Comment

What is it about a kiss that time and again gets the nation’s knickers in a twist? This time it’s the Mika-Rakhi Sawant lip lock that continues to occupy our media and has even made it to the pages of the international press.

This column is not about that particular kiss — we have been inundated with the whys and wherefores about it ad infinitum-— but about our obsession with and the inordinate importance we Indians give to the coming together of two pairs of lips.

Our celluloid heroines can dress down like lap dancers or simulate sex on the screen. Yet they yell cut when they have to kiss their co-stars. Come to think of it apart from the king-kisser of the screen, Emraan Hashmi, even the most macho of heroes would rather fight than kiss. Why?

Well, I got an answer that seemed to nail down this puzzle some years ago from an unexpected source, after many an intellectual pundit had failed to come up with a plausible explanation.

“Chi, it is jhoota,” replied actress Shilpa Shirodhkar, without a moment’s pause for reflection. A sexual siren in the early 90s — one with more curves than a winding road in the hills — Shirodhkar had done innumerable wet, see-through sari numbers and writhed on screen in the most provocative permutations.

However, she insisted that kissing is unclean. Her disgust has to do with oral hygiene as well as the concept of purity. Simply put, the exchange of saliva puts off many Indian stars, as does bad breath. Hence, the ubiquitous elaichi before a kissing scene. Today you have fancy American chewing gums.

But is that all? Certainly, kissing comes with a lot of cultural baggage. Perhaps it has to do with subterranean caste and class prejudices. Our top marquee names (especially once they make it up there) are reluctant to do so. Ashwariya Rai refused to kiss in Bride and Prejudice. Shah Rukh Khan always manages to avoid putting lip to lip. There might just be another reason why Indian actors (the men) fight shy of locking lips: many are convinced that they are bad kissers.

Producer-actor Romesh Sharma once told me that many actors did not want to be “shown up —they don’t mind goofing off if it is fight scene. But if a kissing scene goes off, it is embarrassing — it’s an attack on their virility. They are afraid of being laughed at.” In other words they would be judged inept in what is supposed to follow.

Remember Mallika Sherawat’s debut film Khwaish, the one that touted 17 kisses, the hero could not have been more wooden — kissing under duress, as if he had a gun pointed at him.

There’s no longer a red light for kissing in our films: the green signal came after the Khosla Committee Report in 1969 when Justice GD Khosla ruled “kissing or nudity can’t be banned unless a court of law judges it obscene.”Still, kisses have been more the exception than the rule since then.

The kiss was banned on the Indian screen (in both Indian and foreign films) after independence. Sometimes, with accidental comedy. The Indian audience had to get accustomed to the “strange jumps” in the American and British films being shown in movie theatres here.

In their seminal book on Indian cinema, Indian Film, Erik Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy write: “A shot of lips approaching would be followed by a shot of lips withdrawing.” Just as in a drinking sequence “a hand lifting a glass from a table would be abruptly followed by the hand replacing the glass on the table.”

But there was no dearth of kisses in our films before then, especially those of the silent era: Light of Asia, Gautam Buddha and Karma.PC Baruah, Himanshu Rai, Devika Rani and Salochana kissed all right. And so did later actors like Ashok Kumar and Najmal Khan.

The reluctant kissers of pre-Independence had a way round it though. Prithviraj Kapoor told his son Shashi Kapoor that an actor would hold his leading lady with his back to the camera and the two would place their thumbs on their lips. Thus, while the audience thought their lips met it was only the thumbs that met, and kissed.

The kissa kiss ka is far from over. Our moral police are out, lurking with intent, ready to spring upon amorous couples. Kissing for them is an Un-Indian activity.

Email: jain_madhu@hotmail.com