Atomic Schizophrenia: Indian Reception of the Atom ...

$WRPLF6FKL]RSKUHQLD,QGLDQ5HFHSWLRQRIWKH$WRP %RPE$WWDFNVLQ-DSDQ Raminder Kaur

Cultural Critique, Number 84, Spring 2013, pp. 70-100 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\8QLYHUVLW\RI0LQQHVRWD3UHVV DOI: 10.1353/cul.2013.0016

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cul/summary/v084/84.kaur.html

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ATOMIC SCHIZOPHRENIA INDIAN RECEPTION OF THE ATOM BOMB ATTACKS IN JAPAN, 1945 Raminder Kaur

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he tale of Hiroshima is an unpleasant event. Hiroshima depicts the reality of man’s selWshness, of the transitory short-lived nature of this world, and of the ill-effects of an undesirable use of human knowledge in the modern era.” So began a letter by V. R. Karlekar dated May 12, 1946, and reproduced in the Marathi periodical Chitramai Jagat. Karlekar was an air force serviceman, originally from the Indian port city of Bombay.1 The letter was one of four he sent reXecting on his recent visit to Hiroshima while he was stationed in Japan.2 Hiroshima had been almost entirely razed on August 6, 1945, and along with it, tens of thousands of people were carbonized on impact, their shadows etched on the grounds. As news of the Wgures leaked out through print and radio, inXated Wgures such as 480,000 dead and rising in Hiroshima and Nagasaki became commonplace (“Atom Bomb Leaves”).3 Unlike earlier World War II bomb attacks that carpeted Tokyo and Dresden, for instance, the death toll from one bomb was hard to fathom— a toll that vacillated alongside leaked reports, rumors, and the effort to comprehend the effects of singular bombs dropped in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although Karlekar does not go as far as to condemn the perpetrators of the devastation, it is implicit in his lament to the inhumane use of technology when reconciling himself with scenes of desolation in Hiroshima. Such brief glimpses of the impact that the atomic attacks had among Indians in the mid-1940s afford a unique intervention in the debate that has hitherto been dominated by commentaries from the United States, Europe, and Japan. As is memorably cited, J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientiWc director of the Manhattan Project, resorted to the power of parable by invoking verses from the Bhagvad Gita to describe the atomic tests in July 1945 in terms of it emanating “the Cultural Critique 84—Spring 2013—Copyright 2013 Regents of the University of Minnesota

ATOMIC SCHIZOPHRENIA

radiance of a thousand suns” and Krishna’s speech to the Pandava prince Arjuna, where he reveals the phenomenal powers of his divinity: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” ReXecting on the atomic scene before the scientists at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer added, “I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”4 The verses reXected the moral dilemmas of Arjuna, who could not bring himself to kill his own kin, friends, and teachers on the rival side of the Kauravas in the battle from a longer epic, the Mahabharata. On seeing his consort and guide, Krishna, reveal his sublime form, Arjuna is simultaneously terriWed, elated, and humbled. Krishna reminded Arjuna of his dharma—that he was a warrior, a Kshatriya, and had a duty to act accordingly in the battle. Under duress, as James A. Hijiya elaborates, Oppenheimer used “philosophy as an anodyne for the pangs of conscience” (125), having been involved in the development of a devastating bomb with an enemy in mind during war. The question pursued here is how did those positioned in the Indian subcontinent invoke this text among others as they reXected on the boundless powers of atomic science when it made its public debut in the theater of World War II a month later on the sites of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? How did they reconcile their intrigue for the technology with the horror of its capabilities? In this article, I consider the available evidence as to how the atomic bomb was received in the subcontinent from August 1945.5 I Wrst provide a reappraisal of theories of the sublime in terms of atomic schizophrenia, before demonstrating its multiple affective nuances with examples from the years after news of the atom bomb exploded onto people’s consciousness.

FROM THE SUBLIME TO THE SCHIZOPHRENIC Shortly after the atomic attack in Hiroshima, an editorial in the nationalist Bombay Chronicle asked: What of the future which that bomb has blasted open? It is a discovery or conquest that has two opposite potentialities. It may bring about the end of the species and this earth; it may also mark the beginning of a new world of human progress, prosperity and happiness . . . the next major war, can lay in ruins countries and continents in a matter of hours by, so to speak, the manipulation of a few switchboards. The outlook is—the end of the world. . . . That the harnessing of the atom can prove

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an incalculable blessing to mankind is not easy to see, though it is impossible to determine the limits of its beneWts. They are, indeed, unlimited. . . . What electricity has achieved for, and given to mankind pales into insigniWcance compared with what the atomic energy promises. It can help Man to realise heaven on earth. But also hell on earth. The awful question is whether mankind is ready for this epochal discovery or whether it has arrived too soon, too fatally soon. (“Epochal”)

Temporality both imploded and expanded at a phenomenal pace— destructive time heralded by the atom bomb is compressed to the “manipulation of a few switchboards,” whereas its constructive possibilities could trigger an expansive sea change in how people viewed and lived their lives. There was a staggering shock—surprise reaction to the power of the atom bomb—a sense of the sublime in being both beguiling and horrifying. The effects of the “boundlessness” of the atomic bomb have been described by Rob Wilson and Joseph Masco as an instance of the “nuclear sublime.” Both accounts implicate a thrill/ terror dyad based on Immanuel Kant’s observations of awe and fear at a mammoth object, process, or prospect. Whereas Wilson applies it to the reception of the bomb as conveyed through a range of cultural commentaries in the United States, Masco relates it to the “unthinkable” of “nuclear terror” or war, which in the context of its management by the military and weapons scientists is routinized, and inevitably becomes an expression of an “aesthetic-intellectual form” (23). To return to the source of propositions about the “nuclear sublime,” in his Critique of Judgment, Kant elaborates upon the singular yet universally valid experience of the beautiful and the sublime. Whereas with the beautiful, pleasure is found in an object with deWnite boundaries, with the sublime, satisfaction is “found in a formless object, so far as in it or by occasions of it, boundlessness is represented, and yet its totality is also present to thought” (Kant, 44). A confrontation with an incredible sight leads to a sense of disorientation, anxiety, and inferiority that is inexpressible through language but which the human intellect tries to name anyway in an effort to contain the inWnite. Albeit a human-made entity, the atomic blast is also something formless in its shape as a boundless “mushroom cloud,” seeming to be organic and ever growing, a phenomenon the mind tries to comprehend while it struggles with the experience. It could be described as an encounter with the technological sublime representing the human conquest of


