Cillian Murphy Reads Bhagavad Gita During Intimate Scene In Nolan’s Oppenheimer

New Delhi: A portion from the Hindu sacred book Bhagavad Gita is featured in a scene in Christopher Nolan’s most recent film, ‘Oppenheimer’, starring Cillian Murphy.

The biopic by the Hollywood director premiered in big-screen cinemas worldwide. Even before the release, the film had drawn a lot of attention in India as well, particularly for bringing up the sacred text Bhagavad Gita.

Robert Oppenheimer, a physicist who is credited with creating the atomic bomb, is the focus of the movie. Oppenheimer was the head of Los Alamos Laboratory and a key player in the Manhattan Project, an initiative by the government to carry out research into the making of nuclear weapons.

Now, the scene that includes a verse from the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred text to Hindus, has infuriated many people and sparked protests.

The Central Board of Film Certification of India granted the movie a U/A rating after approving a sexual scene involving Robert Oppenheimer and Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock. In the movie, Pugh breaks off their sexual encounter in the middle of it, gets up, walks over to the bookshelf, chooses a copy of the ‘Bhagavad Gita’, and asks that Murphy read aloud from it.

The sequence didn’t sit well with viewers, who questioned the CBFC for allowing the release of this movie without removing a scene that would offend religious sentiments.

One of them was Uday Mahurkar, a journalist whom the Indian government nominated as an information commissioner in 2020. Mahurkar founded the Save Culture Save India Foundation as well, and on behalf of the organisation, he stated to Nolan on Twitter, “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.”

“We do not know the motivation and logic behind this unnecessary scene on 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,” it read.