Hold on to your bodices — and your saris. Mills & Boon, the biggest, most breathless romance publisher in the world, has just completed its largest search for fresh literary talent.

The British-based company held a writing competition in India to find its first author from the sub-continent, betting that the land that produced the Kama Sutra, Taj Mahal and countless achingly kitsch Bollywood couplings could take its tales of perfect love to new heights.

It has just announced the winner: Milan Vohra, 44, an advertising executive and “foolish romantic”. Her short story, The Love Asana — a tale of love conquering all in a yoga class — wooed the judges like no other.

Mrs Vohra met her husband at the age of 17 and married at 24. They have been married for 21 years and have two children aged 18 and 11. She wrote her winning 2,000-word entry in one night and will be coached to hone her writing skills. The aim is to transform her into one of Mills & Boons’s global megastars.

This elite club includes Penny Halsall, a former shorthand typist who lives in Cheshire and has sold about 80 million books. That puts her — in numerical sales, at least — in the same league as Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming. Then there’s Nora Roberts, the American scribe known in the industry as the Master, whose books have sold 280 million copies.

India had already supplied the exotic setting for several Mills & Boon books by Western authors. The results have included the recent Virgin for the Billionaire’s Taking (“He was the billionaire son of a maharaja . . . she was his interior designer”). But the publisher, who already sells four books every second, is now looking to nurture local talent to bridge cultural divides and boost sales further. It set up its first office in India last year and now has China, Russia and Turkey in its sights.

Hoping to unearth novelists appealing to the country’s expanding middle class, Mills & Boon called for Indian-influenced plots in which “young characters in hip, affluent settings meet, flirt, share experiences, have great sex and fall in love . . . for ever.”

There have been concerns that the more explicit titles in the canon are too risqué for a country where romantic intimacy can be taboo.

For some entrants the competition rubric was indeed too steamy. In what is probably a first for a Mills & Boon book, Ram Nagarajan, a chemical engineering professor, wrote of his heroine: “Being a well-brought-up, traditional Indian girl, premarital sex never reared its hoary head, and all her suitors respected that.” So did the judges — he won third place.

Not all the entrants were as coy. The second-placed Samhita Ambast included in her story the immortal line: “Yes, although I have only met you for the third time, and enjoyed fleeting, mind-blowing sex, I will marry you.”

Literacy rates are rising in India and an increase in disposable income in recent years, particularly among women, mean that more people are buying books rather than borrowing them from libraries or friends. Anecdotal evidence suggests that it is not only India’s women who dote on Mills & Boon. “I see the typical M&B reader in India as a young middle-class woman who travels to her data-entry job by bus every day,” Ms Vohra, who read her first M&B at the age of 13, told The Times. “She keeps her M&Bs tucked away, hidden among her delicates in a cupboard at home.

“But her brother is reading them too. And so is her grandfather.”

Read it yourself: extract from The Love Asana

A petite 5ft 1in tall, Shioli was pretty much the opposite of all her name suggested. Shioli: meaning a delicate, fragrant white flower. Shioli Dewan was more a hot-house bloom.

Everything about her had energy, a vibrance that was almost palpable.

Her rich, dark auburn hair tumbled to her shoulders in careless abandon. Her eyes were a deliciously warm honey-brown; her skin, amazingly clear and glowing. Her nose a little upturned button, with a tiny pierced gold ring poised just above her full lips.

Oh dear, she thought, as one hand went up. Of course, it had to be him. He laid his yoga mat way too close to hers at the front of the class. “Let’s begin. Stretch out your arms above your head like this.” Her head barely came up to his chest level as he mirrored her movements. Her eyes registered the sleeveless black ganjee that left his arms gloriously exposed. “SUJ”, that was the name casually written in block letters on a sticker on his ganjee. Forcing herself to focus, she saw he didn’t seem to be getting the posture quite right for “dhanush asana”, the asana where you had to lift your hips right off the ground in the shape of a bow. Again and again, Shioli demonstrated the movements but he wouldn’t get it.

“All right then, let me show it to you,” Shioli said tersely, slipping her hands under his hips. She gently gave his hips an ever so slight nudge to raise them. “You like the arch, or should I raise my hips some more?” Suj said, staring deep into her eyes. Slowly, as if in a trance, she felt the rest of the room blank out.

An hour later she heard him ask, “So, which would you say is your personal favourite of all these asanas?”

“That would have to be the surya namaskar. It’s the most complete way to start your day,” she rhapsodised.

“I can think of something even better,” Suj drawled under his breath.

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