THE FIRST INDIAN NUKES
JACOBS, ALAN
THE FIRST INDIAN NUKES by Alan Jacobs India's nuclear-weapons testing may have surprised many Americans—especially the CIA and the Clinton administration—but for people who remember the early...
...Vajpayee has used just such language, contending that if India needs any sanction for its actions, "India has the sanction of her own past glory...
...Indeed, in some myths she is the consort of the great god Shiva, also known as the destroyer: the destroyer of worlds...
...No wonder, then, that there was ecstasy in the streets when Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee announced the underground explosions of very real nukes...
...But Oppenheimer and his many followers in the anti-nuke movement are not the only ones to have made the link between A-bombs and India: Many Indians do so, too...
...India is of course not the only country that engages in such figurative action...
...when the first mushroom cloud rose over the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, physicist Robert oppenheimer cited (or so he later claimed) a passage from the great sacred book of India, the Bhagavad-Gita: "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds...
...Vajpayee has further claimed that "the greatest meaning of the tests is they have given India shakti, they have given India strength, they have given India self-confidence...
...THE FIRST INDIAN NUKES by Alan Jacobs India's nuclear-weapons testing may have surprised many Americans—especially the CIA and the Clinton administration—but for people who remember the early history of the nuclear age there is a natural and immediate association of India with nuclear weapons...
...Pottery broke without cause...
...To understand that phrase, one must note particularly its tense: The wonder long since lost, through conquest by Muslims and Englishmen, is to be recovered by the detonation of nuclear weapons in the desert...
...Indeed, a quick search of the Web (on a good search engine "mahabharata + nuclear" will do) turns up many versions of this notion, some by Indians, some by Western aficionados of "Eastern wisdom...
...Stature, after all, is a symbolic commodity...
...And no wonder that most of the talk emerging from the government and from the editorialists in India's major newspapers has less to do with India's security than with the establishment of India's national stature on the world stage...
...The Mahabharata and the other great Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana, remain enormously popular in India—^both are retold again and again, as movie, as television show, as comic book, as radio serial—because they represent, as the title of one scholar's book has it, "the wonder that was India...
...When the novelist V. S. Naipaul made his first visit to India in 1964, he was surprised, amused, and annoyed to find claims being made in Indian periodicals such as: "The aeroplane was known to ancient India, and the telephone, and the atom bomb: there is evidence in the Indian epics...
...Hair and nails fell out...
...The Gita is merely the record of the advice given by Krishna (an avatar of the god Vishnu) to his friend Arjuna, a great warrior who dreads to fight, as he is about to do, against members of his own family...
...Foodstuffs were poisoned...
...It would be beside the point to note that the Mahabharata is not a historically reliable document and that the technological resources for making nuclear bombs were not available in 500 b.c...
...Shakti is an age-old Sanskrit word meaning "energy" or "power"—appropriately enough in this context, though again the energy referred to was originally spiritual—but Shakti is also personified as a goddess...
...In the great war that ensues, and in various battles described throughout the thousands of pages of the Mahabharata, many terrifying weapons are unleashed that, in the minds of some Indians, prefigure the modern age...
...The argument for ancient Indian nukes assumes that these objects could be made by spiritual means, that the ability simply to imagine "a gigantic messenger of death" is equivalent (perhaps even superior) to the ability to construct one from metal and plutonium...
...And there is little cause for believing that this will change any time soon...
...To escape, the warriors threw themselves in streams to wash themselves and their equipment...
...The Bhagavad-Gita, though it is known in the West (and even in India) as a freestanding book of spiritual wisdom, is in fact a small section of the enormous ancient Indian epic the Mahabharata...
...we are by now familiar enough with people around the world who think that burning an American flag constitutes victory over "American imperialism...
...It was the unknown weapon, the iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death which reduced to ashes the entire race of Vrishnis and Andhakas...
...Naipaul's hatred of his ancestral homeland (he was born and raised in Trinidad) was so visceral that he can't always be trusted...
...The corpses were so burnt they were no longer recognizable...
...In short, the ancient Indian nukes are symbolic nukes: They represent the distinctive spiritual power that India considers its birthright...
...But I have since come across elsewhere the insistence that Indians, millennia ago, possessed what we now call weapons of mass destruction...
...And India is not the only poor country to seek to boost its international reputation through the pursuit of some project that has either a negligible or a negative effect on the well-being of its people...
...An incandescent column of smoke and fire, as brilliant as ten thousand suns, rose in all its splendor...
...But Naipaul is probably right when he says that "symbolic action [is] the curse of India...
...WHEN THE NOVELIST V. S. NAIPAUL FIRST VISITED INDIA, HE WAS ANNOYED AT THE TALK OF ATOM BOMBS IN THE ANCIENT EPICS...
...Alan Jacobs is associate professor of English at Wheaton College...
...There are many other passages that "prove" the same point, though without such a close resemblance to the consequences of nuclear explosion and radioactive fallout...
...The favorite passage from the Mahabharata seems to be this: Gurkha, flying in his swift and powerful Vimana [the "aeroplane" Naipaul mentions], hurled against the three cities of the Vrishnis and Andhakas a single projectile charged with all the power of the universe...
Vol. 3 • June 1998 • No. 37