nature but in such a way as it threatens its own existence (see Nye).6 In many senses, the sublime is a “negative pleasure” bound up with a certain pain “produced by the momentary checking of the vital powers and a consequent stronger outXow of them” that overpowers the senses (Kant, 62).7 Kant takes Edmund Burke’s more empiricopsychological proposal for the sublime as a “negative pleasure” to a more transcendent level. Describing the sublime as a “subjective universal,” Kant elaborates on how it is subjectively felt but accords a universality to it by way of Reason and Ideas ultimately coordinated by what he calls culture and common sense (50). Although compelling, there are several shortcomings in a theory of the nuclear sublime conceived on Kantian premises. Seeing or the experience of the sublime is assumed as a transparent process of cognition and perception of the world-as-representation (see Rorty).8 This becomes the basis for a purported universalism and its reXection and management through language and culture in Kant’s dependence on metanarratives regarding subjectivity, reason, and progress. Implied is a process of individuation, often in solitude, where the unitary mind comes to terms with what a person has seen and experienced. Moreover, if we were to take the enquiry further, the dialectics of thrill and terror, seduction and fear, that characterize the sublime do not adequately account for the available narratives of encounter with, and comprehension of, the nuclear topic. It is for such reasons that I develop here a paradigm for “atomic schizophrenia” by integrating transposed theories of the “sublime” with those on “schizophrenia” to describe the breakdown of language and a rupture of temporality (which is itself uniWed through language) due to the introduction of a phenomenal technology that then leads to a recuperative attempt through language. While this effort seems to parallel Kant’s description of the intellectual capacity to manage the sublime, it is a process conWgured by Wssures and multiplicities. Atomic schizophrenia encapsulates some of the dynamic binaries to do with the sublime but also intercepts and ruptures them to encompass a prismatic range of experiences and expressions. This is not to invoke a Freudian interpretation of schizophrenia in the pathological sense.9 Rather, my use of the term “atomic schizophrenia” is threefold. On one level, I return to the etymology of the term to refer simply to a “split in the mind”—speciWcally to describe how constructive

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and destructive possibilities of the new atomic power saturated people’s minds. On another level, atomic schizophrenia also draws on the poststructuralist sense of the term as proposed by Jacques Lacan, whereby the schizophrenic condition constitutes a breakdown of temporality and language. Thus, the schizophrenic is unable to enter the symbolic and escapes attempts to reappropriate it through a navigation of culture. In this sense, the effects of the sublime are another manifestation of schizophrenia, which then leads to attempts at recuperation in another order, but, signiWcantly, these attempts can never be fully realized. The effect is rather like a hole that is created by the signiWer of the atom bomb into which signiWcations pour, only to disappear. With this dynamic understanding, the sublime resists rationalization (see also Lyotard). Following the aforementioned observation, reXections on the atom bomb did not just indicate the articulation of opposite potentialities alone or indeed a past or future that seemed to represent a coherent vision. They departed from preoccupations between the material object and representation, which are characteristics of representational philosophy. Instead, there was also a peculiar mix of unresolved emotions, such as simultaneous experiences of humility and pride, or a volatile concoction of horror, delight, and irony that characterized the various opinions and public outlets after the atom bomb was dropped. A striking consequence of this schizoid territory was gallows humor that accompanied atomic themes, combining the comic and the tragic, and the development of satire that entailed emotional distance. Here, in repudiation of Kantian proposals, there is a refusal to suffer even in the face of impending doom, death, or the sublime, and instead the impulse is not to rationalize the perverse pleasures of the sublime (see Caygill, 344–45) but to revel in the provocative delights of rebellious posturing. It could lead to a simultaneous release of laughter and a sense of discomfort for touching on raw nerves. For instance, the reception of the Trinity test among the Manhattan Project scientists has led to theorizations of the nuclear sublime in terms of wonder and terror and their subsequent rationalization, as Masco elaborates. But responses such as those made by the test director, Kenneth Bainbridge, to Oppenheimer escape such analyses: “Now we are all sons of bitches.”10 Not only a dramatic expletive, but the statement also points to a “bitch” that men like Bainbridge helped create that is now


domineering them as errant sons, an absurdity that places production before the anteriority of (procreative) reproduction. In this light, it is reductive to compress the multifarious range of narratives on the boundlessness of atomic science to a Janus of the nuclear sublime as with Kantian derivations. It also bears revising Lacanian approaches in order to appreciate multistranded dynamics where the dualistic scripts of pleasure and pain, humility and pride, utopia and dystopia split, redouble, merge, and proliferate in unfathomable directions. Lacan had asserted that the subject of psychoanalysis remains “the Cartesian one” precisely as it is not “the living substratum . . . nor any sort of substance” (126). On this basis, Alan Badiou rightly critiques Cartesian assumptions that lurk in Lacan’s works: “What still links Lacan . . . to the Cartesian epoch of science is the thought that it is necessary to hold the subject in the pure void of its abstraction if one wishes that truth be saved” (15). Clearly, such subjectivities have a Eurocentric bias. Instead of simplifying a complex through reductionism, a case of modifying one or the other branches of the dualisms, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari propose radical multiplicities as they depart from Cartesian binaries. Deleuze speaks of a non-Platonic “wild discourse” (Deleuze 1990, 2) characterized by a “condensation of coexistances and a simultaneity of events” (262) with “nomadic distributions and crowned anarchies” (263). Félix Guattari’s proposal of schizoanalysis describes the development of new and heterogeneous ontological mutations, or “a multiplicity of components of Expression” accompanied by partial and transitory subjectivities (23). It is in the spawning of heterogeneous meanings around the atom bomb, some of which are dualistic and some of which pierce the binarism in unpredictable ways that do not presuppose a knowing subject, that I invoke the idea of atomic schizophrenia resulting in new spaces in Wctional and imaginative realms about the past, present, and future. Irreverence in particular punctures the radiant light of the sublime while opening up schizophrenic vistas for other possibilities of engagement, both actual and imaginary. If the atom bomb represents untold terrors or unlimited opportunities as an instance of the sublime, atomic schizophrenia undermines the transcendence of the sublime as well as draws in a skein that does not represent anything at all. If the sublime is about an attempt to engage either with the “real” or with

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a Platonic copy of the “real” embodying some kind of presence, the schizophrenic also incorporates the simulacrous-phantasmic, the bad copy of the “real” (Deleuze 1990, 294). On one level, atomic schizophrenia undermines the stolidity of the Kantian sublime: the dualistic scripts of terror and awe may well continue to fester, but its fulWllment remains unattainable or misrecognized as Lacan would have it. On another level, atomic schizophrenia exposes the lie of the copy posing as the real, and the futility of attempts to represent and rationalize a formidable science. In his later reading of the Kantian sublime, Deleuze describes the edge of imagination as the “emancipation of dissonance” that deWes posterior harmony (see Deleuze 1984). In this venture, unruly narratives ensue. In sum, atomic schizophrenia provides a Mobius- or concertina-like frame that stands erect, leans sideways, is compressed and inverted, then falls Xat as a pile of signs on the Xoor alluding to some erstwhile skeletal frame but now a withering heap exuding phantasmic associations. It is from this latter perspective that previous posturing and representations of the sublime become exposed as an incoherent artiWce. The proposal is not just about a journey from the sublime to the ridiculous, but where the “ridiculous” is also incorporated as part of the framework, thereby exposing the limits of transcendent logics to do with the Kantian sublime. The phenomenon of atomic schizophrenia has a wider career than India as the locus of difference, even though it is its particular reception in the subcontinent that remains the focus in this article. Kantian transcendental individualism is premised upon a notion of the modern citizen-subject that in the Indian case was at a dynamic point of emergence in 1945. The “training of Indian subjecthood” required an interplay of modern sensibilities regarding science with the fragments of a more spiritual adherence to indigenous traditions (see Prakash 1999; 2010), such that observations that teetered on the more earthly sublime more often than not interacted with awe for the divine. The particularities of the atomic schizophrenic phenomena explored below touch on Wssured discourses about the devotional sublime, ethics, nationalism(s), and postcolonial modernity. By devotional sublime, I allude to Vijay Mishra’s analyses of Indian devotional verse that is predicated upon the inexpressible divinity of brahman, the object of an impossible desire (199).11 Although Mishra does not mention Indian


