Bodies, Borders and Broken Futures: Dystopian Culture in Manjula Padmanabhan's Harvest

Author

K. Mrunalini


Abstract

 This paper explores the construct of dystopian culture in the Indian English writing in the light of the study of the play entitled Harvest by Manjula Padmanabhan for which she won the Onassis Prize for Theatre (1997). The play is set in the near future of Bombay in 2010, a world where poor Indian bodies are ‘rented', monitored and ultimately stripped for the benefit of a wealthy, unseen client in the West, enabling a worldwide organ-trading industry to thrive. While the Anglo-American dystopian fiction generally presents totalitarian states or environmental disaster, Padmanabhan is situated in the home interior of a lower-middle class apartment in Bombay where the family is the place of biopolitical extraction. It maintains that Harvest plays with the icons of Western dystopian and science fiction literature to epitomise very specifically postcolonial fears: the fetishization of the Third World body, the postcentric decline of family and sexual autonomy in corporate vision and management, and the domestication of nationhood under transnational capital. The research relies on textual analysis (with the aid of postcolonial theory, biopolitics, and feminist criticism) to investigate the central devices of the play: the Contact Module, the videocouch, and the donor recipient's disembodied voice of Ginni, as they represent technology as a new tool for colonial control, not liberation. The three research questions guiding the inquiry concern the indigenisation of the dystopian genre in the play, the staging of the body as contested postcolonial space, and the troubling of the logic of commodification by the figure of Jaya and the theme of gender and desire. The paper suggests that Padmanabhan's dystopia is a critical text about the unevenness of globalisation and provides Indian English literature with a language of imagining the future that is always tied to the unresolveable violences of the colonial past.

The paper uses the terms dystopian literature, Indian English drama, Manjula Padmanabhan, Harvest, postcolonialism, biopolitics, globalisation, organ trade, science fiction and gender.



Keywords

Dystopian culture, Broken futures, Borders, • Manjula Padmanabhan, Harvest (play), Organ trade / Organ trafficking



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References


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