Citation
Suryawanshi, V. W. (2026). Reflection of Postmodern Urban Sensibilities in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest. https://doi.org/10.26643/rb.v118i12.12581
Dr. Varsha Wamanrao Suryawanshi
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Sharda Mahavidyalaya, Parbhani. (MS)
Abstract:
The present research paper discusses the play Harvest (1997) by Manjula Padmanabhan. In spite of its futuristic cast, the play focuses on postmodern urban spaces and its control on everyday life. The play portrays the self-devastating anguish of people who are stressed to live on in the fast-paced surroundings of a modern city. It depicts the economic anxiety of the marginalized deprived by asking them to sell their organs for a profit to the rich people. The play takes advantage of the policy of ‘futurization’ to tell the story of contemporary reality in an indirect way, as it is a work of ‘science fiction’. The situation of the helpless people of a developing country is depicted in the story. In the futuristic city, we see the new lifestyle of urban India: an aimless search for ‘equipment’, a general dependency on TV, and an addiction to modern props. In addition to these topics, Padmanabhan in addition highlights the troubles shaped by overpopulation in urban areas as she mentions organ trade, prison-like living circumstances, parents’ favouritism toward employed children, and women’s plight. The play Harvest explores not merely the postcolonial circumstances but also the process of neo-colonization. It sheds light on overseas procurers’ influence over third-world organ donors. The writer thus expresses subaltern survival of city dweller who is subjected to scarcity and manipulation in order to survive. In this game, the city is a separate entity. It initially fascinates the individual, but it eventually deceives them in its malicious spirals.
Keywords: Utopia, Dystopia, Postmodern, Urban, Neo-colonial.
Introduction:
Cities serve up as a space contractor for shelter, luxury, desire for a home, nostalgia, vision, fantasies, myth, fear, crime, estrangement, attraction, disease, dishonesty, excitement, disorder and menace to the socio-political, spiritual, and financial systems. Poets, dramatists, fiction and non-fiction writers, explicit novelists, voyage writers, and other documentarians commencing India began to center on two different aspects as innermost to the recognition of urban literature, where the position and collision of cities had began to be vibrantly portrayed and predictable. However, it should be renowned that certain cities in India be present mainly as an effect of their spiritual congregations and those celebrated Indian epics such as The Mahabharata and The Ramayana can be seen to attribute socio-cultural and sacred bases that are occasionally chronological, but frequently mythological re-imagined.
The play Harvest by Manjula Padmanabhan is set in the future, but it shows the horrible enforcement depression of individuals need wealth to survive in today’s challenging urban surroundings. The drama depicts the compulsion with which underprivileged people trade their organs. It presents a bleak future for deprived, immobilized people in developing nations. The play takes place to Bombay in 2010 AD while the trade of human organs is a recurrent practice. The play emphasizes on the suburbanites’ mingled esteem and dread of their method of life, as well as their rising fascination with electronic gadget. The organ donors, who were chiefly single-room occupants in a overcrowded Indian metropolis, trade their body parts to rich persons through worldwide approved and permitted agents. They mistake wealth for happiness because they lack fundamental human necessities.
A sense of importance and imminent though Padmanabhan has utilized as a innovative liberty to portray the deprivation practiced by deprived city dwellers in the twenty-first century, it is distinguish that she came up by way of the thought for Harvest through a meeting with her sister in Madras in early on 1995, when she was acquainted with the atrocious actuality of the trade-in of human organs while taking a morning walk around the town. In her article “The Story of Harvest” (1998), Padmanabhan describes how she observed numerous men in dress gowns and sterilized maw masks on a holiday to her sister in Madras in early 1995, which inspired her to write this piece. When she enquired further, she was already informed that they were deprived Tamil Nadu villagers recovering from kidney transplant operations. Later news items on the thriving organ trade inspired her to write about a frantic pursuit for immortality through cannibalism the corpses of the young and needy. Dystopia in the City on the surface, the drama is all about Om Prakash, he mislaid his job and lives with his family in a one-bedroom residence. He chooses to trade indefinite organs to a prosperous American woman named Ginni through a corporation called Inter Planta Services in order to obtain cash and soothe for his relatives. Inter Planta and the earpiece are worried with Om’s health and, as a consequence, have complete control over Om, his mother, and his wife Jaya’s lives in their one-room residence. Ginni, the beneficiary, checks in on them through videophone on a regular basis and act with them with contempt. Om’s sick brother Jeetu is first transported to contribute organs in place of Om, and then Om volunteers to see Ginni, who is portrayed as a seductive white woman. Ginni ultimately reveals herself to be somebody than what she was thought to be. Ginni is revealed to be Virgil, an elderly man in poor health.
The play’s underlying premise is rich in significance and depth, and it serves as a parable for the current socio-economic situation in third-world nations, particularly India, where organ selling is a familiar owing to increasing require for donated organs, elevated financial productivity, and unimpeded trafficking. Every recorded example of illicit body part harvesting and sale is motivated by profit, with little or no protection for victims of those whose bodies have sold as solitary portion at a time. Padmanabhan eloquently depicts the apathetic character of city inhabitants. All convicts have deceived family unit members and or lovers, and perhaps more importantly, they have violated their kindness, in their empty desire for riches, the instant inmate began achieving the console and the fake promises of alteration. Even their own blood Jeetu was overlooked by the mother and son Om. Om and Jeetu have a striking resemblance, as depicted by the dramatist. Om signed a contract with InterPlanta to make his body a commodity on the international market, whereas Jeetu in the present play is a prostitute who is selling his body for sexual enjoyment. As an effect, both guys were busy in the similar action.
Manjula Padmanabhan addresses the association among sexuality and cultural dissimilarity at the end of this soul-stirring narrative, addressing the oriental representation of alien, sexually attractive; so far possibly hazardous ‘Other’ that is unmoving prevalent in western discourse. Yet in the desire for Utopia by people from the Third State, the play implies that supposed Utopian world, where everyone shares the similar place with identical human rights, is difficult to achieve. Harvest speculate on the bumpy prepositions public by western cultures and third-world countries, as societal differences such as race, class, and colors are flattering less relevant than physical resemblance and adaptation. When the body is reduced to its functional organs, it becomes a wonderful leveler. In the play, the body becomes a contestation space wherever the colonial theater unfolds.
When we consider the title of the play Harvest, we can observe that the sound has a romantic connotation, as it is connected with affluence, abundance, profusion, the age of enlargement, and springy in many cultures. Not only that, but it is always associated with a spiritual entity that represents mother nature’s blessing, whether it be Maa Annapurna from Hindu mythology, Demeter from Greek mythology, or Ceres from Roman mythology. However, the play has taken a significant step forward in language growth, demonstrating the usage of ancient terminology in new but harmful ways. Organs are being harvested here. This is also indicative of the overpopulation problem in third-world countries. In the uber-medical environment, where bodily organs exercise power and money, the drama reverberates the idea of cannibalism of the body. So, in order to conceal the wicked act of neo-cannibalism in a contemporary urban environment, the word cannibalism is replaced with the distant added optimistic expression Harvest. Harvest’s science fiction rudiments, while important to the play’s tightly organized description, are kept mainly inside the confines of late twentieth century reality, ensuring the outlook shown is plausible.
Cultures’ human being and substance capital is exemplified by Padmanabhan’s take on the matter. Harvest’s macabre trade resembles its imperial forerunners in this regard, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which proverb millions of colored bodies bought, sold, and traded for the advantage of European mercantile expansionism. The current trade in organs is situated within a range of unequal cross-cultural linkages due to these resonances between previous and present forms of the human body and or body part trafficking. The historical analogies are strengthened by the fact that IP services also manage a worldwide sexual market, which includes trade in exotic infants. F. the Play’s Postmodern Approach Harvest might thus be understood as a warning story concerning the potential (mis)uses of modern medical and reproductive research, as well as an indication on the financial and communal legacies of western imperialism, particularly when they interconnect with latest technologies. Padmanabhan uses the constantly fraught metaphor of cannibalism to distil some of the moral dilemmas presented by organ commerce with deft sarcasm. Om’s insult that Jeetu has been transferred to a human game reserve where the wealthy hunt socially disadvantaged people effectively prefigure cannibalism’s connotative reach such that it now refers to traits of developed rather than savage nations. Sofar as it is aggravated by a fable of renaissance—the reinstatement of infancy and completeness—the western cannibalism of third-world bodies in harvest has a ritualistic element. When Jeetu’s organs were transplanted into Ginni/Virgil, it’s not just a medicinal operation; metaphorical ‘money’ as well flows from the youthful, insolvent, and gorgeous to the old, wealthy, and hideous.
At other stage, the play’s indictment of a dehumanized Indian culture, which is depicted in microcosm through the vicious conflicts within the Prakash family, is heightened by the cannibalism metaphor. Harvest’s story also uses disease as a metaphor for the moral evils of a civilization driven by greed and self-interest to the point that a lucrative trade in body parts has become the norm. The sickness metaphor, on the other hand, works in a complicated way. It’s possible that the dirty world outside the sanitized Prakash housing unit is preferable to the sterile environment in which Om, Ma, and Jaya will be compelled to reside once their Interplanta contract kicks in.Jeetu’s presence precipitates a breakdown in the fragile connection between Donors and Receivers when he enters the unit covered in muck and grime and weeping sores: because he epitomizes the possibility of infection, he disturbs the tightly regulated Receiver world’s power and authority. As she lovingly treats Jeetu’s wounds, Jaya’s revolt against her cruel family and the demands of the system in which they have gotten engaged creates one of the play’s few sympathetic moments. Padmanabhan addresses the relationship between sexuality and cultural difference at the end of this unsettling narrative, addressing the concept of the exotic, sexually attractive, but potentially dangerous other that still exists in western discourse.