aesthetic theologians, the devotional sublime is akin to an aestheticized emotion, or rasa (literally juice, taste or Xavor), in this case not unlike vismaya, or wonder and astonishment (see Muni, Acarya, and Nagar). SigniWcantly, as with Arjuna’s encounter with the cosmic divinity of Krishna, the experience is in the spirit of humility, rather than in tandem with an aspiration to rationalize or master the awesome experience. In addition, while there are plentiful analyses of the absurd in Western literature, extending also to Russian examples (see Cornwell), there is little available for South Asian contexts. Before the atomic absurd in the Indian subcontinent can be explored, it is imperative to get a sense of what kind of logics, however incomplete, it is counterposed against. My main archive of material is Marathi and English print media available in 1940s Bombay, which at best can only represent the mediation of atomic power among a slice of the cosmopolitan constituencies of the city. I draw three series of conjunctions out of the morass of atomic schizophrenia: one that rests on an attempt to come to grip with the immensity of the atom bomb using indigenous texts to explore the threshold of atomic science; a second that imagines future worlds of enchanted possibilities that teeter on the edges of the absurd; and a third that Xattens these fantasies altogether as a nonsense, as narratives meander through a mire of satire where political and ethical caution about the atom bomb is wittingly thrown to the wind and laws of causality and temporality become distant murmurs.

ATOMIC HULLABALOO When news of the atom bomb reached Bombay’s residents, incomprehension set in, followed by a search for explanatory frameworks. Dr. V. K. Kirloskar, the editor of the eponymous periodical Kirloskar, observed: As soon as the Wrst atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August, 1945, human beings all over the world—from scientists to farmers, from the rich to the poor felt intimidated by the tremendous destructive potential of this deadly weapon. The thought that this power can perhaps wipe out the entire human race began tormenting one and all. This calls for an immediate resolution of the question close to everyone’s heart.

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Why is there such a hullabaloo over the atomic bombing? What is the peculiarity of the atom bomb? Is there a permanent threat to world peace here onwards? (365)

Kirloskar attempts to answer his own questions by drawing upon familiar religious stories reformulated to make parallels with the splitting of the atom: It was sunrise when Hanuman, the messenger of Lord Ram, was born. The rising sun seemed like a ripe fruit to baby Maruti [Hanuman]. He instantly leapt up to the sky to grab it but was unable to bring the brilliant sun down to the earth. This is a wondrous and surprising tale from the purana. The author of the present text does not wish to comment on the poetic imagination. Nevertheless, it is astonishing that the feat which could not be attained by the powerful Maruti was successfully achieved by modern day scientists. . . . This feat symbolizes the unprecedented divine illumination bestowed on scientists by the worship of the sun. Through their supreme efforts they have exposed the secrets which lay in the sun’s belly. They have traced the precise source of the everlasting and imperishable energy that is generated by the sun and similar inWnite galaxies. (365)

While Kirloskar struggled with the implications of the atom bomb, he then sought to relate atomic science to the tale of Hanuman. The technological sublime at the limits of thought is conjoined with religious allegory in an effort to make it comprehensible. This simian deity who is also a devotee of Ram (conceived of as prince and god) represents the imagined rungs to the absolute. The brilliant sun stands in for the ineffable, the Thing that prevents the subject—in this case, Hanuman a messenger and devotee of god—from achieving its ontological unity as the ineffable divine. By extension, this allegory of incomprehension (the ripe fruit) and inability (to pick the fruit) also stands in for the author’s own limits to understanding and articulating the depths of atomic science. A residual antagonism between the sacred and the profane is also evident. Whereas Hanuman found it difWcult to catch the sun, Kirloskar declared that recent developments demonstrated a fait accompli by nuclear scientists who had split the atom to release incredible amounts of energy. Scientists seem to be bestowed by “divine illumination” and appear to represent a master discourse that eclipses the authority of parable. There is a recognized Wssure—that perhaps the parable is after all of a different conceptual order, and the author


leaves several questions open about the incompatibility of the “poetic imagination” and atomic science. The example invokes Lyotardian reservations about the Kantian notion of the sublime in which the experience of the sublime is one of the mind straining at the edges of itself and of conceptualization. This intellectual challenge leads to incompatible “phrase regimens” or differends, where there is no metanarrative with which to legitimate the experience, one phrase regimen does not readily translate into the other, and heterogeneity results (Lyotard, xii). There is a crisis of thought as objects refuse neat categorization and conceptualization. Lurking around this text are various unknowns: this is both in terms of the unrepresentable in terms of the “truth” of the divine and atomic science, and an indeterminable silence conjured up by the suffering and devastation that Hiroshima signiWes. Some things remain that are yet to be determined. Other narratives not only sought to recall Indian scriptures as a possible comparable repository of higher truths, but also that the texts could be seen to anticipate the advent of the atomic age. An unnamed writer for Navakal newspaper highlighted a verse from the Wfteenth chapter of the Marathi critique of the Bhagvad Gita, Dnyaneshwari. The invocation of this text written by Dnyaneshwar, a thirteenth century saint, became a means by which to interrogate the entire premises of atomic science: The Supreme Lord says, I created this Earth by means of this energy [ojas]. In order to elaborate on this thought, Dnyaneshwar says, if this earth is an object, what is it that prevents its particles from being diffused and scattered, be it in a liquid or gaseous state? Who is it that holds together the earth, the stones, the mountains, the trees, the body, and everything else in the world? The Supreme Lord binds these together through the brilliant energy, which is why the earth does not disintegrate. Are this energy and the energy concentrated at the core of the atom found by the American scientists, one and the same? (“Investigation”)

In a vein parallel to Kirloskar, this writer looked to Dnyaneshwar’s commentary on the Bhagvad Gita to highlight similarities with the fundamental energies of the universe and atomic science. Truth is believed to lie in the devotional sublime, the “Supreme Lord,” counterposed with that represented by the nucleus of the atom where potentially uncontrollable amounts of energy reside. The saint Dnyaneshwar alludes to the ineffable by posing questions about the divine energy

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that binds the world together. The author picks up this point and asks whether this is of the same character as what had recently been released with the atom bomb. Could something that was within humanity’s reach reveal the secrets of the universe? Again, with the premises of a divine text, the narrative demonstrates a desire for closure yet the realization of insurmountable limits, not only in terms of understanding the potentials of atomic science, but also in terms of representing the divine force that lies behind forms on earth, and thus a questionable disjunction in parabolic similarities. Whereas these authors only raised questions as to whether a religious narrative may be in the same register as contemporaneous science, indicating a recognition of an insoluble differend, another unnamed writer drew upon a religious treatise to understand the new science with resolute conviction, the net effect being that indigenous philosophy had already presaged this science which others were celebrating as the forte of the West: The creator or controller of the world is the same as the almighty. The tiniest bit of the atom is as powerful, as great as the primordial universal principle which pervades the inWnite universe. The philosophy of our ancient sages is: “I am tinier than the minutest particle of the atom. Likewise, I am also the universe which dazzles with the spark of a million suns.” The same philosophy is expounded by Sant Tukaram: “I am as minute as the atom, as enormous as the sky.” The power of the atom has been brought to light by physicists. There is a semblance between this power and the philosophy which demonstrates that the primordial universal force and its tiniest particle are indistinguishable. These similarities must be pondered over. (“Science”)

