Philip Glass’s contemporary opera Satyagraha is a hypnotising meditation with music built on quintessential minimalist loops.

It chronicles Mahatma Gandhi’s early days as a young lawyer facing racial discrimination in South Africa between 1894 and 1914.

Opera Australia’s concert version of Satyagraha, arriving in Melbourne in May, features Indian-born Australian tenor Shanul Sharma singing the pivotal role of Gandhi, in Sanskrit.

Satyagraha translates as “truthforce” and was the title of Gandhi’s movement of peaceful resistance with which he stared down power. Like its subject, the opera transcends convention, conveying powerful messages about philosophy, pacifism, power and discrimination. As it does so, it proves that opera can evolve into a performance work that reflect the times and speaks to a global future.

Shanul Sharma: Satyagraha. Photo © Daniel Boud/Opera Australia

The second of Glass’ landmark trilogy of operas, Satyagraha, like Akhnaten and Einstein on the Beach, is a story of an individual who changed their world. Written in 1979, it emerged when former colonies were re-discovering their own cultures and powers and is fired with the anti-establishment, mystical hippie-culture of the 1960s, when Glass first visited India.

The Sanskrit...