M
anjula Padmnabhan’s play Harvest (first published in 1996) won the first Onassis prize for the best new international play in 1997. Padmanabhan, in the introductory note to the play (published by Hachette India in 2020) states that her impulse to write this play came from stories of illegal organ trade. The play is an exploration of one of the ways humans are commodified in biomedical and capitalist discourse.
The action is set in the then future and almost entirely in a one-room house in a chawl, presumably in Mumbai. The characters are divided by the playwright into three groups: Donors, Receivers, and Guards and Agents. Each group also represents a sociocultural class. The donors are a family of four Indians who live in the chawl: Om Prakash, a twenty-year old who is currently unemployed and the only breadwinner in the family; his stay-at-home wife Jaya, 19; his brother Jeetu, 17, who works as a male prostitute and is very much the black sheep of the family; and Om and Jeetu’s mother, Ma (aka Indumati), who is 60 years old. The receivers are Ginni/Virgil (projected as two individuals but eventually revealed to be one and the same), who appear only on a screen to the family and are American. They never appear on stage in person, which helps to maintain the unbridgeable void between those who yield and those who take. The interface between the donors and receivers is a futuristic looking “Contact Module”, which may certainly have seemed far-fetched in 1997 but in the age punctuated by virtual meeting platforms, does not appear quite as futuristic. The three guards from Interplanta Services and the three agents from Video Paradiso are extensions of faceless corporations, and behave as such. Interplanta Services is a corporation that enables the rich (receivers) from the West to harvest organs, and indeed entire bodies, of the poor (donors) from the developing parts of the world. The guards are representatives of ludicrous bureaucracy that dehumanizes living, breathing, feeling humans, reduces them to names, files, and identification marks; Padmanabhan uses the term “clone” (187) for them. In return for ‘donating’, nay sacrificing their organs, the donors are compensated through material benefits that they could never have imagined acquiring otherwise. However, they are essentially treated as private farms for the rich, and are forced to maintain themselves in excellent health not for their own sakes but for their receivers’ benefit.
The story unfolds thus: Om signs up to be a donor at Interplanta Services, knowing fully well what the job entails but compelled by penury and the threat of starvation. Jaya initially tries to dissuade him, but the family’s material well-being assumes priority. Jeetu, who Jaya is having an illicit affair with, is ostracized by both Ma and Om because his profession makes him less than respectable. Jaya desperately wants to be a mother but has so far not been successful. Within this setting enters Ginni, the first receiver, who is projected as a blonde and very pretty white woman, whom Om falls in love with as the days go by. Ginni’s patronizing and condescending attitude towards Indians in general, and the family in particular, is quite evident. Nonetheless, the family more or less accepts her views because they are in thrall of the wealth coming their way. We learn towards the end of the play that the projection of the receiver is based on the donor’s (unconscious) sexual preferences to ensure their compliance. This is reminiscent of a regular science fiction trope, from Lester del Ray’s Helen O’Loy (1938) to the dystopian AI film Ex-Machina (2014) by Alex Garland.
The family quickly becomes used to the material and technological comforts provided to them, and begin to overlook all the other inconveniences caused by the job: social isolation, absolute obedience to the rules set by the receiver and the corporation, and the impending doom of harvest. The fateful day arrives when the guards come to collect, quite literally. By what appears to be an error, the guards take Jeetu instead of Om. Jeetu is eventually returned to the family blind, which means his eyes have been harvested. Jeetu now wears a futuristic looking optical device, through which he sees the semi-pornographic virtual-self of Ginni and nothing else. So tempted is he by this vision and her enticement that he agrees to donate his entire body to her. This is his exit from the play. Om, distraught that Ginni has ‘chosen’ Jeetu over him and ignores him now, leaves home to explain to Interplanta their mistake. By this time, Ma has become so addicted to TV that she had bought herself a ludicrous science fiction-worthy sarcophagus-looking entertainment module and is lost to the real world. Jaya, the only one left at home now, encounters Virgil, the second receiver, who reveals to her that it was him all along that needed the organs, and whose newest body is Jeetu’s (as also appears in his virtual avatar on screen). Ginni (the play on the name hints at duplicate identities) was just another avatar that was deemed to be pleasing to Om and Jeetu. Virgil unwittingly also reveals that the company knew all along that Jeetu was not Om, and the true purpose of the contract: that men’s bodies are harvested for their organs, while the donors are also constantly looking for young women’s bodies to impregnate so they can have children. Quite literally, “young women’s bodies in which to sow their children” (267). Jaya is sorely tempted by the offer but refuses to play along with this virtual make-believe. She threatens to kill herself if Virgil does not show up at her doorstep if he really wants her to be pregnant. The play closes with Jaya, who asserts herself and the physical nature of her body and being, and her absolute right over her own death if not her life.
