The Sunday Story: Love Commandos

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4.5 • 52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 13 August 2023

⏱️ 32 minutes

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Summary

In India, intercaste marriage is very rare and marrying for love is not widely accepted. Among those who defy tradition, a small number face threats of violence from their own families. Enter the Love Commandos, a group tasked with protecting these couples under threat. But how do they do it? And why are they controversial? Today on The Sunday Story, Ayesha sits down with Lauren Frayer, the reporter on Rough Translation's new series "Love Commandos". She spent five years tracking this mysterious group as NPR's former India correspondent, and reveals what she discovered when she started talking to the couples sheltered by the Commandos.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I just got back from my really good friends wedding and it really made me think about love
0:09.0	because I got to see my friend and her partner join together and it was all about their
0:18.1	connection, they found each other, they really complement each other and then it was also
0:23.4	like a joining of families, right?
0:26.0	It's a thing that you can kind of forget that it's not just these two people, but you
0:30.2	have these two families in a whole community coming together to lift up this couple in
0:37.5	this new step in life.
0:47.0	This is a Sunday story, I'm Aisha Roscoe, weddings based on love like my friends are a very
0:53.8	Western tradition, but in the world's most populous nation, India, love marriages are
0:59.9	very rare.
1:01.1	My colleague Lauren Freire is here to talk about this, she spent five years as NPR's India
1:06.1	correspondent and she's here to talk about her new series Love Commandos on the Rough Translation
1:12.4	podcast.
1:13.4	It's about love, marriage and a vigilante group in India.
1:18.9	Once a heads up, this episode does include a brief mention of suicide, Lauren, welcome
1:25.0	to the show.
1:26.0	Hi Aisha, thank you for having me.
1:28.6	So Lauren, let's talk about this podcast because there's a lot in this, marriage without
1:33.9	love for the most part is not how we do it in the US or not how we think about it.
1:40.7	Of course, some people might be like, what's love got to do with it becomes the marriage,
1:44.5	right?
1:45.5	Love actually has very little to do with marriage in India, at least at the beginning of a marriage,
	...

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