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denimbex1986 · 9 months

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'Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan's sweeping new biographical thriller about the "father of the atomic bomb", has opened to a glowing reception around the world. In India, it's been a hit too but some have protested against a scene depicting the scientist reading the Bhagavad Gita, one of Hinduism's holiest books, after sex. Oppenheimer learnt the ancient Sanskrit language and counted the book as one of his favourites.

In July 1945, two days before the explosion of the first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert, Robert Oppenheimer recited a stanza from the Bhagavad Gita, or The Lord's Song.

Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist, had been introduced to Sanskrit, the ancient Indian language, and subsequently the Gita, as a teacher in Berkeley years before. More than 2,000-year-old, Bhagavad Gita is part of the Mahabharata - one of Hinduism's greatest epics - and at 700 verses, the world's longest poem.

Now, hours before an event that would change history, the "father of the atomic bomb" relieved his tension by reciting a stanza he had translated from Sanskrit:

In battle, in forest, at the precipice of the mountains

On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,

In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,

The good deeds a man has done before defend him

As Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin write in their authoritative 2005 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, a young Oppenheimer was introduced to Sanskrit by Arthur W Ryder, a professor of Sanskrit at the University of California, Berkeley. The precocious physicist had arrived there as a 25-year-old assistant professor. Over the next few decades, he helped build one of the "greatest schools of theoretical physics" in the US.

Ryder, a Republican and a "sharp tongued iconoclast", was fascinated by Oppenheimer. For his part, Oppenheimer regarded Ryder as a "quintessential intellectual", a scholar who "felt and thought and talked as a stoic". The young scientist's textile importer father agreed, saying Ryder was a "remarkable combination of austereness through which peeps the gentlest soul".

Oppenheimer - played by actor Cillian Murphy in the biopic - also regarded Ryder as a rare person who had "a tragic sense of life, in that they attribute to human actions the completely decisive role in the difference between salvation and damnation".

Soon, Ryder was giving Oppenheimer private lessons in Sanskrit on Thursday evenings. "I am learning Sanskrit," the scientist wrote to his brother Frank, "enjoying it very much and enjoying again the sweet luxury of being taught".

Many of his friends found his new obsession with an Indian language odd, Oppenheimer's biographers noted. One of them, Harold F Cherniss, who introduced the scientist to the scholar, thought it made "perfect sense" because Oppenheimer had a "taste of the mystical and the cryptic".

So Oppenheimer's knowledge of Sanskrit and the Gita is clearly germane to telling his story. But some right wing Hindus have complained - particularly about the sex scene with lover Jean Tatlock, played by Florence Pugh - saying the film is an attack on their religion and demanding cuts.

But India's film censors found no problem with it and at the box office it's the Hollywood hit of the year in India, faring better than Barbie since the two blockbusters opened on Friday.

There's no doubt Oppenheimer was a widely well-read man - he took courses in philosophy, French literature, English, history, and briefly considered studying architecture, and even becoming a classicist, poet or painter. He wrote poems on "themes of sadness and loneliness", and identified with TS Eliot's "sparse existentialism" in The Waste Land.

"He liked things that were difficult. And since almost everything was easy for him, the things that really would attract his attention were essentially the difficult," Cherniss said.

With his facility for languages - Oppenheimer had studied Greek, Latin, French and German and learned Dutch in six weeks - it "wasn't really long before" he was reading the Bhagavad Gita. He found it "very easy and quite marvellous" and told friends that it was the "most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue". In his bookshelf was a pink-covered copy of the book that Ryder had gifted him; and Oppenheimer himself gifted copies to his friends.

The biographers write that the scientist was so "enraptured by his Sanskrit studies" that in 1933 when his father brought him a Chrysler, he named it Garuda, after the giant bird God in Hindu mythology.

In spring of that year, Oppenheimer had written a rather florid letter to his brother explaining why discipline and work had always been his guiding principles. It pointed to the fact that he was enthralled by eastern philosophy.

He wrote: "through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity, and a certain small but precious measure of freedom from the accidents of incarnation… and that detachment which preserves the world it renounces". Only through discipline, he added, is it possible to "see the world without the gross distraction of personal desire, and in seeing so, accept more easily our earthly privation and its earthly horror".

"In the late twenties, Oppenheimer seemed to be searching for an earthly detachment; he wished, in other words to be engaged as a scientist with the physical world, and yet detached from it," his biographers write.

"He was not seeking to escape to a purely spiritual realm. He was not seeking religion. What he sought was peace of mind. The Gita seemed to provide precisely the right philosophy for an intellectual keenly attuned to the affairs of men and the pleasures of the senses."

One of his favourite Sanskrit texts was the Meghaduta, a lyric poem written by Kalidasa, one of the greatest poets in the language. "The Meghaduta I read with Ryder, with delight, some ease and great enchantment," he wrote to his brother, Frank.

Why did Oppenheimer turn to Gita and its notions of karma, destiny and earthly duty so fervently? His biographers hazard a guess: "Perhaps the attraction Robert felt to the fatalism of the Gita was at least stimulated by a late blooming rebellion against what he had been taught as a youth", alluding to his early association with the Ethical Culture Society, an "uniquely American offshoot of Judaism that celebrated rationalism and a progressive brand of secular humanism".

To be sure, Oppenheimer was not alone in admiring the Hindu text. Henry David Thoreau wrote about immersing himself in the "stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial". Heinrich Himmler was an admirer. Mahatma Gandhi was an ardent follower. And WB Yeats and TS Eliot, two poets Oppenheimer admired, had read the Mahabharata.

The sight of the giant orange mushroom cloud rising in the skies after the first atomic bomb test had led Oppenheimer to return to the Gita again. The bombs that were eventually dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II had killed tens of thousands of people.

"We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent," he told NBC in a 1965 documentary.

"I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu [a principal Hindu deity] is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now I have become death, the destroyer of the worlds'. I suppose we all thought that, one way or another."

A friend of the scientist said the quote sounded like one of Oppenheimer's "priestly exaggerations".

Yet, the enigmatic scientist remained profoundly influenced by it.

When the editors of The Christian Century asked the scientist once to share the books that most profoundly influenced his philosophical outlook, Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal held the top spot. And the Bhagavad Gita took the second position.'

#Oppenheimer #Cillian Murphy #Bhagavad Gita #Christopher Nolan #American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer #Kai Bird #Martin J. Sherwin #The Christian Century #Baudelaire #Les Fleus du Mal #Arthur W Ryder #Harold F. Cherniss #Jean Tatlock #Florence Pugh #T.S Eliot #The Waste Land #Frank Oppenheimer #WB Yeats

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isabeldrakeblog · 7 years

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Reflection on India

Three weeks after arriving back home, I have finally had the time to think and reflect on my time in India. I’ve been to India before, very briefly, and so didn’t really get to experience the place as a whole but there was definitely something pulling me back there. Me and Tom wanted to do one big travelling jaunt before getting on with our lives and being sucked into constant commitments and to-do lists. The obvious thing to do these days is South East Asia but we both agreed on India. When people asked us why, we wouldn’t really know what to say except that it was something different. I have been very lucky in my life to have lived in Asia for 3 years and had the opportunity to visit many countries but there was something about India. Although I knew I hadn’t fully experienced it there was something about the place that was unlike anywhere else I had been.

Having travelled around India for a month, I have now got to grips with why this place is so fascinating and beautiful.

The people are the key aspect of India which makes it stand out. They are the most helpful, friendly and non-judgemental people I have ever met. You will have a five-minute conversation with an Indian and 9 times out of 10 they will invite you to stay at their house. To a westerner’s ears this may sound very odd, even threatening to some but it is absolutely the norm in India to welcome anyone and everyone into their home.