Jaya refuses to be a social gathering to a contract that efficiently puts Virgil in manages of her sexuality, just alike she had formerly rejected to repress her sexual requirements by playing the sedate wife of Om. As an effect, Jaya’s order that Virgil meets her in person before she considers his proposal serves as a broader challenge to Western civilizations to set aside harmful stereotypes and compulsive uncertainties of contagion in order to interact with other cultures on a more equal and respectful basis. From a postcolonial viewpoint, the play raises a significant question about the characters’ battle with choice. In this situation, their identities as deprived third-world people drive them to do desperate decisions. In both public and political discourse, it is critical to study the formation of both manliness and femaleness in the expression of cultural and national identity. This raises the question of what happens to men, male bodies, and masculinity notions in the postcolonial public sphere’s discursive articulation of nationalism. It’s also worth noting how male bodies were depicted and refashioned in the wake of postcolonial nationalism’s formation of contestation. Both the male characters Om and Jeetu are in a circumstance where their masculinity is threatened by their poverty. A woman is little more than a ‘body’ for enjoyment in a patriarchal society. Similarly, the play transfers the binaries of male and female to the third and first worlds, with third-world people playing the role of females whose primary identity is limited to their bodies.
Om sells his body, while Jeetu works as a male prostitute; therefore both of them are portraying themselves as female substitutes. The dehumanization of the poor continues, as we discover, ironically, that Jaya’s identity is reduced to her womb. This marginalization of third-world individuals is accomplished through challenging their traditional constructs of family, relationship, culture, and habitual practices, resulting in a theatrical battle between the identities of “East Vs. West” or, more specifically, India versus the West. The play follows a symmetrical pattern, with India’s projection limited to the body and a poor viewpoint, while the west is projected indirectly through a virtual picture due to money, power, and technology, all of which obstruct reality. This virtual world is an intriguing place that caters to enticing stereotyped young white women who attract brown men. Ginni gains the diaphanous status as a result of this. Ginni, who are you? Because there is a lot of sexual uncertainty throughout the play because, despite the fact that Ginni is portrayed as a (young attractive) white woman, it is only in the final scene that the playwright reveals Ginni’s true identity as an old white male. As a result, the female body serves as a site of contestation for both the colonizer and the colonized. Ginni’s persona reveals a lot about first-world projection. Ginni appears in numerous positions under this shady alias. She is a coloniser as well as the virtual reality of a superior species manufactured by doctored images.
The play depicts the blurring of limitations and the control of the west above third-world nations, with Ginni installing a virtual platform to contact Om, but it was in fact firm observation for Om and his whole family, despite the fact that only he had signed the Faustian pact with IP services. In a shocking turn of events, the guards abduct Jeetu instead of Om, and when he returns, he is utterly blind. Under the thrall of a potential sexual enchantment with Ginni, Jeetu becomes oblivious to the idea that he will be robbed of his body organ by organ. Nobody cares about Jeetu’s situation, not even his mother Ma, who is fascinated by the dramatic turn of events in her life, and watching television becomes her main pastime. Ginni/Virgil, who is desperate to reclaim his youth, is dissatisfied with the transplants from Jeetu’s body and sets out to seduce Jaya, because the elderly man with youthful transplants desires youthful female flesh at the moment. Jaya, who couldn’t bear the thought of being a wife to Om, who will lose his essential organs, wants her guy to be genuine. Virgil, on the other hand, is unwilling to risk physically entering Jaya’s disease-ridden world.
Conclusion
Harvest is not just a societal critique, but it also delves into the relationships between people from different countries. It emphasizes the neo-colonial market while also focusing on the blurring of political and psychological borders. The play explores the breakdown of societal and family relationships as a result of increased consumer product consumption and unending human materialistic pursuits; on the other side, it also depicts the operation of progressed countries in increasing countries to endorse consumerism for mercenary purposes.
Ginni’s physical flaws and wealth, as well as Om’s physical beauty and poverty, make them equal competitors. Om and his family are no longer on the oppressed end of the power equation because of their common needs. When Virgil, Ginni’s real self, begs Jaya to substitute his child, Jaya requests that he come in self to get her. Jaya is depicted as a powerful woman who prefers and chooses the real world over the virtual. Women’s bodies are frequently used to represent civilization, custom, society, and nation. Padmanabhan, through the character of Jaya, challenges the colonized world’s viewpoint by presenting the colonized world’s reverse gaze. So Padmanabhan has portrayed the dystopian image of the Future Indian through this play and has explored the terrible prospect of the third-world nations identical to harvest.
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