Prof Dr Avinash Kolhe reviews The Just, Albert Camus’s powerful political-moral play, in its Hindi adaptation in India, examining violence, revolution, conscience, justice and the question of whether noble ends can justify violent means.

At a time when political violence, ideological extremism and the justification of brutality in the name of a larger cause continue to shape public discourse, The Just feels disturbingly contemporary. Albert Camus’s enduring question—can violence ever be morally justified?—forces us to confront the dangerous distance between righteous intentions and violent means. Its Indianized setting, rooted in the freedom struggle, makes the play even more relevant, reminding us that history repeatedly asks the same question: when does resistance become violence, and when does a noble cause lose its moral legitimacy?

Hindi poet Maithilisharan Gupt [1886-1964] had said about our epic ‘Ramayana’ that it is such a moving story that it always generates various rasas. This observation was running through my mind when I watched Albert Camus’s play ‘The Just’ in Hindi. This play is my all-time favourite as it deals with some meaty, modern issues like political assassinations in the name of a larger cause - is violence inevitable? I got to see its Hindi version [The Just] recently. Its Indianized Hindi avatar is quite engaging and is adapted by Suresh Bhardwaj and Deepa Sahi.

The Just, based on Camus’s ‘The Just Assassins’, is one of the important plays by Albert Camus [1913-1960], others being ‘Caligula’ [1944], ‘The Misunderstanding’ [1944], ‘The State of Siege’ [1948]. ‘The Just’ was the last play written in 1949 and is based on a true story. In 1905, Russian Socialist-Revolutionaries attacked Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich in Moscow.

Violence And Its Moral Limits

Camus used this incident and turned it into a play that explores the moral limits of political violence for a just cause and its uselessness. No wonder it’s a play that has a timeless quality as political violence is around us, with greater ferocity. This is why ‘The Just’, directed by Mukti R Das, presented by Roopkatha Rangmach and produced by Pankaj Tripathi and Mridula Tripathi, does not allow viewers to wander even for a second. The Indianised play is set during our freedom struggle, with Bengal-based armed revolutionaries. Here the Indians plot to bomb the Governor of the province. 

The Second World War, fought between 1939-1945, forced many European nations into it. France, the immediate neighbour of Germany, was occupied by the Nazis from May 1940 to December 1944. Though France lost militarily, the French organized underground resistance, known in modern history as The French Resistance, in which Sartre and Camus played a stellar role. Resistance activists ran an underground newspaper ‘Combat’, where Sartre and Camus contributed. These experiences helped Camus create ‘The Just Assassins’, a play with high moral tones. 

In this play, the central issue is ‘can there be morally justified violence/murder’? There are no easy answers here. Gandhiji did offer one with ‘ends don’t justify the means’ and ‘there must be purity of means’.

Gandhi And The Purity Of Means 

This is why he called off the non-cooperation movement on 12 February 1922 when a protesting crowd in Chauri Chaura burnt alive 22 policemen. Camus’s play does not travel this path but raises the same piercing questions.

Centuries before Gandhiji came on the scene, a somewhat similar issue dominated the Christian world. Saint Augustine [354 AD-430 AD] offered a concept ‘Just War Theory’ allowing violence in self-defence and for a moral cause.

A Challenge For Gen Z

Tackling so many politico-moral issues in a 90-minute performance was a unique challenge, one easily shouldered by the director Mukti R Das and his impressive young Gen Z team, comprising Aditya Ghosh, Arunim Mishtra, Aashi Tripathi, Amit Vanshi and Utkarsh Thakur.

The next show of The Just is on 15th September at Prithvi Theatre, Juhu Mumbai.