It's un-lndian, it's immoral—censors tell our stars. If you want to kiss go abroad. And many did.

It's un-lndian, it's immoral-censors tell our stars. If you want to kiss go abroad. And many did. The first kiss was in the 1920's. Kissing scenes continued till the 1930's in such movies as Light of Asia, Shiraz and Karma, with Himansu Rai and Devika Rani doing most of the kissing. Those were the days of the British censors, who were very lenient (after all they had to corrupt us in some way!) However, the trend did not last as the distributors found out that women and children stayed away from such movies, which meant that box-office collections dropped considerably. So the Indian cinema reverted to lovers singing around trees or just looking into each other's eyes from a distance of at least five feet or more. Thus our actors lost a great opportunity to find out what kind of toothpaste or mouthwash the other used. Indian actors and actresses being in no demand in the international market (50s-60s) had no opportunity to kiss either. I.S. Johar, of course, acted in Harry Black and the Tiger, but he played second fiddle to Stewart Granger, who had all the kissing scenes while Johar watched. In Lawrence of Arabia he had no scope either because the whole story was based on a man with no chicks around. They didn't even show a harem. So what did he do? With a vengeance he started making a feature film called The Kiss, something like 365 ways of tongue twisting. But halfway through, the movie stopped because I.S. found out that "you couldn't film what was happening inside the mouth"! He nevertheless generated huge publicity out of it but the film is still lies in the cans. In Johar Mehmood in Goa, I.S. finally extracted his first kiss because the heroine played a Portugese. Our censors let Johar have his first kiss, after all, and the kiss wave thus started. The Indian censors have a double code for Indian actors-kiss as much as you want but only in foreign films. Left with very little choice between kissing and not kissing-our stars tried by hook or by crook to get foreign stars to act in Indian pictures! Reproduced from the original article published in Cine Blitz. Copyrights exclusively owned by VJM Media Pvt. Ltd.