Opinion: ‘Oppenheimer’ intersection with sacred Hindu text misses the mark

A controversy has erupted about the way the movie “Oppenheimer” depicts the scientist’s relationship with the Hindu sacred text the Bhagavad Gita.

J. Robert Oppenheimer saw the Gita as a reflection of his moral dilemma over the act of killing. He would use a line from a translation of the Gita to describe how he felt after the first atomic explosion: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

However, the movie refers to the Gita not in this accurate biographical context but in a sex scene instead. This has provoked outrage from some Hindu viewers. Officials of India’s ruling party have called the scene a “disturbing attack on Hinduism” and are demanding that it be cut from the movie. Critics of the government disagree and say this is just one more instance of Hindu Nationalist censorship.

The bigger issue, in my view, is the lack of effort in understanding cultural context in our increasingly, if seemingly only superficially, globalized world.

Even though in the past Western intellectuals approached other traditions as students and seekers (Oppenheimer learned the Sanskrit language), today’s pop culture seems to take a haughty, casual and sometimes destructive approach to other people’s meanings.

Oppenheimer isn’t the first movie to spark a controversy among Hindus. The movie “Eyes Wide Shut” used chants from the Gita as the background score to an orgy (this was later changed). An episode of the TV show “Friends” once showed a statue of Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu deity, being kicked off the table and broken — once again, in an intimate scene.

Western filmmakers perhaps see nothing wrong in associating sacred imagery with sex in this way, presuming that it is a form of appreciation for Eastern cultures that do not see sex as sinful as other religions once did.

But for Hindus, watching deities trivialized or destroyed in movies reminds us of the persecution of our ancestors as heathens and idolators for hundreds of years during colonialism, a period they survived by turning to the stories about the gods and their deeds for inspiration — such as the Bhagavad Gita.

For generations of Hindus, the Gita has been considered a philosophical interlude in the narrative context of the Mahabharatha, an epic underdog story of five brothers fighting to survive against 100 powerful men. Diplomacy fails, and the vast armies move to confront each other on the battlefield.

At the last moment, the warrior Arjuna is struck with sorrow. He forgets all the pain he and his family have endured and simply refuses to fight. This is Arjuna’s dilemma: Is it not wrong to kill people, even if they have wronged you, tried to kill you even, all your life?

It is not hard to see how Oppenheimer, who came from Jewish heritage and was a witness to the sweeping genocide of his people, could relate to Arjuna’s predicament. As a scientist, he would want to use his knowledge to destroy his enemy. And yet, as a human being, he would regret the suffering that would come with war and the mightiest of weapons ever used in it.

The Mahabharata and the Gita offer fascinating meditations on questions that humans have faced for a long time about justice, war, life and death. It is a pity that a director such as Christopher Nolan, who is renowned for exploring profound ideas in his films, missed a chance to represent this cultural encounter between Western science and Eastern spirituality at the dawn of the atomic age more insightfully.

Vamsee Juluri is a professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco.