Before Christopher Nolan made Oppenheimer, if there was one thing you knew about J. Robert Oppenheimer, it was probably that he was instrumental in developing the first atomic bomb. But if you knew two things about him, the second one was probably that he famously thought of the Hindu holy book Bhagavad Gita when the first bomb was detonated during the Trinity test, specifically the line “Now I become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Nolan’s movie does some legwork to explain why that specific quote pops into Oppenheimer’s head, and Variety has pointed out that some members of the Hindu community in India are upset about just how the quote is first introduced.
In what is most likely the very first instance of “sexposition” in a Nolan movie, Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer first says the line while having sex with Florence Pugh’s Jean Tatlock. While in bed, she abruptly gets up and goes to his bookshelf, grabbing a book written in a language she doesn’t recognize—presumably the Bhagavad Gita—and asks him to read it while they continue having sex (feeding into his ego and the god complex he has over how smart he is).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a vocal group on social media is not particularly thrilled about seeing someone read from a holy text during a sex scene, with Indian journalist (and founder of the Save Culture Save India Foundation) Uday Mahurkar calling it a “direct assault on religious beliefs of a billion tolerant Hindus” in an open letter addressed to Nolan. The post argues that Hollywood makes a point to be “very sensitive” about Islam and asks why “the same courtesy” can’t be extended to Hindus, and it says that if Nolan does not decide to remove the scene from the film, it will be taken as a “deliberate assault on Indian civilization.”