India’s Hindu hardliners slam Oppenheimer sex scene featuring holy book: ‘it amounts to waging a war’

An official urged Christopher Nolan to cut the scene with the Bhagavad Gita, calling it an ‘assault on religious beliefs of a billion tolerant Hindus’
Religious intolerance and hardline rhetoric have been on the rise in India since Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist government came to power in 2014

India

Amrit DhillonandAgence France-Presse

Published: 3:00pm, 25 Jul 2023

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As Hollywood blockbuster Oppenheimer plays to packed cinemas in India, some Hindu hardliners have taken offence that the faith’s holy scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, is featured in a sex scene.

They have called the scene “a scathing attack on Hinduism”, “disrespectful”, and “racist”, and demanded to know why India’s censor board allowed it through.

Religious intolerance and hardline rhetoric have been on the rise in India since the Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist government came to power in 2014.

A scene from Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer”. Despite the controversy, Indians have been flocking to see the film in IMAX where tickets cost as much as 2,500 rupees (US$30). Photo: Universal Pictures/TNS

“This is a direct assault on religious beliefs of a billion tolerant Hindus,” Uday Mahurkar, a senior official at the government’s Central Information Commission, wrote to the film’s director Christopher Nolan.

“It amounts to waging a war on the Hindu community,” Mahurkar said in the letter, a copy of which he posted on Twitter, urging Nolan to cut the scene.

Hashtags such as #BoycottOppenheimer and #RespectHinduCulture have trended on Twitter since the film’s release.

In what is thought to be the first-ever sex scene in Christopher Nolan’s body of work, Jean Tatlock – played by Florence Pugh – and Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) are in bed when suddenly she climbs off of him and walks over to a bookshelf to marvels at the many languages the ‘Father of the Atomic Bomb’ could comprehend.

She takes the Bhagavad Gita off the shelf, returns to Oppenheimer and asks him to read from the book.

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This is when he reads aloud the famous line that he uttered in real life upon witnessing the power of an atomic bomb during the first detonation on July 16, 1945: “I am become death, destroyer of worlds”. The couple resume having sex.

The Gita, revered among Hindus as sacred scripture, was also Mahatma Gandhi’s constant companion that he turned to in moments of crisis. “The Gita is not only my Bible or my Koran, it is my mother … my eternal mother,” he said.

Some media reports suggest that Information and Broadcasting Minister Anurag Thakur had asked for the scene to be deleted.

On July 16, he met representatives of streaming platforms Netflix, Disney Hotstar, Amazon and Discovery, among others, to warn them of New Delhi’s zero-tolerance approach to any content that “demeans Indian culture”.

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Thakur said Hollywood was “very sensitive about the fact that the Koran and Islam is not depicted in any manner that may offend the value system of a common Muslim … Why should the same courtesy not be extended to Hindus?”

He added that if Nolan chose to ignore the requests to remove the scene, “it would be deemed a deliberate assault on Indian civilisation”.

Despite the controversy, Indians have been flocking to see the film in IMAX where tickets cost as much as 2,500 rupees (US$30). Oppenheimer grossed US$3.6 million in India in the first two days after its release.

“Please don’t overreact. It’s just a movie,” one Twitter user said, responding to the controversy.