The Controversy in India Surrounding This ‘Oppenheimer’ Scene Explained
We have been seeing how the Hollywood film Oppenheimer has sparked all hue and cry in the media. People in the country particularly from the Hindu community have raised their objection to a controversial sex scene. The said scene has remained critical towards the book Bhagavad Gita, which is a book of Hindu scripture as considered sacred to the people of the said religion. Before Christopher Nolan’s got its premier, it did have one scene keeping Bhagavad Gita as its references. However, J. Robert Oppenheimer was a man of many interests, including Sanskrit and Hinduism. He studied Sanskrit at Berkeley and read and studied Kalidasa’s Meghaduta and the Bhagavad Gita. While he was fascinated by the philosophical aspects of Hinduism, he was not a traditional practitioner of the religion.
So, needless to claim that the Bhagavad Gita clearly influenced J. Robert Oppenheimer, who later claimed that the first thought he had upon watching the atomic bomb detonate was a line from the scripture that reads, “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” The quote is sometimes erroneously attributed to Oppenheimer himself, so the film could have done a better job of giving the Bhagavad Gita its due credit for the infamous quote. The film could also have delved deeper into what the scriptures meant to Oppenheimer, and how they may have even been used to help him make sense of the moral conflict he faced in constructing the atomic bomb.
Yet, the film used the Bhagavad Gita as an unexpected scene, which is completely baseless as far as the historical facts are concerned. The said scene in the film received backlash only due to the intimate scene between Cillian Murphy the leading man playing Oppenheimer and the leading lady played by Florence Pugh. The duo has an intense relationship leading to aggressive sex. So, it was so obvious as to how the lines from the scripture were proclaimed and depicted in the movie.