There are three key constructs that the play explores: the body, the family, and class. Each construct intersects with the others along axes of power and desire. Since the primary theme of the play is the organs being harvested, donated, and received, the body is clearly a prominent element. The title of the play, the name of the company (Interplanta), and various dialogues make the metaphor of body as field quite evident. However, the play does not allow an escape with a metaphor. The body is literally harvested, or sowed into, and its physicality cannot be elided, nor can we overlook the violence done to the body. The mind of the donor does not matter. That is, Jeetu becomes ‘Jittoo’ (as Virgil pronounces his name), a hybrid being with Jeetu’s body but Virgil’s mind and memories. Of course, with the real-virtual interplay, one may wonder if Jeetu’s body as Virgil’s is another virtual illusion to please Jaya or something that physically was made possible. The script does not resolve this ambiguity.
Greatly germane to the body are questions of rights over one’s body, fear of violence inflicted on it, sexual desire, and survival. Hunger and poverty force Om to sign up to be a donor. Om’s description of the nature of the “interview” is the first hint of the centrality of the body. The Interplanta Services building, to his shocked eyes, appears as a “machine” (191) and a physically constraining “cage shaped like a tunnel” (192). Each person is made to unclothe themselves, get injected and sterilized (193), and their “physical data” matched with the receivers.
There are none of the usual steps of a job interview, no questions asked or answered, no test of intelligence or knowledge. The mind-body dichotomy is made evident through the absence of any mental faculty required for the job; the effect is one of denaturing humans, reducing them to physical beings who can be put to use for the benefit of the rich who can pay for their organs.
The guards refer to the pellet-like food provided to the donors and their family as “fuel” for the “maintenance of … personal resources” (196). Even the body, whose organs will be given one by one or all at once whenever the need arises, at the whim of the receiver, is reduced to a set of parts. The sum total of man is now the parts that he gives up to let another live in/through is body. Virgil reveals to Jaya that Jeetu’s is his fourth body in fifty years. He says: “my voice is but the latest tenant in a house you have known” (268).
This transaction of bodies enables the Prakash family to experience material comfort they had never dreamed of. Within two acts, the scene, without shifting, is transformed. From a barely furnished room, it becomes filled with furniture and gadgets, objects of comfort (air-conditioning), entertainment (the TV), and health (a treadmill). Ginni even insists on running water and a bathroom being installed in this tiny space, something that should be a basic amenity but is a luxury given the family’s circumstances. The fear of losing organs and of death is often overshadowed by the fear of losing this material comfort.
Contrasted to Om’s selling his body to Ginni is Jeetu’s claim of autonomy over his body even though he is a prostitute. Jeetu claims that while he sleeps with anyone who can pay him enough, he and his body are not “owned” by anyone (213). The body here is one in daily transactions of money and sexual fulfilment, but this is the body defiantly its own. However, after his eyes are harvested, he returns a broken man left with no desire to live any longer. Ginni’s seductive image and her environs prove so powerful that his sexual desire for her culminates in his own willing annihilation.
