The all-new Satyagraha just put ‘Gandhi in the pantheon of gods’

This is not Lord Krishna in Gita. This is Alan Oke, performing as Mahatma Gandhi in the ornate surroundings of London Coliseum in Philip Glass’s landmark portrait opera — Satyagraha: M K Gandhi in South Africa.

And then in one giant leap of time and space, the viewer finds himself lifted from Kurukshetra in ancient India to Tolstoy Farm, near Johannesburg in South Africa. The year is 1910. Krishna’s dialogue with Arjuna echoes again.

Here Gandhi assumes the mantle of Krishna, preaching his disciples — Kasturba (Anne Marie Gibbons), Sarojini Naidu (Janis Kelly) and Herman Kallenbach (Ashley Holland) — a spiritually inspired resistance to racial discrimination. He calls it Satyagraha — ‘a fight on the behalf of truth consisting chiefly in self-purification and self-reliance.’

“Glass puts Gandhi in the pantheon of the gods”, wrote Tim Ashley in The Guardian.

The English National Opera’s latest production, libretto by Constance De Jong and adapted from the text of the Bhagavad Gita, focuses on the formative years of Gandhi, 1893-1914, in South Africa. The opera begins with the seminal event when Gandhi is thrown out of the first class train compartment in Pietermaritzburg.

Oke’s (Gandhi’s) deep resonant voice fills the air again. He sings verses from the Gita in Sanskrit: ‘Between theory and practice, some talk as they were two… Yet wise men know that both can be gained in applying oneself whole heartedly to one.’

One knows how Gandhi’s life and work was inspired by the Gita but to see it unfolding so reverentially through the combined efforts of the ENO and the British theatre company, Improbable, is another milestone in Gandhi’s global legend. “It’s very much a sacred piece — a contemplation, really. I have found that I can only work on it for a time before switching into an altered state, “ says Julian Crouch, the associate director and set designer.

Though Glass’s Satyagraha has premiered in London 27 years after it first appeared in Rotterdam, it’s almost unanimously acclaimed. The Guardian described it “an astonishingly beautiful work.” The Times called it “a perfect marriage of music and subject matter”. It is vintage Glass — repetitive, minimal and yet softer and melodious enough to the capture the resolve and righteousness of the Gita and peace and non-violence of Gandhi. All this brilliantly falls into place due to the sublime presence of the conductor Johannes Debus.

Yet many found the musically broken Sanskrit syllables hard to digest. Oke agrees, “Glass’s music by its very nature is very repetitive¿ It’s more like a mantra; it’s quite prayer like.”

So how difficult was to sing in Sanskrit? “Very difficult”, he says, “in my case it was repetition, repetition and repetition, because there was nothing to relate to. But I am not finding it difficult to pronounce although I am not saying that a Sanskrit scholar will be convinced by our pronunciation.” Every morning he wakes up for an hour long practice — a routine that began almost six months ago. He had even pasted the Sanskrit verses on the walls of his flat.

As an energetic and self-effacing tenor, Oke appears in every scene giving a vocally flawless performance. His progression from Barrister Gandhi to the “half-naked Faqueer” is equally faultless. “I am not trying to ape Gandhi in any mannerism. What I am trying to do is to ape him as a contemplative and thoughtful man. You can go down the road of mimicry to some extent but after that it has to be something else that you can relate to the person that you are playing”, he says.

To help the foreign audience, the English translation of Sanskritised libretto appears on the corrugated iron backdrop that is imaginatively used to portray the colonial age as well as the poverty that Gandhi so intentionally embraced. And then there are hundreds of newspapers vividly moulded into distorted men and animals to depict the fight between the good and the evil. Newspaper is used as a remarkable device to represent public opinion as well as stones to hit out at the opponent. “As everyone associates Gandhi with poverty, it seemed appropriate for us to choose humble materials to inspire the production”, says Crouch.

Director Phelim McDermott uses another mesmerising device to show the universality of Satyagraha. The opera is divided into three acts and during each act peeping from a window are three men — Tolstoy, Tagore and Martin Luther King — that were central to Gandhi’s epic story. “Those figures are really outside time, even though they represent the past present and future; they stand for the idea of Satyagraha”, says McDermott. “It’s multi-layered and non-linear; you could almost enter the piece at any point and experience the whole thing”, he adds.

Glass, 70, first came to India in 1966 and got deeply immersed in Tibetan Buddhism. Later an association with Ravi Shankar fulfilled his quest for Indian instruments and the corresponding rhythm. A few years later, he met Dalai Lama and got involved in the Tibetan cause and other peace movements. It was in those formative years Gandhi became central to his musical vision.

Equally admired in Europe and America Glass touched new heights in 1976 with a five-hour long opera, Einstein on the Beach. Glass’s music was specially appreciated in Netherlands so he premiered his next production Satyagraha in Rotterdam in 1980. A year later, Satyagraha opened in the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. But Glass’s unconventional repetitive music was unpalatable to many critics. The US critics trashed Satyagraha for its paucity of musical ideas and the oddity of its text. “Satyagraha ought to be considered for inclusion in the Guinness Book of Records,” wrote Donal Hanahan in The New York Times, “has there been an opera that went so far on so few musical ideas.”

But that was more than a quarter of century ago. Today not many would venture to frown upon either Gandhi or Glass as one preached socio-political tolerance and global understanding while the other idolised it for the posterity. As McDermott puts it: “Satyagraha’s a timely piece; there will never be an era when it’s not timely because of its issues around war”.

PS: Alan Oke’s interview and a piece of his performance can be heard on Vijay Rana’s web-radio nrifm.com