This time the writer turns to the philosophy of the later Maharashtrian saint Tukaram, again to muse on the fundamental energy of the universe that scientists were believed to have recently unlocked. The movement of atomic energy from the minuscule nucleus to the boundless chain reactions seems to be captured in indigenous philosophy. While parallels between the divine and atomic feats are noted, there is a transcendence attributed to the devotional sublime in terms of “the almighty.” In other words, what atomic science seems to parallel and reveal in indigenous texts proves itself to be inaccessible and unknowable. The parallels defy total resolution or management, for the similarities are only to be “pondered over,” as there is a recognition, Wrst,


of the limits of language to capture and explain phenomena, and second, that while provoking comparison, a fundamental incongruity between the powers of the divine and that of science (the atom) remain. With narratives such as this, writers could at once revel in the intrigues of atomic science, subscribe to an alternative modernity, while alluding to religious texts that seemed to precede atomic science in a manner that makes indigenous philosophies relevant to the contemporary world. As Slavoj Žižek elaborates, it is another instance of “an impossible gaze,” which “involves a kind of time paradox,” “a travel into the past,” enabling the subject to be present before its beginning (367, 382). The “time travel” of such differends to do with science and the religious parable slipped India into the folds of global history: by doing so, it served a range of purposes, including that of orientation in an uncertain world, legitimacy, and cultural pride, and it provided an ethical matrix with which to castigate the West for using atomic science for destructive ends, examples of which follow. One writer made analogies of atomic science with the gods themselves, namely, Brahma (“the Creator God”) and Rudra (“the God of Destruction,” the Rigvedic synonym for Shiva): It is remarkable how our Hindu conceptions of Brahma and Rudra are being materialized in the processes of polymerisation and of atomic Wssion. The door of science has, so to say, usurped the function of the gods. . . . Science now makes molecules unknown to nature and breaks up the unbreakable atom. . . . In every atom of matter hides Rudra, the god of destruction, and so when the atom is split, out comes the primordial energy released from the hold of the static. What we seek to do is to domesticate for man’s purposes this power born of the splitting of the atom. We seek to make Siva work for us tirelessly under discipline. We may succeed if indeed that is Siva’s pleasure. (“Scientists”)

There is a domestication of the sublime inherent in this text, in that atomic matter is already familiar with allusions to the materialization of the tension between Brahma and Rudra, creation and destruction. The writer suggests that by paralleling atomic science with the divine, the amorality of science could be channeled into an ethical enterprise. The attempt at domesticating atomic science leads to its selective integration into narratives of an emergent Indian nation. The exercise invests meaning into something that is unclear and in the process becomes an act of self-deWnition, and by extension Indian civilization.

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“Our” Hindu conceptions are directly compared with later developments in atomic science. The attempt at symbolic reappropriation through cultural repertoires momentarily deWned the positionality of the person, or in other words, the self as against the other. Even though the modern scientist seemed to have demonstrated the potential omnipotence of humanity, divine will continued to be held as the superior force. Scientists may have succeeded in developing atomic science into a bomb, but it is implied that this is an egoistic and fruitless endeavor without the sanction of the divine. Modern science was given a metaphysical twist, in which select ancient texts were expounded at length to highlight some of its antecedents, and science’s future direction was ultimately dictated by divine will. Both tradition and modernity relevant to an ethically based but forward-looking India were reframed. In the remembering, there is a dismembering: ancient texts were excavated and reformulated for contemporary validity, while modern science was given a metaphysical twist. It was also asserted that some aspects of science and technology, however powerful, should not be embraced at all. Writer and freedom Wghter Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari declared with proud conviction: “Humanity will survive the atomic bomb just as it survived the steam engine and the invention of gun-powder and the riXe. . . . Such conceptions . . . were not new to India, as for instance in the conception of the ‘Narayanasthra’ and the ‘Pasupathasthra’ of our ancients. But luckily, they stopped with theory.” The atomic bomb was not something unknown or to be feared, for it was proclaimed that it was already familiar in India. Suddenly it would appear, in 1945, powerful weapons in the ancient texts began to look very “atomic.” Narayanasthra is the personal missile weapon of Vishnu in his Narayana form. This asthra lets loose a powerful tirade of millions of deadly missiles simultaneously. The intensity of the shower increases with resistance, and the only solution is total submission before the missile, after which it will stop. The Pasupathasthra is the legendary arrow of Shiva, which Arjuna obtained after doing penance, as recounted in the Mahabharata. Even though vehemently against atomic weapons, Rajagopalachari assumes a higher moral and epistemic ground by indicating how ideas about the atom now beginning to be exploited were Wrst developed in ancient India, but “luckily” they only developed the theory, not the actual bomb. But he goes on to say, somewhat idiosyncratically, “In


every atom . . . there was good alongside of the evil,” implying that the splitting of the atom bomb need not be a heinous activity after all (Rajagopalachari). Presumably, the “good atoms” could be subjected to human control, and with divine blessing, atomic science could be channeled for the constructive beneWts of society. A writer identiWed as Farishta cited the Bhagvad Gita this time to launch a Wery critique at Western leaders for the devastation unleashed by the atom bomb: Prabhavanty ugra-karmanah Kshayaya jagato hitah’ (Bhagvad Gita, 16/9) The demoniac who are lost to themselves and who have no intelligence, engage in unbeneWcial, horrible works meant to destroy the world. Indirectly, this verse anticipates the invention of nuclear weapons, of which the whole world is very proud today. . . . Such weapons are invented in human society due to godlessness.

With these opening lines, Farishta criticized the conduct of Western powers using a Manichean reading of the Bhagvad Gita as his moral compass. Whereas the earlier examples demonstrated a radical indeterminacy, here the sensibilities around “something happens” converge around a deWnitive “what happens” (see Shaw, 122). Godlessness is identiWed in the secular West deemed to be obsessed with warmongering and technology-driven oppression, next to which the moral Wber of India is seen in a rosy light. Farishta recognized that religious texts and the realm of atomic science were not immediately compatible, but nevertheless, they “indirectly” provided a departure point to debate the ethics of the main protagonists of the bomb. Science’s association with unfettered enquiry, objectivity, and disenchantment indicative of Euro-American modernity was declared the path to immorality: “It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that America and Britain have outdone Hitler and Tojo in the perpetration of terrorizing acts. They have wreaked havoc in Japan by making use of the destructive powers of the atom. Bhagvad Gita classiWes such people as demonic who have little or no intelligence. . . . While Hiroshima endured the extermination of its human population, Britain and America witnessed the annihilation of its humanity” (Farishta). Ambivalence toward Japan is particularly notable: opinion in India ricocheted between empathy for Japanese who stood up against Western powers and who then became victims to their might, reconciled with the sobering thought that

