Oh, please, the Gita neither inspired, nor is culpable for, the atom bomb!

Despite all the self-fashioned gurus ever at the ready to dispense advice and give us fake quotes from the Gita, it isn’t often that it makes the headlines. With Oppenheimer quoting from the Gita twice in the movie, once for dramatic effect in an intimate scene that was in rather poor taste, a scene that was probably rendered comical in India through the insertion of a black CGI dress, everyone seems to be talking about the quote and what it means that the ‘father of the atomic bomb’ had read the Gita.

It was not just Robert J Oppenheimer who had read some Sanskrit. Eastern wisdom was all the rage at this point, and lots of European scientists and intellectuals dabbled in it, just as they read the classics in Latin and Greek. Werner Heisenberg, who is also referenced in the movie, had also read some Sanskrit in his childhood and even had a Sanskrit dictionary at home. Erwin Schrödinger had an acquaintance with the Upanishads, as did Neils Bohr whom we get a glimpse of in Oppenheimer.

But first, who was the legendary figure who taught Oppenheimer Sanskrit? One of Oppenheimer’s professors at Berkeley was Arthur Ryder, a Sanskritist beloved to many for his pithy translations of everything from the Panchatantra to Kalidasa’s Shakuntala to the Gita. Ryder believed in learning Sanskrit for the love of language and preferred the poetic to the pedantic, choosing to translate his favourite classics rather than writing scholarly papers. Here’s a sample from his collection Women’s Eyes: “The critics were all jealous/The patrons full of pride/The public had no judgement/And so my poems died.”

Among Ryder’s other accomplished students was Anthony Boucher, the author and literary critic, whose mystery novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry, featured a Sanskrit professor named ‘Ashvin’ (meaning ‘Rider’ in Sanskrit), as an amateur detective as a tribute to his mentor. Ryder’s translation of the Sanskrit play Mricchakatika, titled The Little Clay Cart, which you might know from the Bollywood movie Utsav, was even staged at Berkeley during his life. So dedicated was Arthur Ryder to his Sanskrit that he died of a heart attack while teaching an advanced class to a single student!

Oppenheimer had read the Bhagavad Gita with Arthur Ryder, which prompted him to recall at the Trinity test, the famous lines from the 11th chapter of the Gita, when Krishna assumes his cosmic form and declares to Arjuna, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”. In the Gita, this chilling statement is followed by Arjuna seeing all the warriors he is hesitating to kill in the Kurukshetra war dying anyway, gnashed between the teeth of Krishna’s cosmic form. Krishna affirms in the Gita, “Anything you see that is glorious, beautiful, or powerful, know that it comes from a spark of my light.” And what could be more powerfully destructive than the atomic bomb? But for those arguing that this makes the Gita somehow either the inspiration behind, or culpable for, the atomic bomb, of course it does not. No more than Shakespeare is responsible for the awkward pickup lines used in bars or Michelangelo is culpable for the graffiti in public restrooms.