“Maili Chadar, or The Stained Shawl” and “Truth and Justice”

Two plays exploring the dark side of power and the human cost of injustice.

What is the fate of justice when morality is subservient to power? What happens when people in power lose their moral compass, and truth becomes a casualty? This volume brings together two recent plays by eminent Indian theater personality Shanta Gokhale that address these burning questions.

Maili Chadar; or, The Stained Shawl: A Tragedy in Four Acts traces the regression of the protagonist from the idealism of his youth to the cynicism of a man who has but one goal in life-power at all costs. Along the way, he develops a megalomanic sense of destiny for which he is willing to lose all that he has ever loved, in the process becoming an exemplar of the proverbial worm in the apple called democracy. In Truth and Justice: Four Monologues, women from different places and times speak of what men in power have done to them in the name of their hatred for the other-from the Dreyfus affair that rocked France in the nineteenth century to the deadly communal riots in Gujarat and the Sri Lankan Civil War in the early twenty-first century.