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Japan was also a nation that nursed imperialist ambitions for themselves and brutally oppressed areas that it had invaded in Asia. It is particularly marked in this narrative by singling out hawkish Japanese rulers such as the former prime minister of Japan Hideki Tojo from the general populace, including those who once lived in the city of Hiroshima. The superlative powers of the devotional sublime expressed in the Bhagvad Gita allows a means with which to navigate the negative space of the technological sublime. Whereas Oppenheimer invoked the Bhagvad Gita to allude to his sense of wartime duty to develop the atomic bomb before Germany did, here the interpretation of the Gita is much more deterministic, which in fact implicates scientists like Oppenheimer with the “demoniac.” Nuanced philosophical readings of the verses are recalibrated into a battle between good and evil, where evil is located elsewhere, primarily in the (neo)colonial powers of the United States and Britain. Despite their proclamations of a “free world,” opinion on the United States was often elided with Britain, for even though the country was not directly part of India’s colonial experience, it was certainly seen to nurse ambitions of global power for itself. By association, scientists in the West who created the bomb were also “foes of mankind” for conducting research for destructive ends. But all was not lost, for the proverbial chaff could be extracted from the wheat, and science could be redeemed. Farishta goes on to note that just as the martial sage Parshuram had rid the earth of evil Kshatriya warrior clans who had insulted Brahmins, so must the “breed of scientists” who developed the bomb be weeded out from earth, and “limited permits” granted for conducting research in chemistry and physics: “These permits must only be granted to those who have served mankind with selXessness and compassion” (Farishta), the writer declared. Farishta’s wrath was aimed at the duplicity of the Allies, who preached “universal compassion” but then used this refrain as a means with which to destroy people for what they deemed the greater good. Farishta concluded: “This clearly depicts the inconceivably dangerous extent to which man can go when intelligence goes hand in hand with destructive thinking.” Those like Farishta who sympathized with politicians’ and scientists’ resolute castigation of the atom bomb presents a more deWnitive


perspective on atomic schizophrenia, one that enters into a dialogue with either the moral superiority of Indian culture or, conversely, the progress that a “selXess and good science” promises that was not tied to the machinations of “destructive thinking.” The invocation of the Gita is not about an individual’s interpretation of the atom bomb, but a group-oriented one. Subjectivity does not simply reside in the monadic self but in the socially conscious, selXess patriot wanting to rid itself of the abuse of colonial powers that the inhumane development and use of the atom bomb epitomized. It is clear with these examples that the breakdown of language and the radical loss of duree represented by the devastating power of the atom bomb led to a certain historicity, in this case speciWcally through the recuperation of ancient narratives where a phenomenon is deemed more certain and familiar even while it resists worldly representation. The receptive process signaled a manifest lack that led to a misrecognition of the self’s identity as expounded in religious discourse. This appears to provide a sense of completeness and an experience of the fragmentary real. It resulted in the emergence of what Banu Subramaniam has described for contemporary Hindu nationalists, “archaic modernities . . . strategically employing elements of science and religion, orthodoxy and modernity” (74). Following the spiritual-technological dialectics from the late nineteenth century, atomic science became an exterior technology to clothe in spiritual robes and a modern conduit for earlier “atomic” narratives found in Hindu scriptures. The lines of Wssion were between science and spirituality, as well as the past and the present, recalibrated and fused into compelling narratives in multiple ways. By placing atomic technology next to the wisdom of the ancients, India bequeathed itself a powerful narrative with which to ethically herald the “age of science” for the development of the nation. The turn to religious parable in the mid-1940s did not necessarily signal a politicized Hindu nationalism as it does in the contemporary era (see, for instance, Brosius; Hansen; Luddens; Rajagopal). Rather it was done with a view to put India on the atomic map in terms of deWning the country as a repository of charters with which to comprehend and develop modern science “peacefully” and for the beneWt of society, distinguishing India from other nations then associated with the development of the atomic bomb.

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FUTURE VISIONS While the above narratives excavated the past for a moral compass, others explored possible futures, which was again an attempt to grasp at time in order to orient the present. With respect to atomic science, these futures were envisaged as splintered. As we have seen above, following the path of the bomb, the direction adopted most notably by political leaders in the United States, was the path of destruction for all. This was in direct antithesis to the ascendant politics of nonviolence in India (“‘Atom Bomb Destroyed’”).12 Following the path of constructive, socially beneWcial science could lead to a nation of “smiling gardens” (“India’s”).13 With a twist on Žižek’s proposition, travel into the future enabled a fresh start only tenuously linked to the “then-present,” a place that is imagined as free from the effects and inequities of colonialism. This was a future imagined as fueled by the possibilities of science, where the subject could appear in landscapes characterized by fantastically animated scenarios entailing, in a sense, an equitable world after the death of the colonized subject. By 1945 the Cambridge-educated scientist Homi Jehangir Bhabha had already enlisted the support of Parsi millionaires to develop a school of science and mathematics in Bombay, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. Other cities too held scientiWc councils and organizations for an emerging Western-educated coterie of Indian scientists. Mastery of science was seen as a way to mastery of one’s destiny. Even defeated Japan attributed its global failure to a “lack of scientiWc knowledge and equipment and shortage of materials” (“Seed”). Blaming the defeat on science became the salve for brutalized psyches. It was seen as the main reason for Japan’s failure, a view shared by others for the defeat of Nazi Germany as well.14 Indeed, Jawaharlal Nehru put the cause for colonial conquest not down to the “perWdy of competing indigenous elites or the skill and intrigue of Western conquerors,” but to India’s “lack of technological and scientiWc mastery” (Abraham, 29).15 Slowly but surely, with the arms and intelligence race that the bomb epitomized (with reference to Nazi Germany) and presaged (with reference to the growing powers of the United States and the USSR), Indian commentators saw the need to engage with world science but also to emphasize their differences in its application and the


geopolitical carving up of large swathes of the world at the dawning of the Cold War.16 In a book review of In the Age of the Atom (Parmanuchya Yugaat) by Amarprakash Gokhale, the reviewer observed: “On one hand, there are scientists who opine that such an advancement of research will make the creation of paradise on earth, a reality; on the other hand, many experts feel that it will turn the earth into a necropolis [smashaan]” (“Books”). However, in this case, the reviewer proposed a means with which to navigate this uncertain crossroads by using the book as a guide. He outlined how Gokhale’s book reXects the view that India must brace itself to face the calamities of the “age of science” [vigyan yug] and ready itself to be in the forefront in the prosperous period which is to follow. The author has painted an imaginative picture in his book, portraying that World War III will take place in the year 1952, that a veritable global government will be formed by 1957, and that the year 1970 will see the emergence of a brilliant, prosperous, glorious and mighty India, brimming with conWdence. He states that the above events will take place due to advances in science. Therefore he lays out before the reader a treasure-trove of scientiWc knowledge.

