“Hold pleasure and pain, profit and loss, victory and defeat to the same: then brace yourself for the fight. So will you bring no evil on yourself.”

Scene 1: ‘The Kuru Field of Justice’.

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.’

... contd.