Richard Gere kisses Shilpa Shetty. Photograph: Tanushree Punwani
The outrage in India over the Richard Gere/Shilpa Shetty kiss has a dreary predictability about it. Putting aside the fact that Gere was rather embarrassingly parodying his Shall We Dance? moves after Shetty complimented him on his performance in that film, this is a controversy that has its own history.
In 1980, actress Padmini Kholapure (who famously portrayed Raj Kapoor's teenage widow in the pioneering film Prem Rog) scandalised the nation by kissing Prince Charles on the cheek when he visited the country. Actress Shabana Azmi's "freedom kiss" planted on Nelson Mandela's cheek in 1993 inflamed the righteous once more. This latest story demonstrates with brutal clarity one difference between Holly and Bollywood. The celebrities of the west have the paparazzi snapping at their heels but Bollywood babes come under the judgment of the holier-than-thou crowd.
Give or take a song, the scenario itself has played out like a Bollywood storyline - two lone innocents representing common sense and human values battling against an unjust and repressive society. The furious activists, including those burning effigies of both actors, mainly hail from Hindu fundamentalist groups: Shiv Sena, and the rather sinister youth wing of the rightwing BJP. Both have appointed themselves the guardians of Indian womanhood against corrupt western influences.
Bollywood has long drawn objections from such folk; from the beehive hairdos of the 50s and 60s to the famously sexy cabaret numbers of the 70s, the "western" accusation has been flung about willy-nilly. From this comes the notion, once prevalent about actresses in the film industries of the west (and the theatre before that), and still commonplace in mainstream India, that the women of Bollywood are "modern" anyway; as distinguished from the good Indian girls of the real world.
But while kissing is rare, it isn't new to Bollywood fans. Pioneering smoochers go right back to the 30s, while a raunchier recent release, Khwaish, boasts no less than 17 lip-clinches.
Interestingly, independent Indian cinema and that of the diaspora is frequently filled with the kind of naughtiness that a general Bollywood formula excludes. Monsoon Wedding has adultery, half-naked kisses galore and even the odd cigarette. Hey Ram, an intriguing modern film about Indian independence which sketches a psychological portrait of a man who almost assassinates Gandhi, features songs accompanying sex on a balcony.
As the landscape of Indian cinema changes, more kisses arrive, along with more radical stories. It's when that fantasy spills out of the cinema screen into real life that the golden-robed rent-a crowd emerges.
