Enkayaar, Bollywood Trade News Network

Valentine day is celebrated all over the world with a great passion and compassion and the symbolic epresentation of this day is exchange of kisses. However, there is a very peculiar predicament that the Indian film stars do not like to kiss on the screen though they do not have any hesitation in doing umpteen gyrations and pelvic thrusts thrown to the viewers. Interestingly enough, this kind of ideological positioning in most of the cases is on account of the ban that censure imposed on kiss. The year was 1952, when the Indian censure board decided to be the moral watch dog and from then onwards kissing became a taboo. This was even though Sulochana had kissed with gay abandon Ashok Kumar aka Dada Muni in ACHUT KANYA.

The banning of the kissing from the Indian screen was replaced by the Indian Male Gaze of the heroine drenched on the screen in white showing all the vital body parts. Interestingly enough, it was the patriarch of the Hindi cinema Dada Saheb Phalke who in 1913 experimented with this genre for the first time and it was a male star that performed the first wet dance in wet. It has been more than a century but the fetish for the male white gaze of the heroine on the screen continues to manifest in one form or the other. It was Raj Kapoor who had patented and perfected this art, and through nearly all his films Raj Kapoor experimented with this genre and its climax was in MERA NAAM JOKER followed by SATYAM SHIVAM SUNDARAM and RAM TERI GANGA MAILI. Raj Kapoor's legacy was continued with aplomb by Manoj Kumar who even made a Hema Malini slither and slide completely drenched on the screen in his magnum opus KRANTI, a feat which never got repeated again.


Kiss in the Indian films was never facially expressive till the time Yash Chopra dared to do it with VIJAY where Sonam's debut shot was a kiss with Rishi Kapoor. Rishi Kapoor was again involved in one of the most passionate kisses picturised on Indian screen in SAAGAR. These however where sporadic instances, and on-screen kiss still was a taboo, and it was the plants and the flowers which tangled against one another. With the advent of new generation of actors the Indian kissing scene also evolved and Aamir Khan emerged as one of its biggest proponents. Right from his first film QAYAMAT SE QAYAMT TAK till RANG DE BASANTI Aamir Khan has taken kissing as a natural way of expression of love, and that is in fact how it should be. A Mallika Sherawat as a female star emerged as the biggest proponents of kiss on the screen and has been the inspiration for her contemporaries to emulate her.

Now kissing is somewhat sporadic on the Indian screen but still the stars are not able to leave aside their halo of conscience about their image to indulge in the same. It is in fact a natural expression of love and Amitabh Bachchan showed it with panache in his career in BLACK. Now even television has become bolder in depiction of love through kiss, but the films still have not graduated to using kiss as the expression of love.

With love becoming more expressive in society, in the times to come it would become expressive in the same manner on the Indian screen as well.





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