Did Bollywood’s longest kiss really happen in 1933?
By Geeta Pandey
BBC News, Delhi
KASONDE24
When a beautiful princess leaned over and tried to resuscitate her comatose lover with a kiss, she made cinematic history.
The kiss - from the 1933 film Karma - featuring real-life couple Devika Rani and Himanshu Rai - has long been written about as the first-ever Bollywood film to have a lip lock and "Bollywood's longest kiss ever". Apparently, neither is true.
The press at the time reported that the kiss was more than four minutes long, and the couple exchanging it on screen have been the subject of much myth-making in India ever since.
Rai and Rani went on to set up Bombay Talkies, India's first professional film studio, in 1934 which dominated the first decade of talking cinema in India and set trends, many of which are still followed to this day.
A 2020 book, which recently received the National Film Award for Best Book on Indian Cinema from the country's president, tries to set the record straight on the kiss and the tumultuous lives of the couple.
"The film was made at a time when Rai and Rani had just been married, they were still very much in love, so if passionate kisses were exchanged on screen, it was not a surprise," says Kishwar Desai, author of The Longest Kiss: The Life and Times of Devika Rani.
Also, she says, "it was not unusual" for Indian cinema at the time to have a kissing scene as India was still ruled by the British and many of the films were made for a Western audience and some of them in the late 1920s and 1930s featured kisses.
Karma, like a lot of the cinema of the time, was steeped in "exotic orientalism".
Described as "a love drama", the 63-minute film was directed by British filmmaker JL Freer Hunt and boasted that it "featured actual royal palaces and scenes of oriental splendour".
It was packed with clichés the West liked - the Indian royalty, a tiger hunt, mating cobras and a snake charmer.
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