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Christopher Nolan’s latest film about the “father of the atomic bomb”, J. Robert Oppenheimer, has created a controversy in India over the use of lines from the Bhagavad Gita during an intimate scene between the nuclear physicist and his girlfriend. The film, inspired by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s insightful biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, doesn’t quite follow the script on this incident. Oppenheimer’s girlfriend, Jean Tatlock, was dead when the first atomic bomb was tested in the New Mexico desert. Later, the physicist said that when the mushroom cloud was sighted after the flash from the bomb, these lines from The Gita came to mind: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” which Sanskrit scholars have said should read, “Time, I am the destroyer of all the worlds.” Oppenheimer had a felicity for languages, he learnt Sanskrit, loved to read The Gita and gifted copies to his friends. He had been deeply immersed in reading Hindu texts since he was in his twenties: “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.” Among his favourite lines were these: “Vanquish enemies at arms/Gain mastery of the sciences/And varied arts…/You may do all this, but karma’s force/Alone prevents what is not destined/And compels what is to be.” For a scientist who was celebrated for inventing the atomic bomb and then rejected for talking about the dangers a nuclear arms race would inevitably lead to, the lines from The Gita proved to be prophetic.
In reviews, we read an updated edition of Dennis Dalton’s Indian Ideas of Freedom, told through the words of seven thinkers; and a book on women scientists and their struggles in a male-dominated world. We also talk to K.R. Meera and Anjum Hasan about their new novels.
Books of the week
Dennis Dalton’s Indian Ideas of Freedom (HarperCollins) is an extended edition of a book he published in 1982 called Indian Idea of Freedom. In the introduction to this edition, Dalton writes that he picked the “group of seven” (from the original four) because they pondered deeply and published voluminously on universal concerns of political thought. The seven – Swami Vivekananda, Aurobindo Ghosh, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, M.N. Roy, B.R. Ambedkar and Jayaprakash Narayan – wrote about “human nature, pursuit of truth, how society could be constituted, democratic authority, ideas of freedom, equality and justice, and desirable methods of change.” They were not systematic philosophers, says Dalton, but they contributed to an intellectual tradition that invigorated an extraordinary nationalist movement and an unprecedented renaissance of political thought. In his review, Rajeev Kadambi says an important aspect of the book is its immersive quality. “The pages are testimony to a mind that sought ‘conceptual correspondences’. The author has been an advocate in the West, of Indian political and cultural ideas, and his deep admiration of it comes across in this work.” Central to Dalton’s claim, writes Kadambi, is that swaraj is a civilisational ethos of self-transformation, echoing Gandhi’s famous insight: “It is swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves.”
The authors lay bare several barriers to women’s entry into and persistence in the field of science. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/ iStock
In Lab Hopping (Viking), Aashima Dogra and Nandita Jayaraj delves into what it means to be a non-cis-male scientist, and the challenges of being a woman in science in India today. It is a painstaking effort to map the incursions of power gone unchecked despite claims that science is objective, says Vasudevan Mukunth in his review. “The book is heavy with the weight of history – women can make it to the higher levels today but once couldn’t, and even now, people, beliefs, systems, and attitudes are trying to stop them. They are discriminated against on the basis of their gender identity.” The authors lay bare several barriers to women’s entry into and persistence within science, from implicit sexism to a lack of role models, from horribly delayed grants to insensitive obligations and expectations, from lofty invocations of oppressive symbols and narratives to execrable preoccupations with caste.
The Many That I Am (Zubaan Books) is an anthology of writings from Nagaland edited by Anungla Zoe Longkumer. A researcher on folklore, who has also dipped into music, writing, and filmmaking, Longkumer gathered stories, poems, first-person narratives and visuals that reflect the diversity in women’s writing in Nagaland. Each piece in the collection speaks of the many journeys women have to undertake to understand the past and present. There are stories about tattoos, the arrival of Christian missionaries, conflict, tradition, modernity and so forth. “Our children will need these stories,” says, Longkumer, whose mother is the poet and celebrated writer Temsula Ao, adding, “It is worth preserving these memories for the future.”
Spotlight
For K.R. Meera, her new book, Assassin (Harper), published as Ghathakan in Malayalam and translated into English by J. Devika, was an attempt to document the times and lives of the women of her generation as personally witnessed by her. Though the characters and situations are fictional, she writes in her author’s note, the emotional core of the story remains true. The protagonist, Satyapriya, “has a lot of me in her, and her mother’s quirkiness is borrowed from my own.” She tells Swati Daftuar in an interview that the seed of her book was actually planted in 2017, after Gauri Lankesh’s murder – the book is dedicated to her. “One year later, I sat down to write, and it’s interesting that that day, I started three chapters of three different novels. All three were from my life, from varying time spans – like three kinds of flowers in the same garden. After a few days of toying with chapters, I centred on Assassin, and it started growing – sprouting leaves and tendrils.”
Listen to an extract here: K.R. Meera’s new novel ‘Assassin’
Anjum Hasan’s latest novel, History’s Angel (Bloomsbury), holds a mirror to the times, particularly a combative society increasingly being divided into “us” and “them”. Set in contemporary Delhi, she tells the story of Alif, a middle-aged history teacher who is at a loss to understand and explain what is going on around him when his community is seen as either victim or a threat. His family is aspirational; there’s chaos within and without, and his life soon spins out of his control. In a conversation with Ziya us Salam, Hasan says bringing Alif’s wavering consciousness to life was the project. Alif loves history and yet he feels a “tiredness about the way Muslim culture has become – that somewhat moth-eaten thing we project our liberal, syncretic yearnings on.”
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- Political writer Neerja Chowdhury analyses the operating styles of the country’s Prime Ministers in How Prime Ministers Decide (Aleph). She looks at their functioning through six instances: Indira Gandhi’s return to power in 1980; Rajiv Gandhi and the Shah Bano case; V. P. Singh’s implementation of the Mandal Commission Report; the Babri Masjid demolition under P. V. Narasimha Rao’s watch; Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his nuclear stance; and Manmohan Singh’s signing of a historic nuclear deal with the U.S.
- In Burning Pyres, Mass Graves (Speaking Tiger Books), Harsh Mander combines ground reports with data and first-hand knowledge to chronicle the government’s handling of the COVID-19 humanitarian crisis. While the first part describes how the pandemic pushed the poor to the brink of starvation, the second part records the horrors of the second bout when everything from hospital beds to oxygen and medicines fell short.
- Samrat Choudhury’s Northeast India: A Political History (Harper) chronicles the processes by which hill tribes of the Northeast and the diverse other people inhabiting the valley of the Brahmaputra became part of the “imagined notion” that is India. Several States border China and Southeast Asia and with the situation in Manipur spiralling, this is a timely read about the region.
- Shikha Malaviya pays tribute to India’s first woman doctor Anandibai Joshee (1865-1887) with a collection of poems, Anandibai Joshee: A Life in Poems (Harper). She had travelled across the forbidden seven seas to pursue an education in the U.S. In one poem, inspired by a letter Joshee wrote to Alfred Jones requesting admission in a medical college in Pennsylvania, she writes: “…this determination which brings me to your country against opposition/of my friends & caste, ought to go a long way.”
