Sealed with a kiss

A seasoned traveller to India, Richard Gere might have known that it would come to this. The Hollywood star was last week ordered to appear before a court in Jaipur, Rajasthan, on a charge of public indecency. His alleged crime was grabbing and kissing a Bollywood actress, Shilpa Shetty, in front of 4,000 truckers in Delhi, at an event to raise awareness of HIV/AIDS. The judge in Jaipur called this “highly sexually erotic” and an “obscene act”. He also ordered the arrest of Ms Shetty, a moderately successful actress who found fame in an execrable British reality TV show earlier this year.

Back in America, Mr Gere tried to brazen out the charge. He blamed it on right-wing opportunists, the self-proclaimed custodians of Indian morality. But as effigies of the star of “Shall we dance?”—a film Mr Gere acted in and claimed to be re-enacting with Ms Shetty—burst aflame in Mumbai, he apologised for causing offence. Poor Ms Shetty, caught between placating her compatriots and alienating a Hollywood A-lister, said Mr Gere’s clinch was a “little overboard”.

For Indians affronted by such behaviour, these are terrible times. In recent years Bollywood has taken a racy turn. For decades Indian films showed intimacy through symbols—for example, a close-up of two flowers touching. Now they show generous cleavage and an occasional full-lipped kiss.

India’s swelling urban middle-classes have tracked this licentious trend. In the new shopping malls of Mumbai and Delhi, couples hold hands and canoodle surreptitiously.

Illicit lovers also favour protected monuments and ruins, where an entrance fee can buy a little privacy. At Kolkata’s Victoria Memorial, a peerless example of British civic baroque architecture, this correspondent faced a surprising sight. Under the sombre gaze of Britain’s tubby empress, immortalised in bronze, scores of young couples lay writhing on the lawn.

But the moral police, typically Hindu nationalists, are fighting back. Two Bollywood A-listers, Aishwarya Rai and Hrithik Roshan, have been summoned to appear before a court in the northern state of Bihar on May 30th to answer for their three brief kisses in a movie called “Dhoom 2”. Last year politicians in Rajasthan called for the state’s chief minister to resign after she planted a friendly kiss on a businesswoman at an official function in Delhi. Public kisses, after all, warrant a $12 fine in India’s capital.

To outsiders and locals alike, India’s public mores are confusing. India, as is often remarked, is the source of the kama sutra, and the country’s ancient Hindu temples have wonderful carvings that depict group sex and bestiality. Indian films of the 1930s featured unabashed kissing. What, in fact, are the rules of public decency in India?

For Hindus, as well as Muslims, they are certainly more conservative than the erotic temples suggest. A decreasing, yet sizeable, majority of marriages are arranged between families—a custom that safeguards the caste system. For women especially, a reputation for chastity is crucial to a respectable match.

India’s freedom fighters—and subsequent nationalists—revered chastity. For them it was a defining Indian virtue, separating them from the more permissive West. According to Dipankar Gupta, a sociologist at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi: “Kissing went off-screen primarily because of our desire to capture the high moral ground against the British.” But thanks to globalisation, young Indians have become more like the louche Westerners the bigots deride. “We’re in a bit of a cleft,” says Mr Gupta.

He might as well be speaking of the Muslim world, where a similar confusion is being played out by obscurantist Islamists and pro-Western modernisers. On April 25th Bangladesh’s army-backed government banned ten foreign TV channels for violating laws on public morality. One of the channels, Fashion TV, which is based in France and features an endless reel of strutting models, had been banned in India for the same reason earlier this year.

In Pakistan, the situation is more grievous. On April 6th the mullah of a state-funded mosque issued a fatwa calling for the country’s tourism minister to be sacked. Her alleged crime was to have given a relieved hug to a French paraglider after the pair completed a glide together in Paris. The minister was in Paris to raise money for victims of an earthquake in 2005, but also to promote Pakistan as an ideal destination for European tourists.