Why have we become a country of prigs!

Contemplating Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer, the biopic of Julius Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist, opened last week to rave reviews. Oppenheimer headed the US Manhattan Project and ushered in the era of atomic weapons -- indeed, he is called the ‘father of the atomic bomb’ – and the world has never been the same since. Young Indians have been going to the movie, enjoying its intensity and passions, and beginning to appreciate the scientific and ethical complexities of the world of, and after, Oppenheimer. And Indians have long prided over the fact that Oppenheimer chose to quote from the Bhagavad Gita when he witnessed the first atomic weapon test in 1945, which he called the Trinity test. But all that doesn’t matter to the Hindutva elements, who have chosen to overlook everything else about the movie and the story and chose to feel outraged about one thing: that Oppenheimer, played by the actor Cillian Murphy, is shown as reading a line from the Gita – the same line that he quotes after the Trinity test: “Now I’m become Death, the destroyer of worlds” -- during a sex scene.

Such a reaction was to be expected from the rabid Hindutva fringe, who seem to be competing with Islamic fundamentalists like the Taliban. But we see even the right-wing mainstream becoming sanctimoniously intolerant. A BJP politician went ballistic, charging that the movie was “a disturbing attack on Hinduism…part of a larger conspiracy by anti-Hindu forces.” An Information Commissioner, Uday Mahurkar, who also runs a ‘Save Culture Save India Foundation’ called it “a direct assault on religious beliefs of a billion tolerant Hindus,” adding that it amounted to “waging a war on the Hindu community.” He made an absurd appeal to director Christopher Nolan to “remove the (sex) scene and do the needful to win the hearts of Hindus, it will go a long way to establish your credentials as a sensitised human being and gift you friendship of billions of nice people,” or else, “It would be deemed as a deliberate assault on Indian civilisation.” Even I&B Minister Anurag Thakur, reportedly upset with the scene, questioned how the Central Board of Film Certification, an autonomous statutory body, had let it pass and demanded that it be deleted.

Also Read | Anurag Thakur seeks explanation on CBFC nod for 'Oppenheimer'

What ludicrous irony! While the Prime Minister enlarged India-US military cooperation and celebrated the friendship and “shared democratic values” between the two countries just weeks ago, his underlings are busy finding conspiracies against India and Hindus in America.

It is well known and recorded that Oppenheimer was attracted to Hindu philosophy and its quest for the meaning of life and mystery of creation. He was a polyglot who learnt Sanskrit and a polymath with eclectic interests. There are video and audio recordings of him quoting the line from the Gita in the aftermath of the Trinity test and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Gita quote – even if it was a misreading of kaala (time) as death, as has been suggested recently and which is what we should have been debating -- was philosophic and metaphoric, the utterance of a mind profoundly disturbed by the gravity of what he had done – he had become ‘death’ for millions, he had become the ‘destroyer of worlds.’

When the rest of the whole world watching Oppenheimer is overawed by his colossal intellect and overcome by his humility in seeking solace and refuge in the Gita, faced as he was with an ethical crisis just as Arjuna was on the Kurukshetra battlefield, we are outraged over a line from the Gita being read during a sex scene, missing the woods for the trees, missing also the fact that the Gita itself deals with the four motivations and paths -- Dharma, Artha, Kama, Moksha.

This is not to overlook the thematic or aesthetic treatment of the film or condone any lapses in discernment of needless sex scenes with an eye on the box-office. There is a place for
critical reviews. But does the movie-maker’s intention seem to be prurient or, worse, a conspiracy against us Hindus and our beliefs?

This is a time to rejoice that the film is reminding and showcasing to the world the profundity of Indian thought, which has offered the world, among other things, the Upanishads, luminous metaphysical treatises that have pushed the boundaries of philosophical thought, and the great epics of Mahabharata and Ramayana that have explored and penetrated the ethical dimensions of humanity in its infinite aspects.

By quibbling over an incidental sex scene – did the director take creative liberty to convey something complex succinctly or did it indeed happen in Oppenheimer’s life as it is depicted? -- we are exposing our insecurities and a dwarfed outlook of our own civilisation and heritage, as well as obscuring the marvellous and keen mind of Oppenheimer that revelled in Hindu thought. This, in the land of the glorious celebration of love and Rasleela and Krishna and his myriad lovers. This, in the land that gifted Kamasutra to the world, when the rest of the world was prudish. This, in the land that has sculpted and etched in stone, in the open for all to see, the most mesmerising and seductive erotica of voluptuous nude apsaras entwined in lovemaking -- with humans and gods -- under the very eyes of the gods in the temples in Khajuraho, Madhya Pradesh, and the Sun Temple in Konark, Odisha.

Today, many among us, conservative and orthodox Hindus and Muslims and others, stuck in a time-warp, are sullying our land and besmirching our reputation with our khap panchayats, honour killings, bizarre and retrograde love jihad laws, moral policing and medieval barbaric fatwas and sharia laws. We have become gross and insensitive to brutal rapes and molestation of women in an increasingly illiberal, vulgar, and chauvinistic society, but we are easily offended by acts of love and affection.

As Oppenheimer himself said in a speech to an audience of Christian theologists at the Princeton Theological Seminary many years after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, “I even believe that the question of one’s attitude toward war which is dealt with in so deep and apparently conclusive a way in the Bhagavad Gita would not today be dealt with in the same way by the descendants of the authors of the Bhagavad Gita.” How true, given that the descendants of the authors of the Gita are obsessed with and outraged by the trivial and cannot see or think about the larger and deeper import of what they see and hear. Why have we become such prudes and prigs!

(The writer is a farmer, soldier, and entrepreneur)