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peaceable as what you witnessed in scene 2.
    All three strands twine together to create a strong and extremely moving climax in the third act, in which elements of all three kinds of scenes—armed conflict, harmonious cooperation, the triumph of Gandhi’s new vision—come together in a representation of Gandhi’s 1913 New Castle March, an enormous and enormously successful mass protest against yet another piece of political treachery on the part of the British. (This was the triumphant climax of Gandhi’s South African activism.) Here, the principles of
satyagraha
are seen enacted on the stage. By this point we have seen Gandhi reacting to the news of the British betrayal (his head is bowed in grief); Act III includes a tableau of solidarity as his
satyagrahis
mourn with him (they walk back and forth across the stage, unspooling hundreds of yards of shimmery, glassy tape: an arresting, symbolic enactment of their oppression), and ends with a scene of nonviolent resistance, asGandhi’s supporters are removed, one by one, by soldiers with whom they refuse to struggle. Eventually, Gandhi is left alone on stage to sing a final aria.
    And just what is he singing? Another aspect of Glass’s antitheatrical theater is how he dispenses with the usual means of indicating what’s going on—not least, dialogue. None of the words uttered by the various characters—Gandhi; his longtime wife, Kasturbai; his secretary Miss Schlesen; a couple of Indian coworkers, Mrs. Naidoo and Parsi Rustomji; a European co-worker called Kallenbach; and Mrs. Alexander, the police chief’s wife who, during the first scene of Act II, rescues him from the ugly mob at the dock, brandishing her parasol like some mighty weapon—take the form of “dialogue” in any recognizable sense. Instead, Glass and his librettist, the novelist Constance DeJong, have provided fairly perfunctory directions about the historical background, setting, and staging for each of the seven scenes in the opera, clearly meant as guidelines for the stage director and designer, as for instance this set of instructions for the second scene of Act II—the scene in which we get to see
Indian Opinion
being produced:
    Setting: 5 P.M. (orange burning sun). Part of communal residence that houses
Indian Opinion
. Large, working press sits center stage. Blue grass field.
    Staging: Farm residents set up, issue and distribute
Indian Opinion
. Gandhi, appearing late in the scene, inspects their activity in the printing process. All exit, leaving press to run alone during 3-minute orchestra tutti.
    Kallenbach and Miss Schlesen, joined by principals.
    What the characters are actually uttering as this scene progresses—what, in fact, all the characters are uttering all the time throughoutthe various scenes—are passages from the
Bhaghavad Gita
, a text that had tremendous spiritual and aesthetic importance for Gandhi, and in which he found special significance for his life’s work. Naturally, this choice on the creators’ part may strike you as strange—the
Times
critic found “radical” what he referred to as “the complete separation of sung text from dramatic action, such as it is”—but the gesture is wholly of a piece with the larger project of
Satyagraha
, which everywhere forestalls our expectations of what should take place in an opera house.
    It is, in any case, inaccurate to characterize the
Bhaghavad Gita
texts as “completely separate” from the action: if you actually take the trouble to read the libretto, you can see that the Sanskrit texts have been chosen with great care. What the workers in the
Indian Opinion
scene are saying as they fold and pass along great sheets of newspaper is a highly poetic expression of what they are, in fact, doing: “Therefore, perform unceasingly the works that must be done, for the man detached who labors on to the highest must win through.” When Mrs. Alexander berates the mob that attacks Gandhi as he returns to South Africa, she