"It was only 25 years ago that you couldn't show a kiss on screen in Bollywood," said Pankaj Kothari, who runs a talent management agency in Mumbai. "They would show two flowers 'kissing' instead. If the director wanted to suggest a sex scene, they would include a shot of a bedside lamp going dark."

How things change. On Friday one of the most hotly anticipated films in years opened in India. Its chief selling point: raunch. And lots of it.

Jism 2 has garnered acres of press interest after a Canadian-Indian porn star called Sunny Leone was chosen as the female lead. She had come to prominence after starring in Bigg Boss, India's answer to Big Brother. Jism, incidentally, means "body" in Hindi. The film's publicity manager seemed genuinely surprised to be told this week of jism's less savoury meaning in English slang.

Leone had to learn Hindi for the film but didn't have to dig too deep to research her character: she plays a porn actor who is tasked by the intelligence agencies with luring in a deadly assassin with her charms.

The film is due to open this weekend at 1,300 screens with the equivalent of an 18 certificate. But is India ready? Manish Dubey, editor at the Bollywood channel UTV Stars, thinks so. "The days of a bikini providing titillation are gone. We are now moving towards bold acts which include love making scenes, going semi-nude and bold dialogues," he said, adding: "Nothing can be deemed 'shocking' for today's audience."

Even before its release, the film has proved too much for some parts of India, however. On Tuesday activists in Punjab from a group called Bhagwan Valmiki Shakti Sena burned effigies of Leone and her female director, Pooja Bhatt – who, in her previous life as an actor was one of the first Bollywood stars to kiss on screen.

In Mumbai, the city's mayor also gave the film publicity on Thursday by ordering all posters be removed from municipal buses.

Writing in the weekly news magazine Tehelka, Shoma Chaudhury argued recently that Bollywood plays a huge role in influencing the Indian psyche. "Bollywood in India is no ordinary thing. It is cultural glue; barometer; mirror and master. It is the horse whisperer. The potters' club subconsciously shaping and shifting the Indian mind. The influencer," she writes.

Advaita Kala, a Delhi-based novelist and film writer, said she hoped Jism 2 would change conventional ideas of female sexuality. "The movie is directed by a woman and I am keen to see if the female gaze comes to the fore. I don't have a problem with the projection of female sexuality – only that in our films it's usually manipulative and caters entirely to male fantasies.

"I think with a female director at the helm, Jism 2 might prove different."

She added: "We still live in a country where women are assaulted for visiting pubs or wearing westernised clothes. Bollywood has the power to change the mainstream – in the way it depicts women at work, in families, intimate relationships – as well as perpetuate stereotypes. Most often we see examples of the latter."

Bhatt, Jism 2's director, said she wanted to present a woman as a sexual being "and not just a plaything for men's sexual pleasure".

She wasn't surprised at the furore the film has caused. "We're obsessed with sex, but in a very repressive way. I blame the Victorians. I thank the Brits for our railways but not for the puritanical view of sex they left behind," she said.

Eager

Kothari, who manages a string of top Bollywood actors including one of the male leads in Jism 2, says young women are increasingly eager to flash some flesh in order to win a part.

"They are not expected to but today new talent is far more willing to," he said, stressing that he advised his clients to keep their clothes on. "Dangle a carrot but don't feed it."

Aspiring actor Poonam Pandey is of the opposite opinion. The 20-year-old hit the headlines last year when she vowed to strip if India won the cricket world cup. After appearing on a reality TV show and notching up 260,000 Twitter followers, she recently achieved her dream of being offered a Bollywood part in a film directed by Amit Saxena, who directed Jism 1.

"Things have gone perfectly, just how I wanted," she said in a phone interview.

But does Jism 2 really offer anything new? It doesn't break any cinematic new ground, said Dubey – it has just capitalised on its unique selling point: having a porn star lead. "The bottom line is that flesh display in the film will be the same [as in other films] but the 'expectation' of getting more flesh would be high with the result that it might benefit them at the box office."

One review on Friday warned readers the film was not especially rude.

"Jism 2 is a sexy movie – but it's not as dirty a picture as you might expect," counselled Srijana Mitra Das in the Times of India, writing that it "hovers over sex, like a butterfly gliding across one of the many water pools the movie features".

But regardless of the amount of flesh on offer, if Jism 2 is a hit, similar films will follow, said Kothari. "Every success spawns imitation."

Bollywood films that have broken the mould



Dostana: A 2008 comedy featuring two men who pretend to be gay in order to bag an apartment in Florida. It "probably did more to make middle India less homophobic than all the gay parades of the world" said Shoma Chaudhury from Tehelka magazine.

Delhi Belly: Hit comedy produced by and starring Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan, which introduced Indians to the "gross-out" genre. With the subtitle "Sh!t happens", the film featured a profanity-laden soundtrack and a few bold sex scenes as it told the story of three useless flatmates getting embroiled in a gangster plot.

Kahaani: Conceived by chicklit author Advaita Kala, this thriller broke the mould with its strong female character – Vidya Bagchi, a pregnant woman searching for her missing husband in Kolkata