In an open letter, Uday Mahurkar, an information commissioner, said the scene was “a direct assault on religious beliefs of a billion tolerant Hindus”. The presence of the Bhagavad Gita in the middle of the sex scene prompted a member of India’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) government to call the film an “attack on Hinduism”. Oppenheimer taught himself Sanskrit and during his life, he spoke of drawing from the Hindu text.
The words he reads aloud, which he translates from Sanskrit, are those of the god Krishna – “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” – a quote the real Oppenheimer recalled after the first detonation of the atomic bomb he had invented.