Written in an accessible style, Gokhale had presented a work with which the layperson could understand the potentials of science using ancient texts as well as modern theories of science. The commentary reXected a view apparent also in the West that, albeit after a period of world destruction through nuclear proliferation and warfare, lessons would be learned and science could pave the way for a paradise on earth (see Boyer). Nuclear war was conceptualized as a brutal means with which to “cleanse the earth” and iron out global political tensions and inequalities so that humanity could start afresh, leading to a new world order in which, in this case, India had its rightful position as a powerful nation. But cracks began to appear in his picture of a postdystopic utopian future. Little reference was made to the lingering effects of radiation on the planet—seemingly an unfortunate side effect that did not enter onto the writer’s horizon. Here, it is evident that the lack envisaged as a sign of a colonized and technologically thwarted India could be elliptically fulWlled by a science-driven future, which even though it could lead to a calamitous war would pave the way for equitable global governance, a scenario in which India could prosper. The fact that atomic science was only recently being exploited

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meant, as Abraham proposes, that “the most developed and the least developed states would be beginning on relatively equal footing” (7). One writer commented: “Scientists have been striving strenuously to acquire the Philosopher’s Stone and the sanjeevani [a plant that resurrects the dead] that bestows immortality. The atom, born out of warfare, will certainly help humanity achieve these. Furthermore, the magic of the atom will open many more doors to inWnite happiness” (“Earth”). Folklore and atomic developments were brought together in what appears to be an awkward conjunction of differends, for it was not explained or indeed fully understood how atomic science could promise immortality. Here, the wartime birth of the atom bomb was eclipsed by the way its “magic” could be channeled into the bid to aid humanity. It was as if further secrets of the atom remained to be unlocked; yet these “doors to inWnite happiness” represented a beyond to the known world, for they could only be partially opened, if at all, and even then the doors could lead to a brick wall or a corridor of other doors where the recursive pattern was to be repeated. Another unnamed writer was cautiously optimistic about the frontiers of world science: It is being said that in the near future, atomic energy will be used to run railway engines in America. It is also being hoped that atomic energy will help in the effective treatment of diseases. Since all this has been expressed by none other than the physicists themselves, it cannot be disregarded as a “Wgment of imagination.” The common man’s reXections on the revelation of the potential of atomic energy, brought about by means of the atom bomb, are being presented here. These thoughts must be read bearing in mind that they pertain to those who have no knowledge of physics. However, these people do have immense respect for the potential of science which can enhance man’s knowledge and power. (“Science”)

The writer’s attempt to comprehend atomic science had recourse to the higher intellectual attributes of physicists. The author alludes to the fact that if scientists can make what appear to be incredible proclamations, then reason and imagination were not incompatible. What could be said to be an imaginative exercise was in consonance with scientiWc logic. The layperson could place his or her doubts in the hands of experts who predict beneWcial outcomes for atomic science. The task was to spread this message to those who had little understanding of


science, but nevertheless had a lot of faith in its potential beneWts. The rhetoric of disciplining the newly independent nation to produce modern, scientiWcally aware citizens became persuasive. Although attempts were made to rationalize science for the beneWt of society, certain elements lay manifestly beyond what may be described as the faculties of reason. ScientiWc conjecture Xowed easily into the realm of fantasy where Wction masqueraded itself as “science fact.”17 Science Wction is the inevitable outcome of the imagination running wild with real-life events to do with science to create, on the face of it, improbable futures.18 Whereas Indian scientists had by the mid-1940s begun to come together to establish science institutions and organizations, little is available on how this attraction to modern science manifested itself in the Wction of the time. Moreover, the assumption is that the recourse to Wctions of science in the modernist sense is a recent development in India.19 Remarkably, some trends were also emerging in the 1940s propelled by the wonders of atomic science. The Indian columnist Mu Kappa wrote about a Wctional encounter with a scientist who disintegrated while checking some rocket fuel for the “artiWcial moon” in a tale entitled “Pure Science Fiction.” Here Mu Kappa describes an interview with “the disintegrated man in the realm of the Ultramental.” The story begins, according to the writer, “on the day I heard about that explosion in Alamogordo (New Mexico) of the Wrst Los Alamos atomic bomb on July 16, 1945.” The scientist revealed to him that he was working on “a Japanese theory connected with the properties of the inert gas argon.” The author is amazed at the prospect of an inert gas such as argon being used as an explosive. But the scientist counters that under high pressure it “glowed like an incandescent bulb” when a high-voltage electric charge was passed through it. After being bombarded with neutrons it began “to disintegrate and release fantastic heat!” This, along with “pure carbon as a catalyst,” could then be used as the “ultimate fuel for your interstellar journeys.” The author declared that he would tell the scientiWc world of this discovery. The scientist replied: “Do you think you can tell them the secret? But how can you, my poor fellow? This interview is in the Ultramental and you can never repeat all this in the World of Reality.” The author ends his reXections:

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I doubted this and got out in a hurry, and immediately began to take down notes. I have passed on all the facts as I heard them. But I am beginning to wonder if I remember them quite correctly. Was it really argon he mentioned? Did he say high pressure or low? And neutron bombardment or something else? Finally, was the catalyst carbon or silicon? I don’t know. (“Pure”)

Fusing events in the lived world with an imaginary scenario set in a parallel world, Mu Kappa weaves a story that encapsulates the wonder of atomic science and its “mysteries” yet to be unraveled. The imaginary experiment with the stable element argon, which is present in the earth’s atmosphere at 0.93 percent, replicates the fascination for the unstable element of uranium bombarded with neutrons in nuclear devices. Whereas in reality argon is actually inert, the Wction enables the author to overcome the weight and inertia of materiality to fantasize about its possibilities. At high pressure, however, argon is actually a narcotic, but the writer retrieved his credentials by conveniently forgetting the details of the experiment when back in the “World of Reality.” This tale, written three years after the “atomic drop,” revels more in apoplexy than apocalypse. The story represents a conWdence in the amazing prospects of atomic science while simultaneously retaining an open ending, cloaked with an element of intrigue. The questions at the end imply both a recognition of human incapacity and a residual uncertainty about science’s purported claims such that something lies beyond mastery and comprehension. Here is a vivid example of “time travel” into the future in order to express a contemporaneous fascination with atomic science triggered by “that explosion in Alamogordo.” The Wssure between the possible and the impossible is exploited for its Wctional amazement at the progress of science in that it could lead to the “ultimate fuel for your interstellar journeys.” Yet, there remains a disquiet, as it is not fully understood what actually happened in the World of the otherwise unattainable Ultramental, a counterfactual world that eludes the person’s capacity to remember events and conversations after visiting it. It is as if utopia with its scientiWc mastery exists in the partially forgotten memory of the experienced past, which taken to a larger scale tantalizes cultural memory with a series of “what-ifs”—what if scientists outside of the Allied powers had channeled the instability of uranium


to make a bomb? Or even, what if ancient theories of the atom and weapons in India had been pursued in practice? The futurist tale is simultaneously propelled by contemporaneous issues about social uncertainties, scientiWc development, technical mastery, and aspirations to do with racial, national and/or global power. The story was not based on an “American theory” that infatuated some other authors, but a Japanese “theory” developed by a Wctional Tokyo-based scientist. In this technocultural geography, a humiliated Japan was accorded its eminent position as the site for a reworked modernity, gloriWed perhaps, as some Indian nationalists would have it, for defying Western powers. This was in distinct contrast to what actually transpired in contemporaneous reality, where Japan became the victim to the brutal excesses of modernity as it was formulated in the West with the development of the atom bomb.

