Cinema and the Desire for Modernity to investigating its cultural significance in the context of a modernizing nation-state. For anyone who observes the scene of Indian cinema with the question of desire as a point of departure, this phenomenon will present itself immediately as an obvious object of investigation, so pervasive is its 'presence'. However, my 72 interest lies in treating it symptomatically as a phenomenon related to the question of modernity. Thus I take up questions of desire in so far as they have a bearing on this question. The phenomenon I refer to is a prohibition. In the post-independence era, a much-discussed feature of the censorship code for Indian films has been the prohibition of scenes of kissing. As the Enquiry Committee on Film Censorship led by G.D. Khosia reported in 1969, this prohibition was based on an 'unwritten rule' (Report 1969: 93). The written rules prohibited 'excessively passionate love scenes', 'indelicate sexual situations' and 'scenes suggestive of immorality', all of which were derived from the British code of censorship applied in Britain as well as (with modifications) British India (Report 1969: 20). No reference to kissing as such as a target of prohibition is to be found in the censorship guidelines. In the first place, the ban on kissing strikes us as obviously related to a nationalist politics of culture. The most frequently offered justification of this informal prohibition has been that it corresponds to the need to maintain the Indianness of Indian culture, to which kissing—described as a sign of westemness— is alien. In keeping with the logic of this justification, this principle has never been applied in the censorship of foreign films. Further, there has been the occasional Indian film (often shot abroad), in which the Indian characters have to observe the ban while the 'foreign' couples—usually white—who appear in the background are allowed to break the rule (Raj Kapoor's 1964 film Sangam is a good example). The 'double standard' whereby foreign films were censored according to a different code was justified by the fact that the audiences for these films were different from the ones for Indian films, with some even arguing that this was appropriate since 'foreign pictures cater to a higher stratum of society' (Report 1969: 82). There also appears to have been (at least in the late sixties, when the Committee was doing its work) a measure of popular support for this ban, with a survey revealing that 51 per cent 'expressed the view that kissing scenes should be deleted from Indian films even if kissing and embracing was a natural part of the story' as against 33.3 per cent who voted for a more liberal' code (Report 1969: 83) while according to the gender division of votes, more men voted for a stricter code than women (52:45). A further interesting turn of events was the discussion in the film magazines in the wake of the publication of the Committee's report. The Committee's recommendation that the blanket ban on kissing was irrational and should be suspended did not meet with the sort of universal welcome that might have been expected from an industry that was supposed to have been united in its objection to the excesses of censorship. Indeed, many notable film personalities wrote articles opposing the introduction of scenes of kissing (see for instance, articles in Screen during the months of August and September 1969). It was not until the mid- Joumal of Arts & Ideas