I’ve been getting into Bollywood films. But the big question is why is kissing forbidden? Is it a general Indian thing, or is this the most conservative elements of a society defining what is acceptable for all?
It’s because Indian people are uptight.
(Well, not all of them, but the ones who set regulations for the movie industry are.)
Not a director answer, but this article shows that kissing is serious business in India. See the problems caused for this popular actress who received a spontaneous kiss on the cheek at a charity event.
We Indians are a conservative society and some forms of PDAs are sort of taboo. It could make people gawk if I was to kiss my spouse, on the street for example. I understand that this might pass without notice in other parts of the world.
This translates a bit into movie guidelines. The censor board operates on guidelines many decades old, and no one wants to be the person to change it. You could have half clothed starlets dancing suggestively, or lewd, sexist jokes - but kissing her on the mouth is not allowed. You can kiss her on the navel in full screen glory but not on the mouth. Not if you want the scene to be passed by the censors. Every film released in India must have the board’s certificate. It can allow movies after deleting scenes it finds ‘offensive’. Yes, it is quite apparent that this is absurd. To make it slightly more so, there have been at least two movies which featured kisses. Soft Porn is allowed under a different certificate of course. Everyone understands that 
We are by and large conservative, especially in relation to prevalent standards in the West or other parts of the world. I do not beleive this is a bad thing per se. But it does lead us to contort into farcical positions.
And yet you have the most amazing collection of erotic art in painting and sculpture of any culture ever, IMHO. That’s what I find most amazing - that it’s okay on your temples, but not on film.
(Of course, American ideals around this stuff aren’t logical or consistent, either.)
I cannot fully explain why it is so. It is possible that since these temples are ancient, the prevalent attitudes towards eroticsm and sex at that time was more pragmatic than it is now. Sex was seen as both divine in one form and very human in another. There can be philosophical , religious groundings for the attitudes expressed in art at that time. This may have turned to prudishness after Mughal and British cultural influences were introduced [my half assed theory].
Since the innate tendency of the society is towards conservatism, everybody assumes that the other guy might think less of you for having sexually liberal opinions. The censor board is also comprised of human beings - who among them will want to be seen as the guy or lady who wanted to see kissing scenes in movies? Oh the shame! Plus he/she will have to fight a ton of beaurocracy.
We have probably the largest population in the world, its likely that all of us have kissed at some point.
Well, you can have sex without kissing. So maybe it’s a fear of cavities or something?
I watch bits of Bollywood movies, and it always makes me laugh to see these sexy dances, half-dressed girls, booty-shaking and breathless sighs and then guy grabs her and they embrace and their faces rush at each other at light speed and then . . . . nothing. Her cheek brushes his. And on and on.
But I like the dancing. The more absurdly unconnected to the story, the better.
Isn’t that the point of sex?
But any censorship ends up having its farcical aspects.
I need to protest. I watched that video. Indians can be uptight, but that was not “a spontaneous kiss on the cheek”. Shilpa was moving away from him and Richard literally bent her over - you can even see that in the picture there - and put his arms around her and was clinging to her and kissed her several times. That was a lot more than what the media portrayed it to be. Even I was a little skeeved out by it. (So anybody who says it’s OK because it’s Richard Gere and he’s handsome can stuff it.)
Plus Richard Gere should have known better. He’s been around India a lot. He should have a feel for the culture.
Anyway, there are some kissing movies nowadays, but few and far between, and NO TONGUE. They are chaste mouth-to-mouth kisses at best. In the olden days they would have an umbrella or something cover them at the last moment.
It’s a shame since there are some really hot Indian girls, but I can live with the sexy dances and revealing clothing. 
I personally think they’re all h0tt, men and women both. This is likely because my mind was imprinted with the handsomeness of Indian men when I was in high school. One of my teachers was Indian and he was drop-dead gorgeous. But though he was a Sikh, he wasn’t very devout and didn’t wear a turban. His nephews did, though. These 3 guys were all officers in the Indian army and they came to Canada for some military thing and one day they came to give a talk at our school and there they were, looking like Princes out of the Arabian Nights or something, and every female in the entire school swooned at their magnificence. A fond memory.
Just one more gift Victorian England bestowed upon the people who wrote the Kama Sutra.
???
What has Victorian England got to do with Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim views on propriety?
I’ve often believed it was England who caused a lot of it. I mean, they did rule us for a long time, and Christianity is notoriously strait-laced. However, I have no cites to back it up and am too lazy/uninterested to do any actual research. It’s just that once upon a time we wrote the Kama Sutra, and now, we are prudes, and in between was this 300 year English rule.
OK, amend that to read “spontaneous kisses on the cheek.” Here’s the shocking video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdnaHHns3c0. I don’t think an NSFW tag is required. Whether or not Gere’s behavior was appropriate is beside the point. As you noted, Shilpa did not prompt or encourage the display, and yet she was the one being harassed in an airport months later.