India’s Hindu hardliners slam Oppenheimer sex scene featuring holy book: ‘it amounts to waging a war’

An official urged Christopher Nolan to cut the scene with the Bhagavad Gita, calling it an ‘assault on religious beliefs of a billion tolerant Hindus’

Religious intolerance and hardline rhetoric have been on the rise in India since Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist government came to power in 2014

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Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock (left) and Cillian Murphy as the titular Oppenheimer in the Christopher Nolan-directed film. Photo: via AP

Published: 3:00pm, 25 Jul 2023Updated: 4:26pm, 25 Jul 2023

As Hollywood blockbuster Oppenheimer plays to packed cinemas in India, some Hindu hardliners have taken offence that the faith’s holy scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, is featured in a sex scene.

They have called the scene “a scathing attack on Hinduism”, “disrespectful”, and “racist”, and demanded to know why India’s censor board allowed it through.

Religious intolerance and hardline rhetoric have been on the rise in India since the Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist government came to power in 2014.

A scene from Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer”. Despite the controversy, Indians have been flocking to see the film in IMAX where tickets cost as much as 2,500 rupees (US$30). Photo: Universal Pictures/TNS

“This is a direct assault on religious beliefs of a billion tolerant Hindus,” Uday Mahurkar, a senior official at the government’s Central Information Commission, wrote to the film’s director Christopher Nolan.

“It amounts to waging a war on the Hindu community,” Mahurkar said in the letter, a copy of which he posted on Twitter, urging Nolan to cut the scene.

Hashtags such as #BoycottOppenheimer and #RespectHinduCulture have trended on Twitter since the film’s release.

In what is thought to be the first-ever sex scene in Christopher Nolan’s body of work, Jean Tatlock – played by Florence Pugh – and Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) are in bed when suddenly she climbs off of him and walks over to a bookshelf to marvels at the many languages the ‘Father of the Atomic Bomb’ could comprehend.

She takes the Bhagavad Gita off the shelf, returns to Oppenheimer and asks him to read from the book.