Take for example, his image of a young boy and girl holding hands in an urban alleyway. These childhood sweethearts may be five or six years old, but their future is already written out for them. The cage the boy is holding contains two green parakeets; lovebirds imprisoned by society. Lit like a Bollywood movie from the 1970s, the image mixes the real and the fictional in a carefully staged manner. “I’m always looking for something that is slightly clichéd — and what is more clichéd than love and romance? But I’m also looking for something that is fictional or pulls away from reality. Love is so abstract that it gives me the chance to experiment with the subjective in a metaphorical way.”
For all its economic progress over the years, India remains a deeply conservative and contradictory country, where sex and love is rarely discussed openly. Instead, the convoluted plotlines and high drama of 100 years of Hindi cinema serve as a proxy form of education in how to fall in love and how to be in love. “The choice of using Bollywood aesthetics is a reference to cinema and the idea of how couples should act,” says Pinckers. “It is also a reference to how actual couples act because they learn how to act from the movies. Bollywood is the main form of sex education in India.”
The purely staged shots are mixed with photographs of moments restaged from real life. We see an image of a man and woman standing on corrugated iron rooftops on a Mumbai beach. She is throwing a paper plane to the man, a message of her forbidden love. The lighting is garish, the location opportunistic and anonymous. It seems as though we are in the 1970s again. But the picture is a recreation of the courtship of Sanjay and Aarti, the most celebrated of the couples rescued by the Love Commandos. After Aarti’s parents found out about her relationship with Sanjay, they beat her and tried to sell her three times. Once she was sold to a couple for £140 as ‘a slave for extramarital relations’. Aarti complained so much that she was returned to her parents from whom, with help from the Love Commandos, she eventually escaped. Reaching out into a fictional world, Pinckers shows us Sanjay and Aarti in their new home. Aarti is holding a baby, Sanjay is switching the television on and the walls are covered in peeling blue paint and irregular brickwork. The struggle for love is over; now the struggle of life begins.