Sharing is also a big part of their culture, this is very much seen through their cuisine. On menus, they have lots of small dishes with rice and chapatti as an add-on, encouraging you to pick lots of things and share it amongst friends. We went clubbing with some very westernised Indians but even they kept this tradition of sharing.

Indians also love to talk about themselves and their background which is fascinating but they are also so curious and ask many many questions. Not in an aggressive way but purely out of fascination and curiosity of life. The questions they ask are very different to ours, instead of asking what we do as a job they want to know about you as a person. They don’t judge in the same way as we do, maybe they find things odd or amusing but it is never in a cruel or hurtful way.

They love their country but not in a nationalistic way more in the sense that they appreciate how special it is and want visitors to see it’s full potential. One of the first questions we were always asked was do you like it here? They want everyone who comes here to love it as much as they do. They want to have the best possible reputation around the world so that more people come and visit.

I think there are two big reasons why so many Indians have these good qualities. The first reason is that it would be almost impossible to not to behave this way because there are so many inevitable situations in India that you are thrust together with people whether at a train station or a bus or merely walking down the street. The country has not caught up with the amount of people that currently live in it. Although this obviously brings many infrastructural issues with it you wouldn’t be forced to get along and talk to people in the same way. There’s a huge DIY culture in India due to the lack of government input so people just get on with changing things themselves. There’s a lot of grassroots movements due to this reason and this has also created a real sense of community almost anywhere you go in the country. So many people warned us of the lack of safety in India, especially for women, but there was never a moment in India that I didn’t feel safe and I think it is because of this huge sense of welcoming and community, wherever you go.

The second big reason is another key aspect that makes India so special. It is the religion that is such a huge part of Indian culture you cannot escape it. Although there are many other religions present in the country, the most prominent is Hinduism. Hinduism is rarely talked about in the western world yet it is so fascinating. We learnt a lot about this religion whilst staying in an Ashram and after this we realised quite how deeply rooted it is in the culture.

Firstly, I didn’t realise how much Yoga is intertwined with the religion. It always seems to be linked with Buddhism in the western world. According to legend, it was actually the Hindu Deity Lord Shiva who invented yoga. The Hindu view of yoga is much more complex than I first thought and has lots of different aspects to it that go beyond just stretching your body a bit.

Some people may mock the religion for its ridiculous fantasy deities and gods but in fact it isn’t that they believe all of this nonsense whole heartedly. They are merely there as reminders of the important things in life and, like celebrities, if they weren’t glamorous or fantastical in anyway they wouldn’t get anyone’s attention. Although India in general, especially in the cities, is mad, the people have a kind of calm and serenity to them. During our time at the ashram we were told to do all sorts of things that we might have deemed silly or unnecessary in the western world like mantra chanting, laughter yoga and meditation but they actually really did us some good and got us out of our mind and into our other senses, forcing us to live more in the moment and, therefore, becoming calmer. Due to a higher force telling them to do so, I think many Indians do these things everyday from a young age hence their perceived serenity.

Of course there are some things that are questionable about this religion like the caste system and arranged marriages that are linked to the religion. However, I think there is a lot that our culture could take from Hinduism and is definitely a big reason why the people are the way they are in India. In fact, I think there is much we can take about both these aspects of India. I was sat next to a girl on a bus to Rishikesh and she laughed and said that before she got to know any westerners she believed that we ‘didn’t have feelings’ because we seem so closed off. I was amused but also shocked and a bit sad to hear this. I think it really sums up how different India is to the UK, in particular. Yes, our cities and government may be more efficient but in recent decades we have lost that sense of community that is so present in India. I think we are also starting to loose that similar pride in our country that they have, which is to be replaced by a bigoted and racist version that is so closed off and narrow minded. I think we should try as a country to take on board these aspects of India and its people, it may just solve some of the major issues of our current society.

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