THE STING IN THE TALE Where the atomic schizophrenic realms of utopian and dystopian possibilities fuse most corrosively is in the vein of satire—a disposition that leaves a residue of uncomfortable digestion. The writings of Saadat Hasan Manto are particularly memorable for their stinging satire. Born in Samrala in Punjab in 1912, Manto lived for twelve years, beginning in 1936, in Bombay, a city he came to dearly cherish, as reXected in some of his reminiscences in which he describes himself as “a walking, talking Bombay” (cited in Prakash 2010, 146). In 1948 he reluctantly decided to migrate to the newly formed Pakistan after the studio in which he worked was bombarded by hate mail for employing Muslims. Manto’s reXections on the atom bomb did not reside in moral invective, utopian dreams, or pessimistic futures, but in a stinging scorpion-like sarcasm directed at virtually anyone in his path, including religious chauvinists in the subcontinent and the progenitor of the new technology, the United States. In the script he wrote for the Wlm produced by Filmistan, Eight Days (1946), in which he also acted, he played a half-wit air force ofWcer who scares everyone by saying that the ball that he is carrying is an atom bomb (see Husain, 522). With such revels, Manto does not allude to any transcendent truths outside of the Wlmic text, but the sublime, whether it be technological or devotional,

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collapses and unravels itself within the text as part of a ridiculous narrative. This satirical dalliance with the atom bomb continued after the partition that attended India’s independence was described elsewhere as a “Punjabi Hiroshima” (“Congress”). In the third of his nine letters to “Uncle Sam,” Manto wrote to his avuncular adversary: You have done many good deeds yourself and continue to do them. You decimated Hiroshima, you turned Nagasaki into smoke and dust. . . . Each to his own. . . . Out here, many Mullah types after urinating pick up a stone and with one hand inside their untied shalwar [loose-fitting trousers], use the stone to absorb the after-drops of urine as they resume their walk. This they do in full public view. All I want is that the moment such a person appears, I should be able to pull out that atom bomb you will send me and lob it at the Mullah so that he turns into smoke along with the stone he was holding. (cited in Hasan, 622)20

No one was safe from the Wre of Manto’s acrid pen. While he lashed out at religious chauvinism, he also took a swipe at American policy, arranging the atomic theme with his jaded view on the mass displacement and genocide that accompanied the creation of two nations, India and Pakistan. Using scatological humor to undermine the new nations and a pointed lance at atomic politics to undermine U.S. hegemony, it was almost as if he courted destruction in order to highlight the futility and hypocrisy of political intentions and conduct. In the same letter, he also requested that America send him “a tiny atom bomb for myself” so as he could use it in a number of death-defying ways. It is in a satirist’s disposition to revel in gallows humor, a disposition that arises out of stressful, traumatic, or life-threatening phenomena. In this case, Manto appears to invoke the Kantian reclamation of the sublime, only to then throw it away as he refuses to suffer, and instead he revels in the pleasurable sensations of rebellious and defensive satisfaction. Illustrating a “chaosmotic” narrative (see Guattari), there is a suspension of belief, a satirical taunt at lofty gods of social change whether they be located at an altar to religion, nation, or science. The example throws the lie to nationalist pretensions to cultivate a utopian social order through the “peaceful” channeling of atomic science. In the process, it calls the bluff of the promise of a “socialist science”—a science that could pave the way for equitable development of a nascent nation—indicating instead that atomic science is part of


a rhetoric of control that political elites of whatever nationality want to avail for themselves. Elsewhere, there were numerous cartoons dealing with the atom bomb theme in the satirical vein. For instance, a few days after the broadcast of the bomb, a defeated Japanese leader—conceivably Tojo, who, even though in retirement at the time, represented one of the most hawkish Japanese Wgures—was shown on the front page of a Bombay daily. He sits forlorn in a darkened room at an empty table vacated by the Nazis and the Russians, indicated by a swastika and a hammer and sickle, respectively. Drinking a solution out of a bottle with the label “war spirits,” the image of the Japanese warmonger is accompanied by the caption “Alone! Against Atom Bomb!”21 Another later cartoon lampoons international post–World War II efforts to regulate atomic technology at the dawn of the Cold War era while poking fun at the self-interest of political leadership. Leaders of the key nations are shown squatting on high columns while a disconcerted crowd surrounds them on the ground. The statesmen try to salvage whatever they can from the ashes of war. With the caption “Atom Squatters,” President Truman holds on tightly to the atom bomb; representatives of Canada, Britain, France, and Russia hold on to other paraphernalia including uranium and other bomb parts; and in the far distance are indecipherable Wgures doing headstands and acrobatic poses atop the columns.22 Yet another cartoon translated from the Marathi as “The ‘debt’ and ‘loans’ atom bomb crashes over England” shows leading British politicians scrambling away from an airplane dropping an atom bomb. The image implies that Britain was struggling to hold on to power with the heavy Wnancial losses it had acquired by the end of World War II and its dependency on the United States.23 In what would appear to be a bittersweet indictment of British colonialism, World War II was both revolting and opportune in that it forced the doors open for the exit of the British from the subcontinent.

BRINGING THE SUN DOWN TO EARTH Rather than adapting the Kantian sublime for the nuclear theme, I have modiWed it so that narratives are not reduced to one foundational framework but are characterized by a multiplicity of strands and

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perspectives. The disorientation that characterized atomic schizophrenia resulted in an awareness of desolation and boundlessness that threatened self-preservation. It led to a fragmented recuperation of indigenous traditions and, in tandem with the critique of Western rule, the reignition of patriotism where the threat of the bomb was partly alleviated with reference to more familiar narratives in India and a valorization of its “peaceful” development for a nascent nation. In the process, the boundlessness of atomic science became partially checked such that it did not harbor the negative sublime alone, but also provided disparate lines of Xight when conjoined with the devotional sublime. In its more secularized form, the devotional sublime became the basis for a distinctly Indian ethics that was based on selXessness and social beneWts. Such alignments also became futureoriented, where Indian society’s access to science, and science’s power over nature, suggested freedom from the shackles of colonialism for the populace. Due to the stupendous powers of the new science, the line between reality and Wction became corrosively blurred. Atomic power gave reality an aura of the fabulous, and reality it would seem became more compelling than Wction as contemporaneous developments in science became wrapped up in fantastic, futuristic possibilities. It is as if, as Donna Haraway observes, “technoscience and science Wction collapse into the sun of their radiant (ir)reality-war” (577). The more comments that were made on atomic science, the more they teetered on the realms of fantasy. Sometimes this was a witting conjunction, as in the developing genre of speculative Wction and atomic satire. At other times, it was not so witting, as people waxed lyrical at atomic possibilities that, with the beneWt of hindsight and distance, can only be described as bordering on the bizarre—where the sublime unravels with an incremental, schizophrenic alacrity. The psycho-philosophical contours of atomic schizophrenia provide a moving matrix with which to appreciate the recuperation of temporality, language, and partial yet collective subjectivities through a navigation and production of culture in order to come to terms with the contemporaneity of the atomic age. Recourse to the past gave the hitherto unknown vistas of atomic science a strangely comfortable tinge, and to a certain extent molliWed the disturbing residues of the atom bomb’s destructive potential. Projections into the future tended


to promise much in the way of sociopolitical advancement. After all, Indian scientists did not carry a troubled conscience for unleashing destruction on civilians in Japan, as did Oppenheimer; and the path of nonviolence against colonial oppression gave residents in the tides of a deWnitive anticolonial nationalism a moral vantage with which to approach and debate the subject. In the process, the resultant narratives of archaic modernities or futurist possibilities reXect diverse axes of misrecognition as the Wssured subject sees itself in a broken mirror—to pasts that never were or to futures that could never be. Raminder Kaur is professor of anthropology and cultural studies based in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex. She was previously a lecturer and Simon/Marks Research Fellow at the University of Manchester.

