I am flummoxed by the outrage of some ‘protectors of Hinduism’ at the scene of the Bhagavad Gita in the blockbuster biopic Oppenheimer, where the ‘father of the atomic bomb’ recites a couplet of the Gita after making love. Their collective angst can be summed up in this letter written by Uday Mahurkar to Christopher Nolan, the director of the film. Mahurkar is an Information Commissioner appointed in 2020, and also the founder of the ‘Save Culture and Save India Foundation.
In that letter he writes: ‘It has come to our notice that the movie Oppenheimer contains a scene which make a scathing attack on Hinduism. As per social media reports, a scene in the movie shows a woman makes a man read Bhagwad Geeta aloud while getting over him and doing sexual intercourse. She is holding Bhagwad Geeta in one hand, and the other hand seems to be adjusting the position of their reproductive organs. The Bhagwad Geeta is one of the most revered scriptures of Hinduism. Geeta has been the inspiration for countless sanyasis, brahmacharis and legends who live a life of self-control and perform selfless noble deeds. We do not know the motivation and logic behind this unnecessary scene in the life of a scientist. But this is a direct assault on religious beliefs of a billion tolerant Hindus, rather it amounts to waging a war on the Hindu community and almost appears to be part of a larger conspiracy by anti-Hindu forces.”
The letter goes on to say that Hollywood “is very sensitive about the fact that Quran and Islam is not depicted in any manner that may offend the value system of a common Muslim, even if you make something based on Islamist terrorism,” and asks, “Why should not the same courtesy be also extended to Hindus?” The letter urges Nolan to “remove this scene from your film across world” and adds, “Should you choose to ignore this appeal it would be deemed as a deliberate assault on Indian civilisation.”
Mahurkar’s anger, in my view, is highly misplaced, as is the endorsement of his views by Anurag Thakur, the Minister for Information and Broadcasting, who went to the extent of threatening action against the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) for clearing the film. The truth is that in Hinduism — unlike many other religions — there is no fundamental opposition between spirituality and sensuality. True, spirituality can be pursued without the sensual, but the sensual is not considered to be antithetical to either spirituality or Dharma. That is why the four highest purusharthas or goals in the Hindu world-view are Dharma (Right Conduct), Artha (the pursuit of material well-being), Kama (desire and the sensual) and Moksha (salvation). Thus, Hinduism is perhaps the only major religion in the world which gives philosophical validity to Kama, not in isolation but as part of an overall balanced life, where — as Vatsyayana explains in the Kama Sutra — each of the four purusharthas is pursued in proportion not in exclusion.
The revulsion to the enlightened acceptance of the sensual in our philosophical tradition was that of the British. The British were colonisers. They sought to impose their Victorian morality and Christian ethics on the ‘depraved’ moral fibre of the ‘native’. According to them, the Hindus were ‘tied to hateful, horrible belief and customs — unmentionable thoughts’. Their world of darkness was filled with ‘lust’, and their culture had ‘no moral codes — tolerating both polyandry and polygamy and countenancing the greatest sensuousness’. Their form of worship was ‘to a great extent disgusting and immoral’, and the Hindu himself suffered from ‘unparalleled sexual degradation’.
It is unfortunate that today, the new evangelists of ‘saving’ Hinduism and ‘culture’ have begun to echo the same colonizer’s view. Hinduism is not a semitic religion, but has a highly nuanced and sophisticated viewpoint on the myriad aspects of life. That is why Krishna, who delivers the immortal sermon on Nishkama Karma in the Bhagwat Gita is also the most consummate lover, whose dalliance and raas with the gopis is outlined in explicit detail in the Vishnu Purana, Harivamsha and the Bhagavata Purana. His romance with Radha, is the core of a vast corpus of ethereal and unambiguously erotic literature, whether it be Jayadeva’s Gita Govind or the poems of Surdas, Bihari, Vidyapati, Chandidasa, Mira, Andal and many others.
In fact, Krisna is called Srinagaramurthimam, the very embodiment of love and sensuality, and Radha, who was not his wife, is called Raseshwari — the very essence of the sensual mood. None of this was comprehensible to the British, and the tragedy is that the many-splendoured grandeur of Hinduism is being reduced to this same prudish critique by present day votaries of the same Victorian morality, who go around harassing young couples for being anti-Hindu sanskriti, and protest the fact that Deepika Padukone wore a saffron coloured bikini.
Hinduism did not sanction hedonism, or wanton sensuality. But, as the structure of the Khajuraho temple shows, it did not see the physical as ruptured from the spiritual. At the base of the Khajuraho temple, we have depictions of uninhibited eroticism, for full public view. In the centre, is a depiction of Shiva or Vishnu with their divine consorts. At the shikhara or pinnacle we have the Trinity, thereby marking an undeniable nexus between the sensual and the spiritual, the first a valid part of life, and the second the desired moksha to be aspired for.
Oppenheimer considered the Bhagavad Gita, one of his most favourite books. As a young man he learnt Sanskrit at the University of California, Berkeley. He read the Meghaduta of Kalidasa with ‘delight and great enchantment’. He knew the Hindu cycle of time, origination, existence and pralaya, or annihilation. When the atom bomb was tested in the deserts of Mexico, the lines of Verse 12 of the Gita came to his mind: ‘If the radiance of a thousand sons were to burst at once into the sky, that would be the splendour of the mighty sky’. But he was acutely aware of the misuse of his invention. That is why the lines of the Gita came spontaneously to him: ‘Now I become Death, the Destroyer of the World’. The fact that he said this before, during or after making love, should matter the least to enlightened Hindus aware of the greatness of their religion.
The author is a former diplomat, an author and a politician. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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