Book Review: How India Loves — Beyond Caste, Law, And Shame, Between Fear And Freedom
In 'How India Loves: Love Stories from the World’s Largest Democracy', Rituparna Chatterjee offers a mosaics of intimate lives, drawn from across the vast & conflicted sphere that's contemporary India
There are few terrains more elusive, more charged with contradiction, than love in India. It lives, like the monsoon, between longing and drought, perpetually threatened, occasionally deluged, and always in negotiation with caste, religion, gender, and geography. In How India Loves: Love Stories from the World’s Largest Democracy, Rituparna Chatterjee offers a finely-woven mosaics of intimate lives, drawn from across the vast and conflicted sphere that is contemporary India.
In an age when public life is becoming increasingly majoritarian and hypermasculine, this book stands as a quiet, almost sacred act of resistance. It redirects attention from policy and polemic to the realm of yearning, unapologetically tender, insistently personal.
Stories From The Margins, Told With Grace
This is not a book of grand romances. There are no sweeping musical montages or spectacular declarations of love. Instead, we are given something far rarer: the lived experiences of couples, queer, interfaith, inter-caste, disabled, who risk ostracisation, state surveillance, and familial violence just to claim the simplest of human dignities.
The author's strength lies in her humility as a chronicler. Her prose is stripped of sentimentality, yet never cold. It allows the voices of her subjects to breathe on their own terms, as in the story of Irfan and Pallavi — he is a Muslim, she is a Hindu Brahmin — whose romance unfolds in the quiet corners of a small town in Uttar Pradesh, until it meets the predictable yet brutal backlash of social intolerance.
Between Section 377 And Everyday Intimacy
In one of the book’s most haunting and intimate accounts, we meet Sneha and Priya, a lesbian couple from a small town in Tamil Nadu. Their story, deceptively simple in its beginnings, two young women meeting at college, drawn together by shared books and late-night conversations, soon unfolds into a landscape fraught with silence, surveillance, and emotional exile.
Even after the historic 2018 Supreme Court verdict that read down Section 377, decriminalising consensual same-sex relationships, the law lingers like a phantom in the everyday lives of queer Indians. As Chatterjee reveals through their voices, legality alone does not dismantle the scaffolding of prejudice. For Sneha and Priya, the court’s ruling brought neither celebration nor relief. Instead, their lives remained tightly circumscribed by the expectations of families who refused to see, and a society that chose to look away.
There is a moment in their story unadorned, almost casual, when Priya speaks of returning home during the summer break and deleting their entire WhatsApp history in fear of her parents discovering it. It’s a gesture that tells us more about queer existence in India than any legal brief ever could. Here, love must be rewritten in code, performed only behind closed doors, and even then, not entirely safely.
What emerges is a portrait of intimacy that is both defiant and deeply vulnerable. Sneha and Priya do not attend pride parades. They do not use the language of activism. Yet in their cautious persistence, in their shared meals, their quiet longing, their decision to remain together even as relatives threaten to 'correct' them they embody a radical politics of presence. The violence they endure is not always physical; it resides in silences, refusals, in the way a mother looks past her daughter's joy as if it were something shameful.
The book does not dramatise these tensions. Instead, she listens. And in listening, it grants Sneha and Priya the dignity of being heard without mediation or spectacle. Theirs is not a story of triumph in the traditional sense. But in its steadfast refusal to end in tragedy, it asserts the quiet, daily miracle of queer love, it endures.
A Cartography Of Emotional Citizenship
Each of these anecdotes becomes a way of mapping India, not by language or religion, but by the right to love. In a society where caste still determines desirability, and where surveillance is repackaged as protection, love becomes a political act. A Dalit man’s relationship with a Savarna woman becomes not just romantic, but revolutionary. A disabled couple’s marriage defies the economy of perfection that governs most depictions of romance.
Here, democracy is not just a matter of votes or courts, it is something far more tactile: the act of holding hands in a crowded bus, of naming one’s partner without flinching, of coming home without shame.
The Book’s Quiet Power And Its Silences
If the book has a limitation, it lies in its reluctance to engage more critically with the larger structural forces at play. The narrative, while rich in human detail, often steps back from making pointed political interventions. In a country where even love needs justification, perhaps her refusal to explain is a form of defiance.
There is room here for a deeper reckoning with how love intersects with the politics of urban space, digital privacy, and even economic precarity. But perhaps that is not the book’s goal.
How India Loves is, above all, a deeply human book. It reminds us that behind every news item about honour killings or anti-conversion laws lies a real pair of hands, fumbling toward each other.
In this way, How India Loves becomes more than a chronicle, it becomes an archive of resistance and remembrance. Each story pulses with the quiet defiance of those who dare to love beyond prescribed boundaries, and in doing so, rewrite what is possible in the Indian imagination. These are not tales of the extraordinary; they are accounts of the everyday rendered luminous.
Rituparna Chatterjee’s method, empathetic, non-intrusive, and yet unflinchingly honest, ensures that these voices are not framed as aberrations, but as foundational to any understanding of what it means to love in India today. Hope here is not romantic, it is stubborn, tenacious, and deeply political.
To Love, Still
Rituparna Chatterjee’s closing tone is not one of resolution, but of quiet courage. Love in India, she reminds us, is still possible. Still practised. Still whispered behind closed doors. And because it is all these things, it is still radical.
In bearing witness to those who dare to love in spite of everything, How India Loves becomes more than a book. It becomes a testament to a nation still struggling to believe in the freedoms it promises.
It is not merely a mirror to our present; it is a map of the future we must still fight to build.
Book: How India Loves: Love Stories from the World’s Largest Democracy by Rituparna Chatterjee
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Price: Rs 699
Ashutosh Kumar Thakur is a Bangalore-based management professional, literary critic, and festival curator.
[Disclaimer: The opinions, beliefs, and views expressed by the various authors and forum participants on this website are personal and do not reflect the opinions, beliefs, and views of ABP News Network Pvt Ltd.]
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