Senior officials from Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have expressed their anger over a scene in the recently released Hollywood biopic Oppenheimer, which they say is a “direct assault on the religious beliefs of a billion Hindus”.
Their outrage centres on a love scene in which the US physicist quotes a line from the Bhagvad Gita, Hinduism’s ancient holy scripture.
In this contentious scene, Oppenheimer – played by Cillian Murphy – reads out loud, at his lover’s behest, the line “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” from The Gita, the sacred Hindu tome which the scientist had read in its original form at Berkley University in the late 1920s.
These were the same words Oppenheimer voiced after witnessing the nuclear explosion he crafted in the Los Alamos desert in New Mexico in July 1945, when overwhelmed as by its destructive power.
In response, India’s federal broadcasting minister Anurag Thakur castigated the Central Board of Film Certification last week for approving the love scene. Mr Thakur said it “sullied” the sanctity of The Gita or Song of the Lord, and asked for it to be edited from the film.
Media reports suggested that the minister had indicated that “action” could be initiated against officials responsible for clearing the scene for screening, but did not elaborate.
The Gita is among Hinduism’s holiest scriptures, a central part of the Indian epic known as Mahabharata.
India’s information commissioner Uday Mahurkar went a step further than Minister Thakur and, in an open letter last weekend, accused Oppenheimer’s director Christopher Nolan of “waging war on the Hindu community” as part of a “larger conspiracy by anti-Hindu forces”.
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The former journalist and founder of the Save Culture, Save India Foundation, went on to say that Hollywood invariably displays sensitivity in depicting Islam and the Koran in its films, and demanded that similar standards be extended to Hinduism’s holy books.
He also warned Mr Nolan that if he ignored this appeal to excise the scene from Oppenheimer worldwide, it would be deemed a “deliberate assault on Indian civilisation”.
