion of love.

Priya Ramani is a Bengaluru-based journalist and is on the editorial board of Article-14.com.

The views expressed here are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views of BQ Prime or its editorial team.