The kiss has finally arrived in mainstream Hindi cinema.

After Devika Rani's torrid kiss with real-life soul mate Himanshu Rai in the 1933 film "Karma", for decades Hindi cinema displayed an astonishing coyness about matters pertaining to lips.

India's outdated censorial policies didn't allow filmmakers to go beyond a furtive peck on the cheek or two flowers touching petals when a kiss had to be shown.

In the swinging 1960s, Shammi Kapoor could get away with singing a song with suggestive words ..."Kiss kiss kisko pyar karoon"...But it took another 40 years for Mallika Sherawat to do "Kiss Kiss Ki Kismat".

For many decades the censor board wouldn't allow couples to do the smooch thing even if they were mature...and married!

The only kiss in the 1960s was visible in Raj Kapoor's "Mera Naam Joker" where Raj Kapoor did a lip-to-lip with Russian actress Ksiena Rambiankina. The logic behind the liberalism? It was okay to kiss a foreigner, but not an Indian!

In the repressed 1970s, it took Raj Kapoor to bring the kiss out of the closet.

In "Satyam Shivam Sundaram", he made his sibling Shashi Kapoor squirm through a kiss with Zeenat Aman under a waterfall. The formula was repeated with Raj Kapoor's son Rajiv Kapoor in "Ram Teri Ganga Maili" with Mandakini.

For all practical purposes the kiss remained taboo in Hindi films. No mainstream actor was willing to try the lip lock until in the 1990s Dharamesh Darshan made Aamir Khan smooch Karisma Kapoor for 10 whole minutes in "Raja Hindustani".

The kiss had finally arrived in mainstream cinema. And from there onwards, Dharamesh insisted on planting a kiss in all his plots.

You may not have seen Akshay Kumar and Shilpa Shetty go down the smack track in Darshan's "Dhadkan". But that's because Akshay and Shilpa broke up before the film's release. Their kiss was discreetly pruned out.

Yup, there's a smooch in Darshan's latest offering "Bewafaa", though by now the kiss has lost its sting, thanks to Mallika Sherawat's smooch claim in "Khwahish" two years ago followed by "Murder" where she set the screen aflame with her activities.

In "Julie", Neha Dhupia too got boldly beautiful with co-stars Yash Tonk and Sanjay Kapoor.

In her new release "Sheesha", Neha goes all out with Sonu Sood. The French kisses are so French they make Shashi Kapoor and Zeenat Aman in "Satyam Shivam Sundaram" look like a priest and a nun.

Neha admits there are too many deep-throat kisses in "Sheesha".

"My co-star and I kept wondering what was going on. Sonu finally suggested we just go ahead and do it...because the censors were in any case going to pull out the torrid cases. Just my luck that they decided to pull out all stops instead," laughs Neha.

After decades of repression the on-screen kiss has reached a saturation point within two years, thanks to the excessive zeal displayed in films like "Murder", "Julie", "Hawas" and "Sheesha".

The talented filmmaker Arjun Sablok, who made one of the most romantic films "Na Tum Jano Na Hum" in recent times, says: "A kiss is supposed to be a beautiful, haunting and poignant expression of love between two individuals. Recent films have turned it into an occasion for lustful liaisons. The kiss now looks crude and objectionable on screen."

The one film to have reversed the raunchy element in the celluloid kiss is Sanjay Leela Bhansali's "Black".

The kiss in this film between the sexually frustrated deaf-and-blind girl Michelle (Rani Mukherjee) and her aging teacher Debraj (Amitabh Bachchan) denudes the act of all eroticism to make it a statement of the life force in all its tragic dimensions.

Says Rani: "At first it seemed very odd that I should be telling Amit Uncle, 'Give me a kiss' on screen.

"We had some terrible moments of uncertainty on screen. But then the whole sequence is so poignant and tragic, my character's bitter lack of sexual love, her doomed certainty that she would never know the pleasure of being loved by a man, make her plead for a kiss to her teacher a moment of heightened tragedy.

"I'm so happy and relieved that audiences have perceived this sensitive moment for what it's meant to be."

Indeed the luminously elegiac kiss in "Black" has brought back the touch of enigma and subtlety to the kiss - qualities that you thought were gone in the clumsy necking that passes off as genuine expressions of love and passion in the films of recent times.

Kamal Haasan who in "Hey! Ram" did yet another maturely handled kissing scene with Rani, has as usual his own take on the subject.

"A kiss is not and shouldn't be a big deal. I've done several such scenes in many of my films without the least self-consciousness. It could and should be a natural expression of love between two adults."