So the release of a series of new Bollywood films showing some its leading stars naked has a whole nation girding its loins.
Bollywood films have long been known for their chaste female heroines, bursting with coy, repressed love.
But its top directors and leading actors appear to have finally cast all modesty aside in a series of new releases which show naked women in the shower, male prisoners stripping off, and passionate wet kissing.
The most eagerly awaited release of the year, Kambakkht Ishq, has Akshay Kumar, Bollywood's leading action hero, and Kareena Kapoor, locked in a steamy clinch. Kumar provoked a controversy early this year when his urged his wife to unzip his fly as he modelled jeans on a catwalk.
His film will be hot on the heels of September 11, in which John Abraham, a favourite among Indian women, is shown nude, a year after he revealed his buttocks in Dostana.
According to leading Indian director Jag Mundhra, Bollywood is finally catching up with the liberal MTV generation, which watches Western films on cable television.
He is releasing three Bollywood films this year, one of which has a shower scene showing a naked woman – one he would not have expected to get away with until recently.
"Normally it would just show shoulders and above and underneath the actors wore clothes. Now I have a shot through a translucent glass shower door," he said.
The controversy these releases have caused reflects the existence of two India's – one at the heart of a sexual revolution, or aspires to be part of it, and in the conservative Hindu 'cowbelt' where courting couples are attacked for holding hands in public.
"They may not admit it, but there is a bit more hypocrisy among audiences, and voyeurism," he said.
