(Side) splitting the atom

Today is the anniversary of an event that ushered in the atomic age — on July 16, 1945 the first test nuclear bomb Trinity was detonated in New Mexico. The horrific bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki followed less than a month later.

Now flash-forward 22 years to the climactic scene of the Hindi film Aman, where Dr Gautamdas — played by the intrepid Rajendra Kumar — successfully wrestles a mushroom cloud to the ground and ends the nuclear threat for good.

Okay, so I’m exaggerating (but only slightly). I’m also being a little nasty: Aman, made in 1967, is really a very well-intentioned film about a young Indian doctor’s resolution to work with Japanese radiation victims and simultaneously spread the message of world peace. This subject is handled mostly with restraint, but a few surreal moments do slip through the cracks. For example, when Gautamdas’s father sulks about his son leaving him to go and work in a distant country, we get the unusual spectre of Rajendra Kumar likening himself to a fragrant phool. A flower’s “sugandh” isn’t only meant for the maali who tended it, he replies — it belongs to the whole world.

Aman contains many noble sentiments like the above, but the film is probably best remembered today for one of the most bizarre cameos in movie history: the nonagenarian Bertrand Russell playing himself in a three-minute scene where Gautamdas goes to seek his blessings.

You have to feel sorry for Russell. For one thing, this legendary agnostic is spoken of here in highly mystical terms — as a devtaa, a mahapurush who blesses us with his presence only once every century, and so on. Gautamdas calls the meeting a teerth-yatra; I’m not sure Russell would have approved of his chambers being turned into a pilgrimage spot. But crueller still is that the scene (which you can watch here: http://bit.ly/axPrgp) places a fragile, 94-year-old man in the position of having to listen to Rajendra Kumar speak English. Perhaps they should have shot the sequence in Hindi; how much stranger could it have been?

All this is a way of saying that Aman is an uneven, over-earnest film about the dangers of atomic weaponry. I don’t mean this as serious criticism: after all, few movies have even attempted to tackle this delicate subject head-on. Even Akira Kurosawa had to tread cautiously when he made his 1955 film Record of a Living Being about an elderly man paranoid about nuclear holocaust. It’s a good enough film on its own terms, but it lacks the verve and assuredness of Kurosawa’s best work, suggesting that the director wasn't completely at ease. Who could blame him?

In this light it’s notable that some of the best cinematic representations of nuclear destruction are genre films that approach the theme very obliquely — e.g. the original Godzilla, in which a giant primordial lizard, born of radioactive waste, sets about wreaking vengeance on a modern metropolis. Or even Kaneto Shindo’s horror classic Onibaba, where the scarred face beneath a demon mask suggests the visages of Hiroshima survivors.

Best of all, there’s the Stanley Kubrick classic Dr Strangelove, or How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which ends with the whole world being blown up while Vera Lynn sings the plaintive “We’ll Meet Again” on the soundtrack. The covert suggestion here is that the premise is too horrifying for it to be treated as anything other than absurdist comedy. If so, the people who conceived Aman’s Bertrand Russell cameo may have had the right idea!

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer