Christopher Nolan’s new feature film about the life of the inventor of the atomic bomb includes an intimate scene in which the protagonist recites a passage from a sacred Hindu text. This scene has aroused the ire of Hindus in India. Some ask that the scene be removed.
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With RFI’s New Delhi correspondent Sébastien Farcis and AFP
the expected movie oppenheimer hit Indian theaters on Friday, July 21. Describes the life of Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), the American physicist who helped usher in a new era: the nuclear age.
“The Destroyer of Worlds”
In one scene, Robert Oppenheimer and his lover are making love when the engineer asks his partner to read him a passage from a Sanskrit book. “I have become death, the destroyer of the worlds.” These famous words of the god Krishna are found in the Bhagavad-gitaone of the sacred books of Hinduism.
Oppenheimer had learned Sanskrit and spoke these words when the first atomic bomb exploded, but their use in an intimate scene shocked Hindus.
Written in Sanskrit between the 2nd and 5th centuries BC, the poem is one of the foundational texts of Hinduism. “This is a direct attack on the religious beliefs of one billion tolerant Hindus,” Uday Mahurkar, a senior official at the government’s Central Information Commission, wrote in a letter to the film’s director, Christopher Nolan.
Growing religious intolerance
“This is tantamount to launching a war against the Hindu community,” he added in his letter, a copy of which he posted on Twitter, asking the director to remove the scene. Hashtags like #BoycottOppenheimer and #RespectHinduCulture flourished on the social network.
Human rights activists in India are concerned about growing religious intolerance in the world’s most populous country since Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014. Hinduism is the majority religion in India, along with large religious minorities, primarily Muslims.
