“If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendour of the Great Atman.” (Chapter 11, Verse 12)
“Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.” (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
Julius Robert Oppenheimer and the Bhagavad Gita. One was the putative father of the atomic bomb, the other a staple of Hinduism mostly known for advocating the demotion of personal responsibility in favour of predestinarianism. The oddly opposite as well as apposite flavours of the day. And the cause of plentiful ongoing strife among Hindus, within and outside India.
Both references are encapsulated in Christopher Nolan’s just-released Oppenheimer, a biopic of the physicist who headed the Manhattan Project which culminated in the two atomic bombs that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so appallingly showcasing the obliterative power of fission that a spooked détente has held its place in an increasingly nuclearised world for eight decades.
My interest has been piqued not by the quality of the film but by what the Hindutva ire surrounding it and its public acceptability say about the changing nature of the Indian polity.
Nonetheless, the opposition to it needs parsing. Verse 12, appropriately bombastic, has passed muster without protest. It is Verse 32, which has always been tied in with Oppenheimer’s awe at nuclear fission and horror at its mass-genocidal capabilities, that has raised the ire of some of Hinduism’s self-arrogated protectors, pedants and practitioners alike.
And their focus is just on one scene showing Oppenheimer having sex with his lover—and intoning Verse 32. It’s a laughable scene, indicative only of auteur Christopher Nolan’s noobiness with sex scenes—this is his first in his corpus of 12 films—but, in the minds of readily-offended Hindutvavadis, 26 maladroit seconds are relevant enough to replace critical appreciation of the film.
The pedants have it that the translation from Sanskrit—Kalo’smi loka-kshaya-krit pravriddho—is not “Now I am become Death” but “Now I am become mighty Time, the source of destruction of the worlds”. It is a minor enough matter (and a common, canonical translation—eternal Time being the annihilator of all things, sparing not even the gods); Oppenheimer’s guru in all matters Sanskrit, the Berkeley scholar Arthur William Ryder, rendered this translation.
But when a cohort decides to take punctilious offence, no interpretative departure from acceptable exegesis—basically, strict textuality—is too small.
Until today, this translative twitch has never been made much of. Oppenheimer was not a Hindu. Brought up in a liberal, non-practising Jewish family and sympathetic to the communist cause all his life, he was an atheist.
His attraction to and familiarity with the Bhagavad Gita (and the Upanishads) was predicated on the philosophical salve he could squeeze out of it to settle his deeply troubled mind. Oppenheimer took from the Gita what he could when he needed it. The miniature Gita he carried in his pocket was talismanic—a reminder that his work’s use was inhumane but that he wasn’t entirely responsible for it (just as Einstein, who also pushed for the development of the atomic bomb, was and wasn’t).
But topping this ‘misreading’ is that Nolan dared to employ his knowledge to highlight a sex scene. That Oppenheimer also repeats the quote at the end of the film to emphasise its introspective climax is of no import to its Hindutva critics.
Union Information and Culture Minister Anurag Thakur, a compulsive ripple-maker, not only demanded that the scene be deleted but also that action be taken against the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), which rated the film U/A (recommending parental guidance for viewers under 12).
Uday Mahurkar, a former journalist, author of a laudatory book on the saffronist icon V D Savarkar, and the government’s information commissioner, wrote in an open letter that the scene was “a direct assault on religious beliefs of a billion tolerant Hindus”, that it amounted to “waging war on the Hindu community” and seemed to be part of a “larger conspiracy by anti-Hindu forces”.
But here’s what flies in the face of these watchdogs of the faith: the fact that so many Indians are flocking to watch Oppenheimer—the film collected ₹48 crore in the first three days—goes to show that ‘blaspheming’ Hinduism seems to arouse far less public passion than it did, or perhaps the public is just tired of nearly a decade of outraging in defence of a faith that has been surefooted and secure for millennia.
Equally to the point, the government is largely keeping its peace. The knee-jerk Hindutva groups are uncharacteristically muted. Social media’s hyperactive Hindutva troll brigade has not threatened Nolan with deceasement. No one has filed a PIL in court calling for a stay on screening and demanding excision.
This abstention from exhibiting outrage would be perplexing did it not suggest machinations offstage. Even the weak, unsustained protests are just for show, a sidelong assurance that the government still has Hinduism’s best interests in mind. The Hindutva groups seem to have orders to lie low. Saffronism’s ever-available litigative warriors have been reined in.
The censor board, devoted to the government’s puritanism, was told to let its hair down. And, scenting no establishment antipathy, the general public has felt free to exercise its right to consume the unproscribed.
We might wonder why this departure from the norm. The answer could lie in the government being leery of taking on any more socio-religious tensions than already roiling India. What is at play today with Oppenheimer is realpolitik, not latitudinarianism.
Kajal Basu
Veteran journalist