What Should an Indian Opera Sound Like?
Composer Kamala Sankaram at The Many Deaths of Laila Starr orchestra workshop / credit Drew Arrieta
What Should an Indian Opera Sound Like?
Kamala Sankaram and Minita Gandhi reject easy answers in
The Many Deaths of Laila Starr
World premiere opens Minnesota Opera season
October 31 – November 8, 2026
MINNEAPOLIS, MN – July 22, 2026 – If an opera is set in India, should it feature tabla and bansuri? Should everyone on stage wear saris? Should the score sound like what Western audiences imagine Indian music to be?
For composer Kamala Sankaram and librettist MinitaGandhi, those questions miss the point.
Their new opera, The Many Deaths of Laila Starr, opens Minnesota Opera's 26/27 season October 31 – November 8 at Ordway Music Theater in St. Paul. Based on the Eisner Award-winning graphic novel by Ram V and Filipe Andrade, the opera follows the goddess of Death after she is cast down to live as a mortal named Laila Starr in contemporary Mumbai.
Composer Kamala Sankaram discovered the graphic novel at Books with Pictures, a small shop in Portland, shortly after the premature death of her sister Sheela from an aggressive cancer at age 39. She was immediately drawn to the vibrant color palette – and the author’s name on the cover.
“I’ve been a comic book fan my whole life, and this was the first graphic novel I’d ever seen by a South Asian writer,” says Sankaram. “I bought the book to support that representation, and I really wasn’t expecting it to speak so deeply to the grief I was feeling in my own life. But Laila Starr treats death as ordinary – while proving that it’s no less impactful for not being hyper-dramatized. That depiction of the human experience really spoke to me.”
Costume design for Laila Starr by Oana Botez
The Mumbai of the graphic novel is not a mythic landscape of palaces or exoticized spirituality. It’s a contemporary city of traffic, technology, humor, and mess – where the sacred and the everyday collide.
“Ram V created an incredible playground of possibility for us to explore,” says librettist Minita Gandhi. “We see Death rocking a corporate suit and getting fired, and we also see her chain-smoking and clubbing and making questionable decisions. It was incredibly freeing to create a story with Indian characters who are not model minorities. In this world, even the Gods are fallible.”
With source material that subverted so many expectations of how India must be portrayed, the creative team was determined not to rely on a superficial set of visual or musical cues to signal “Indianness” in the opera. For Sankaram, that meant rethinking how cultural identity lives inside music itself.
“Authenticity is often treated as decoration,” Sankaram says. “As if you add a sound or an instrument and that makes something culturally true. The deeper issue is structural: how does the music behave? What is it doing dramatically?”
Her score draws on Indian musical thinking, including rhythmic and melodic structures and emotional qualities associated with ragas. These ideas shape the architecture of the music inside a Western orchestral framework, and coexist alongside electronic dance music, Konnakol vocal percussion, and field recordings of the ocean in Goa. What emerges is a wholly original sound world, rather than a facsimile of traditions.
“This opera, like the graphic novel, upends expectations about how stories told by South Asian artists are meant to look and sound,” says Gandhi. “We’re not trying to represent the whole subcontinent. We are simply telling one story, as honestly as we can.”
“No single perspective can stand in for an entire culture,” agrees Sankaram. “We can only share our own voices – and hope that opens space for others to bring theirs.”
The Many Deaths of Laila Starr
World Premiere • Minnesota Opera
Composer: Kamala Sankaram
Librettist: Minita Gandhi
Conductor: Christopher Franklin
Production: Mary Birnbaum
Choreographer: Rohit Gijare
Associate Director: Miriam Laube
Scenic Designer: Mimi Lien
Costume Designer: Oana Botez
Lighting Designer: Anshuman Bhatia
Sound Designer: C. Andrew Mayer
Laila Starr: Leela Subramaniam
Darius: Omar Najmi
Pranah: Efraín Solís
Agni / Ka the Crow / Cigarette: Mariam Mouawad
Brahma / Bardhan: Ashraf Sewailam
Mun Mun / Gilly: Emily Finke
Saturday, October 31, 2026 @ 7:30pm Gala
Thursday November 5, 2026 @ 7:30pm
Saturday, November 7, 2026 @ 7:30pm
Sunday, November 8, 2026 @ 2:00pm
Ordway Music Theater
345 Washington Street
St. Paul, Minnesota
Tickets start at $69; Students $20
mnopera.org/laila-starr
About Kamala Sankaram
Composer Kamala Sankaram moves freely between the worlds of experimental music and contemporary opera, earning praise from Opera News for her “eclectic, infectious, and three-dimensional” scores. Her work has been performed worldwide at venues such as Dutch National Opera, Santiago a Mil, and Washington National Opera, and she has been featured as artist-in-residence at the Glimmerglass Festival and Brooklyn Botanic Garden. As a biracial Indian-American and trained sitarist, Sankaram has drawn on Indian classical music in many of her works, including Thumbprint and Jungle Book. She is also known for pushing the boundaries of form and style, having created an opera for the trees of Prospect Park, the world’s first virtual reality opera, and a techno-noir opera incorporating live audience data-mining. kamalasankaram.com
About Minita Gandhi
Born in Mumbai, India, Minita Gandhi (she/they) is a Los Angeles-based multi-hyphenate artist. A NYSAF Pfaelzer Award finalist, Gandhi is a critically acclaimed playwright nominated for multiple Jeff Awards. In addition to three commissions with Minnesota Opera, Gandhi is the lyricist for Rising Tide, a choral-orchestral piece on climate change activism by Emmy Award-winning composer Jonathan Beard. Their work has been developed at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, UNCSA, Theatreworks, NNPN, and ANPF. Gandhi has appeared in more than 30 plays on national stages and in television and film, including Deli Boys, St. Denis Medical, and Chicago Fire. Gandhi is the founder of IGNITE, a national mentorship program for theater artists, and a member of the Kilroys, a collective dedicated to ending gender disparity in American theater. minitagandhi.com
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