Culturally, it is a historic moment in the life of the so-called progressive Kerala. After communism, pornography has become the liberation theology of the working class.

In the post-coitus history of the world, India has that arousing position of being the civilisation that defied the missionary. Mainly courtesy the sage Vatsyayana-whose reputation nowadays is more intact in the deconstructionist classroom rather than in the bedroom-Puranic India reached the climax through a hormonal trajectory that included eight kinds of embrace, four styles of kissing, eight ways of scratching, quite a few biting techniques like cumulus cloud and tiger's mauling and, of course, those multiple arts of union that look great in a miniature painting or on a temple wall. Even the gods were romantic: the blue one ran after the girls around the trees and stole their clothes while they were bathing. And the phallus of the most masculine of them all-who later turned an ascetic-continues to be garlanded by the faithful. Such a priapic mythology it is, and the erotic is engraved in the sacred.

So what? Mythology cannot be the sildenafil citrate to the sagging sexuality of modern India-or, more specifically in the context of the current censor versus sex controversy, to modern Indian cinema. Had it not been for the gaze of the morality police, we would have had a post-postmodern Devdas with the frontal nudity of the courtesan silhouetted against the bare-it-all sorrow of the boozy lovelorn, and the Bollywood Bertolucci would have been supplying more Amul butter to the local Brando to make the act smoother in Last Tango in Mumbai. Sorry, that is not the case, even if it sounds voyeuristic. Romance in Indian cinema swings between the pulp and the pornographic.

The pulp is mainstream, family friendly, where high-wattage love is a wet handkerchief, not a soiled bedsheet. A society singing and dancing towards either tear or cheer is a make-believe that exists only in the mise-en-scenes of the pulpmeisters. And it is not a deceptive subversion by desperate filmmakers who want to vindicate Borges: censorship is the mother of metaphor. Metaphor? That is a joke. It is the industrialisation of a value system, rich in morality and short on art, so remote from the sensibility of the age. It is La Dolce Vita Indianised, no subtext, no context, only the décolletage. The examples of daring to defy are exceptions, like Shekhar Kapur's Bandit Queen and Mira Nair's Kama Sutra. The first is a social statement, replete with gut-churning depictions of sex and violence, made in rough realism. Nair's erotic flick is undressed oriental chic as cultural statement-kind of that-was-India, darling! And both are Shocking with a capital S, in purely Indian terms. As works of art, the frisson they generate is either in the gut or in the groin.

The other extreme is the randy republic of pornography. The so-called Shakeela wave that swept away the Malayalees to the heaving, panting, swooning dark halls of sexual salvation. It was all about heavy-breathing men with Saddam moustaches struggling with their hands and faces on thunder thighs. Culturally, it is a historic moment in the life of the so-called progressive Kerala. After communism, pornography has become the liberation theology of the working class. From Stalin to Shakeela is a predictable journey. The first was hardcore. The newest is soft.

So, is it all about sex in Indian cinema, suppressed by the moral tyranny of the state? The call for the liberation of eros or the legitimisation of it by the state is a misplaced cause in Indian movies-or, for that matter, in contemporary Indian literature. There is a difference between sensuality and vulgarity, and today there is almost no one in Indian cinema or literature who realises the difference. The difference between the erotic and the pornographic. The erotic is pleasure at its individualistic best, intimate, private. Pornography has no identity. Eroticism is art and pornography is kitsch. Pornography, like the biggest ideology of the last century, wants the liberation of the masses. The erotic is rebellious, like Lolita or Lady Chatterley's Lover or In Praise of the Stepmother. The erotic India has no privileged place in today's imagination-in words or frames. The beauty killer is not the censor or the state-sponsored defender of morality, even though both are undesirable in any free society, but those artists who are subordinated to the formula.

At the beginning of man's erotic life, says a character in Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, there is arousal without climax; at the end there is climax without arousal. As we see or read the sexual life of India Today, it is always simulated arousal and no climax. It hasn't come a long way.