Sexual desire is a key element the play explores. Jaya’s desire for Jeetu is as much for satiety as it is to conceive a child. Her marriage to Om has been strained for a while, and perhaps the strain is exacerbated by her not conceiving a child. Om’s desire to please Ginni is a mix of the fear of losing their newly acquired affluence and sexual love for her, although her body is never obtainable. Like a mirage, Ginni’s body remains just out of reach but it constantly exerts its pull on him. Jaya needs to remind him often of the illusion that is Ginni, because she herself puts faith in the tangible. When Om first betrays his desire for Ginni, she calls him the chicken that is dinner for Ginni, and when rendered catatonic by fear when the guards come to take him for donation (and take Jeetu instead), she calls him a cabbage (236). He is effectively a vegetable ripe for the picking but also a person reduced so much that he is not fully human anymore.
The family’s relationships with each other are just as critical to the emotional import of the play. Common internal squabbles carry on about money, progeny, division of work, expectations, fulfilment (or not) of sexual desires, and the legitimacy and illegitimacy of (romantic) relationships. The opening dialogue, for instance, is an almost stereotypical clash between Ma and Jaya. Ma taunts Jaya about her childless status and hints that she knows of the latter’s affair with Jeetu. Jeetu’s profession is alluded to. The word “respectable” appears several times in this context. Jaya, however, is not one to take it lying down, and often asserts herself. She cares for Om, and all the same, desires and perhaps also loves Jeetu. Jeetu, it appears, began this liaison with her in exchange for food, but once he has suffered a near-death experience, experiences genuine attachment to her. In the end, though, he chooses to die for Ginni, whom he can see through his device, while Jaya has become invisible. Jaya’s conflicted feelings between her husband and her brother-in-law are expressed but she never offers justification for being attracted to the latter. Her affair does not satisfy her fully because she has not got pregnant. The trope of body as a field and production is alluded to when Jaya tells Jeetu she wants a “plough, not a lance” and he retorts he can’t afford to have any “crops” (212). This is significant for the denouement, when Virgil offers her precisely this, and she refuses. Having a child is less important than her right over her own preferences and desires.
Jaya also does not hold back in berating Om for making the choice to sell himself to the contract. When she chides him for making her “a widow by slow degrees” (203) as his organs are taken away one by one, Om explodes that he has done all this for the family. There is a degree of duplicity in this: is it entirely for the sake of keeping the family afloat or was it greed that finally pushed him over? He begins to believe the narrative spun by the company and Ginni to the extent that when Jeetu shows up two months after the contract has begun, injured, tattered, covered in muck, Om uses the guards’ language: his “permit to live with us was surrendered” (224), and he is now a “health hazard” (225). Ma, who is excessively fond of Om and disparaging towards Jeetu supports Om in wanting to throw Jeetu out immediately so as to not jeopardize the inflow of wealth. Jaya is the only one opposes this eviction. Biomedical words like “incinerate”, “disinfect”, and “disease” are now part of the family’s vocabulary, highlighting how much their own bodies are now the focus of their existence.
The play does not create black and white characters. Ma loves Om but her increasing addiction to TV makes her completely oblivious to her family and even herself. Jeetu is a prostitute who asserts his body’s rights. Om is a stand-up character who sells his body for the sake of his family, but allows greed get the better of him and falls in love with a virtual person. He openly avows to keep himself healthy for Ginni, yet when the guards come to collect him, he hides in a corner for fear of death and injury. Jaya loves Om and Jeetu, and fiercely opposes both Om’s decision to take up the job, and cares for an injured Jeetu. After his eyes are harvested, Jeetu, in despair, wants to leave home and kill himself, and Jaya is the one to stop him. Not because she loves him, but because if he leaves, the guards will think Om has run away and they will stop giving them money (246). Jeetu begins with mocking the deal Om has signed, but then falls in love with Ginni. Om, once afraid for his life, runs voluntarily to Interplanta at the end to sacrifice himself.