Notes Versions of this essay were presented at the European Association for Social Anthropology annual conference in Maynooth, and at a seminar in the Department of History at the University of Mumbai in 2010. My thanks to those all those who engaged with the paper, the anonymous reviewers, Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, and Susan Ingram. Thanks also to Mithila Deshpande, who provided translations of Marathi texts, and to Jay Schutte, who provided Blitz archival material. The archival research was conducted in the Asiatic Society Library, Mumbai Marathi Grantha Sangrahalaya, Maharashtra State Archives, the British Library, and the Center for Research Libraries, Chicago. This project was initially funded by the British Academy and the Economic and Social Research Council, and completed during the time of an Arts and Humanities Research Leave award. 1. Bombay was renamed Mumbai in 1995 under the behest of the right-wing Shiva Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party alliance. As the article is based primarily on the historical city, I will continue to use its previous name. 2. Karlekar had joined the air force in 1941; four years later he was promoted to the post of leading aircraftsman, and by 1947 he had become a corporal in what was then called the Royal Indian Air Force. He was one among several Indian servicemen who were taken to Japan in 1946 as part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force, which also included soldiers from Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, that, alongside the U.S. military, helped supervise the demilitarization of Japan until 1952. 3. With the beneWt of hindsight, Wgures of up to 170,000 dead in Hiroshima and up to 70,000 in Nagasaki have been cited (see Gusterson, 272).

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4. On the various permutations and interpretations of the verses, see Hijiya. 5. I have not come across comments on the speciWc verses that Oppenheimer cites in the mid-1940s Bombay media. Nevertheless, there are several other references to the Bhagavad Gita in indigenous commentaries that I will focus on below. 6. Even though Kant refers mainly to natural phenomena, he also alludes to structures such as the pyramids and the interior of Saint Peters (63). 7. Kant outlines two kinds of sublime experience: the “mathematical” sublime to refer to a vastness the mind is unable to take in as a whole, and the “dynamic” sublime where the mind recoils at an insuperable, terrifying object. 8. While theories on the sublime pertain to describe the impact of a visceral sensation, their focus is almost always contracted to perceptual vision, initiated by a sight of the sublime. For instance, Kant comments, “To call the ocean sublime, we must regard it as poets do, merely by what strikes the eye” (72). 9. On schizophrenia, Freud had stated: “this disease form is characterised by a peculiar failure of the object of interest; the libido is Wrst turned to phantasy creations and Wnally becomes introverted; no new object is sought and the ego reverts to a primitive objectless condition” (294). 10. For instance, see Masco, 55–68; Wilson, 228–36, 246 (although Wilson brieXy considers ironic commentaries [242–43]; and Nye, 228, where, in addition, Nye wrongly attributes this comment to George Kistiakowsky). 11. Rather than secularizing his insights on the sublime as does Kant, Mishra’s observations remain exclusively focused on the aesthetics of religious experience. Wary of invoking Orientalist readings, he nevertheless holds on to a monolithic idea of “Indian culture” that seems divorced from world history. With respect to the reception of the atom bomb in the subcontinent, I highlight how commentators draw upon religious discourse, but I also recognize that they do so in a transposed sense—that is, with the invocation of religious parables in response to global politics. 12. The history of nonviolent action in the subcontinent associated with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s notion of ahimsa played a part in crystallizing an alternative to “the way of the atom bomb” in the hands of Western powers, even though Gandhi himself refuted atomic science as an abomination (“Mightier”). Ahimsa (roughly translated as nonviolence) was an integral part of Gandhi’s notion of satyagraha (truth-force). See Kaur, 199. 13. This is a comment made by the then Palit Professor of Physics at Calcutta University, Meghnad Saha, which also appears with more Christian resonance in Frederick Soddy’s 1908 book, The Interpretation of Radium, as “one smiling Garden of Eden.” 14. For instance, Prof. James Kendall, a chair in chemistry at Edinburgh University, speculated that “if Hitler had any sense he would have delayed making war until he got the Germans on to this [atom bomb]. The war would then have ended in 6 days instead of 6 years” (“Startling”). 15. While Abraham also considers Indian political culture around the atom bomb, his focus is less on social imaginaries and more on debates among prominent


politicians and scientists. It is largely due to this more vernacular focus that Abraham’s postcolonial interpretations of atomic science differ in nuance from the material and analyses presented here (26–30). 16. The later development of the Non-Alignment Movement in 1955 under the auspices of Nehru, Egypt’s president Gamal Abdul Nasser, and Yugoslavia’s premier Josip Broz Tito was underpinned not just by an ideological stance but also their disapproval of a world dominated by a nuclear arms race. 17. For instance, Bombay readers were informed that John W. Campbell, scientist and the editor of the magazine Science Fiction, speculated that the next generation of Japanese people after the atomization of their cities may become “a fantastic race of supermen.” Campbell elaborated: “The atomic bombs when they explode release gamma rays similar to radium radiation, ex-rays [sic], and other rays, thereby affecting and altering the structure of sex-cells in human beings. . . . This causes basic changes and the result might be the development of persons with three eyes or no eyes at all, with no arms or a dozen arms, and other peculiarities. . . . It is even possible that a race of people might develop with two hearts” (“May”). Another incredible view was offered to Bombay readers by the head of the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, Ernest Hooton. He predicted that “eventually a group of evil men whom he called ‘super-apes’ will gain control of atomic energy weapons and use them for the complete destruction of humanity” (“Harvard”). 18. Science Wction has been variously deWned, but generally it is held as distinct from the more supernatural science fantasy, and both may be conjoined under the generic term “speculative Wction” (see Suvin). 19. Partly, this oversight is due to a preoccupation of interests in EuroAmerican science Wction, its association with empire, and its use of technologies to execute imperial designs and expansion in imaginary time-spaces. As such, unlike other literary genres, its suitability for the colonial and postcolonial contexts has been questioned (see Reid). 20. There were nine letters, four of which were not dated, two dated 1951 and four in 1954. All in the Wtting spirit of irony, they were never mailed due to the lack of postage. 21. Bombay Chronicle, August 9, 1945, 5. 22. Bombay Chronicle, December 22, 1945, 1. 23. Navakal, Bombay, August 31, 1945, 5.

Works Cited Abraham, Itty. 1998. The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy and the Postcolonial State. London: Zed Books. “‘Atom Bomb Destroyed Japan’s Soul’; But Mahatma Says What Has Happened to the Soul of the Destroying Nation Is Yet Too Early to See.” 1946. Bombay Chronicle, July 8.

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