D Madhava Prasad eighties that films began to appear in which some awkward and perfunctory kissing scenes were included, as if to merely register the lifting of the ban. One must avoid the temptation of concluding that the lifting of the ban in itself represents some form of liberation, although the existence of a prohibition of any sort invites discussion in terms of repression and release. For the standard 73 opinion is that the ban on kissing is a manifestation of a form of prudery, a residual victorianism in Indian culture which constitutes a form of national embarrassment. But this reading is inadequate because as everyone acknowledges, there is a great deal of 'vulgarit/ in the depiction of sexual activity in Indian films. The so-called 'cabaret dance' and other song-and-dance sequences are evidence of a sexual permissiveness that is at odds with the image of Indian censorship as a transparent reflection of a Victorian attitude to sexuality. How do individual films negotiate this prohibition? For it is an observable fact that whatever the self-appointed interpreters of Indian culture' may say about the cultural status of kissing, the very fact that a prohibition must be imposed in order to keep it out of sight means that the culture in question is not as homogeneous as some would want to make it out to be. At the level of content, then, we see in Indian films (at least) three different ways of dealing with the ban. The first way is to enact the prohibition itself, as in the scene from Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Ashirwad (1969) where, as the lovers move towards each other for a kiss, a fade-out overtakes them and prevents, not the kiss itself, but its appearance on the screen. In this way the film reminds us of the ban and, through this enactment, also ridicules it. This is the cinematic equivalent of the 'enlightened' attitude to the ban, disdainful of its meaninglessness but resigned to the power of the bureaucracy to impose it. Another approach is to thematize the prohibition as a cultural truth and a duty. This happens, for instance, in An Evening in Paris (1967), where the contrast provided by the foreign location, with its alien mores, serves to highlight the uniqueness of the national culture and the responsibility of the characters to uphold it. Thus the heroine in this film invokes Indian custom to refuse the hero's demand for a kiss. In such films the reality implied by the prohibition is literally produced as truth at the thematic level. The idea of cultural/moral duty is a striking feature of this approach and points to the transformation of particular moral codes in force among some Hindu castes into a national morality. It is significant that the threat posed by a transgression of custom is not only to the family or the institution of marriage but the nation itself, as if the expansion of the sphere of sexuality threatened to break open the national borders and violate its identity. As such it raises the question of the nature of the relation between sexuality and national identity and reminds us of Fanon's assertion, in the course of a discussion of the contestation over the veil in Algeria, that the 'phenomena of resistance observed in the colonized must be related to an attitude of counter-assimilation, of maintenance of a cultural, hence national, originality' (Fanon 1965: 42). This need for counter-assimilation as a guarantee of national originality focuses on women's cultural behaviour. It is women who are regarded as the guardians of the national Numbers 25-26