But this was just a foretaste of the official interference to come.Suffice to say that Nair cut her film, recut it, submitted it to one censorship committee, took it to a revising committee, and was then faced with a 12-page legal edict demanding that “every shot of nudity be reduced to a flash”. She knew from the outset that making a film with such a title was inviting a storm, especially in a country that still doesn’t allow billboard advertising of underwear – for either men or women – so, during production, the film was shot under the cover of the title “Tara and Maya” after its two protagonists. For the main seduction scene, the director even threw housecoats over her actors and then gave them fake “super-soap opera” dialogue because 24 members of the local legislative assembly had suddenly descended upon the set for a sneak preview of the action. But now I truly believe that a lot of what happened was caused by the fact that I’m a woman.”In fact, “what happened” led Nair on such a merry-go-round it would have left Kafka feeling dizzy. “The court life, for instance, was about fire and opulence, but even the colours there were informed by the ancient text, the Shilpa Shastra, where each colour has a symbol: red embodies lust and love; lime green is the evocation of spring, the blossoming of love. So everything has a meaning, and I tried to use it all.”As for Nair’s other love, she intended her Kama Sutra to be “made as reaction against the enormous dividing line in movies between the virgin and the whore. I wanted,” she says, “to make a film about a complicated woman, a woman who is not afraid to express herself sexually, who is very open about her desire but not judged for it in the usual sort of shitty way that most movies indulge in.”In that sense, perhaps, the fairest description of Nair’s Kama Sutra is that it’s an Eastern woman’s version of a Western – where the women ride off into the sunset – but, at the expense of the men.

At the same time, though, Nair is aware that it was her film’s sexual politics – as well as its sexual positions – which immersed her in the bureaucratic nightmare that goes by the name of Indian film censorship “I was naive enough not to take that problem too seriously. For one reason or another,” she continues, “I’m always working in the gutter, but here was a chance to really set the record straight about Indian aesthetics and show how incredibly refined our culture is in terms of fabric, costume and colour.” She then explains exactly how this is applied in India. Yet the paradox is that every day on my way to the set [at the 11th-century temples of Khajuro] every banyan tree I passed had a little statue of a lingam and a yoni – the phallus and the vagina meeting, with a fresh flower, incense and a coconut in a bowl Every morning, anywhere you went. So that belief, that the union of the male and the female is sacred, is also alive, well, worshipped and perpetuated.”Nair bursts into one of the full-throated laughs that frequently punctuate her stories; then, as if she’s drawing back, she says, “For me, the film was an indulgence of two of my great loves: one is women and the other aesthetics.

That way the most banal objects – water, stone, mud, earth, even rocks – can be seamlessly integrated into sensuality. And also,” she adds, “in that way, sexuality can be given a spiritual dimension.”Asked what she means by this transcendent approach, she gives an example: “Nowadays, India is a totally sexually repressed, twisted place – in our cinema, media, and society. But rather it was to be, as the Kama Sutra says, about ‘the art of living’. “I didn’t want the sexuality to be domesticised or compartmentalised so that it only exists in this arena, not that. And so, once ousted and exiled, she brushes up on her Kama Sutra Tantric-technique with a top-seeded courtesan before returning for another bout with the reprobate Raj.In Nair’s skilled hands, though, this sort of lurid Bollywood melodrama is a pretext for unabashed, gleefully reclaimed eroticism. For this is a film engorged with colour – honeyed flesh, vermilion silks, rubies, bejewelled head-dresses and sheaths of pearls – as well as by a sinuous sensuality which, when the film was shown at a special preview in front of a selected audience from the Guild of Erotic Writers, left most of its members asking in wistful tones, “Where exactly is Rajasthan?”"Yes,” deadpans Nair, “it’s an opulent Salaam Bombay.” Aside, though, from introducing us to the pleasures of the butterfly kiss or waking up your lover by trailing a hibiscus flower between his shoulder blades, Nair insists that her film tries to be holistic in its attitude towards sex. While her film undoubtedly contains what one American critic calls “red-hot vindaloo-style, sari- ripping sex”, it is not a precise, or even imprecise, re-enactment of the best-selling fifth-century Hindu sex manual Rather, it owes more to potboiling Bollywood movies.

Nair’s version is set at a lavish, louche court in 15th-century Rajasthan, presided over by the debauched king Raj Singh – played (to the hilt) by Naveen Andrews of Buddha of Suburbia fame – and his bride-to-be, the proud Princess Tara. Here, the beautiful but vexatious servant-girl Maya (Indira Varma), annoyed at being fed all her life from her mistress’s leftovers, decides to return the favour by stealing into the king’s lair on his wedding night and seducing him. Her Hollywood follow-up, the interracial love story Mississippi Masala, was another commercial success which, in turn, launched the career of its male lead, Denzel Washington. And although her last film, The Perez Family, did surprisingly badly at the box-office, this partly owed something to the fact that she was brought in at the last minute to salvage a sinking project. Perhaps burnt by that experience, Nair has gone back to her roots.Yet it’s still surprising just how far the 39-year-old director has gone in her pursuit of a “non-acrobatic” Kama Sutra. Salaam Bombay, her Oscar-nominated debut feature about an 11-year-old boy forced on to the streets after being abandoned by his parents, was never approved for release in India; nevertheless it instantly turned Nair into a star of international cinema.