Within the family, Jaya emerges as the central character: she does not fall into the virtual reality trap like Om and Jeetu do, and insists that she will communicate with Virgil only if he comes to her in person, although he claims that his virtual avatar (Jeetu) will be very pleasing to her. On screen, she can see Jeetu’s body but a changed demeanour, and that is enough to convince her of the illusory nature of this communication. She senses the alienation in how Virgil says, “I’m your Jittoo now” (264). She calls the image a “ghost” (264) and that she knows the “one to whom this…body belonged” is “dead”; Virgil relies on the old paradox of the ship of Theseus, and counters her claim by saying it depends on how one defines death (265). “Jeetu was paid in phantoms” Jaya says, and refuses to be led down the same path. Virgil is the epitome of omnipresent surveillance: he knows Jaya’s deepest desires, as he did Om’s and Jeetu’s. He also knows Jeetu was not taken by mistake. There is no privacy of thought or action. This makes Jaya’s final rebellion that much more effective.
Jaya is so tempted by the offer of having a child that she almost agrees to Virgil’s proposition (268). She baulks only when she discovers that the guards are already at the door with an impregnating device and Virgil knows about her ovulation cycle but he himself cannot come to her because in spite of all the technological advances, the environment of India is too polluted for him. He offers her whatever she wants within the space of the room, a complete virtual immersion with him if she likes, which she dismisses as make-believe and therefore fake.
Their final dialogue is a battle of real versus virtual. If the body is a transactional entity, Jaya makes her own the most important. She threatens to kill herself if the guards break into the house or trouble her in any way (272). If Virgil wants her to bear a child, her only condition is that he must come in person, as a physical being. When Virgil says she cannot win by dying, she replies “But I’ll die knowing that you, who live only to win, will have lost to a poor, weak and helpless woman” (273). Since she has lost her family, there is nothing worth saving anymore; only her own death and pride are still within her control (272). She also corrects Virgil’s (and Ginni’s) pronunciation of her name: it’s not “Zhaya”, it is “Jaya”. She closes the play with these words: “I’m going to take my pills, watch TV, have a dozen baths a day, eat for three instead of one. For the first time in my life, and maybe the last time in my life, I am going to enjoy myself, all by myself” (273). This nineteen-year-old girl who has never known luxury or ease, will now, for a few fleeting days, enjoy herself as she never has, though at the end of it may be death. This defiance is not a celebration of individual triumph. Ultimately, it is a very tiny and impermanent snag in a vicious and overpowering system that disempowers people like her.
Virgil reveals to Jaya that “We support poorer sections of the world, while gaining fresh bodies for ourselves” (267).
There is no moral dilemma here, no question of right and wrong. It is simply a matter of optimal survival, in a place where the only goal is for each individual to lengthen their own lives and health.
Padmanabhan states that the play is not about India versus the West, or about Indians being poor; rather, it is about a universal relationship between the rich and the poor and makes “a universal point about use and abuse between people and cultures” (184). We could quite easily extrapolate the (poor) Indian- (rich) Westerner divide to encompass the current and rapidly increasing distances between the rich and poor in India itself. Ample statistics show that India’s elite are becoming richer than before, and the poor are getting poorer. India’s rich are already (spatially) seceding from the India of a majority of the population in the form of gated communities, private schools, high-end supermarkets and malls, and now access to technology that enables many to stay secluded while still being in the top economic bracket. It is not such a stretch of the imagination to see the dystopia of the play become a reality. If so far, the poor have sold their bodies as cheap labour, and sometimes been compelled to actually sell organs in the black market, the play stretches the point some more. The difference is of degree, not kind.
This exploitation is served with a dollop of irony. The guard from Interplanta Services thanks Om for his contribution “towards creating a healthier, happier and longer-lived world!” (199), which is the world of the receivers, a world he is unlikely to ever see or visit or live in. Ginni says colds are eradicated from where she lives, so she cannot afford to let Om or his family catch a cold either because that would compromise the transplant and require quarantine (221). The incongruity of the two worlds remains steady.
Distance between the two classes is made evident and poked fun at through stereotypes. Ginni’s pronunciation of Indian names (“Auwm Praycash” and “Zhaya”) as well as her patronizing attitude of the Global South, is ripe for critique. She equates talking to one family as “talking to India” (204), a simplistic flattening of the other. She is also shown to be paranoid about sanitation standards in India and distrusts the family’s surroundings and habits. As days go by, she becomes increasingly demanding in terms of obedience, and she does not hesitate to threaten or scold them or talk to them patronizingly if they do not keep to her standards: “you must eat at regular hours” and “confront your booboos”. She wants Jaya to smile all the time so that Om’s organs are “smiling”; not smiling is not an option.
She emphasizes on mutual trust, but given the power dynamic, what she wants in absolute obedience. She refers to them as “honey”, and reduces them to “human goldfish bowls”. They must all be present when she calls, doing exactly what they have been told. When Jaya breaks down, she offers comfort through chocolate and perfumes instead of apologizing for asking if they bathe every day. Ginni realises the shared bathroom situation in the chawl which she finds unacceptable. Installing a bathroom and running water in that tiny apartment is not to facilitate the family but to bring their sanitation habits to her level for her good. “It’s a wonder you’re not all dead of the plague years ago” (208), she exclaims. Ginni’s paranoia and condescension have to be not only tolerated but accepted because all the material comforts they have could disappear in a trice if she dislikes them. Of course, the impending disappearance of organs is the real threat but is sometimes overshadowed by the more immediate fear of loss of material wealth.
Om’s own register changes when speaking to Ginni, and it becomes more pronounced as the interactions proceed; he goes on to affect a nasal twang and says “howdy”. He calls his signing on to do this job “our duty” to far superior Westerner. This cringe-worthy servility is one aspect of complex interactions in the long shadow of colonialism. Om parrots Ginni in register and sentiment about the “Donor World”, the “not small, petty people” (229) of the West, while Indians “have no pride, no shame” (230).
The changes in the material conditions of the family are most obvious, and changes in their attitudes to each other, their neighbours, and towards the receivers as well change with their affluence. Act I opens with the barely furnished chawl room; by Act II, the room is transformed through the influx of material goods and technological gadgetry. The family is almost entirely without visitors, except Ma’s friend from the chawl, Bidyut Bai, who comes to use the bathroom. Ma lets her because she wants her friends to still be her friends. But with the rules set by Ginni and her fear of contamination by outsiders, the family becomes isolated from those around them. The precarity of this affluence, their isolation, and the impending threat of death makes the play all the more poignant.
The intermediary between the donors and the receivers is the Interplanta Services company, a faceless organization whose extensions are guards with stilted, cold and bureaucratic behaviour, and technology and surveillance, which is everywhere. When Jeetu is taken by error instead of Om, Om and Jaya wonder what Jeetu’s fate will be when they discover their mistake. The company can, of course, get away with murdering him since he is not “officially on their records.” Or they could just as easily sell him to “game sanctuaries” where the rich “hunt socially disadvantaged types” for sport. The company, therefore, presents the prospect of lucrative employment but the price to be paid for this is dehumanization at every level.
Technology, greed, and desire come together to create a dystopian mix that does away with moral questions within the play but compels the audience to wonder if we are rapidly exacerbating the terrible ills of economic inequity and unbridled power imbalances.
References: Padmanabhan, Manjula. “Harvest.” Blood and Laugher: Plays. Vol. 1. Hachette, India, 2020. Pp. 186-274. Padmanabhan, Manjula. “Introduction to Harvest.” Blood and Laugher: Plays. Vol. 1. Hachette, India, 2020. Pp. 183-185.
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Dr Pooja Sancheti is an Assistant Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Pune, India. Her current academic interests are South Asian Anglophone fiction, transnational literature, women’s writing, magical realism, and postcolonial theory. She is also an amateur Hindi-English translator. She also dabbles in the interdisciplinary domain of language and science and teaches EAP, a parallel research interest.
Manjula Padmanabhan in The Beacon
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