Harvest

First World

The United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Western European nations and their allies represented the First World

Second World

The Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and their allies represented the Second World.

Third World

It referred to the developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America

[Latin America includes all the Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking nations located to the south of the United States. The countries share significant similarities because they were colonized either]

Harvest is a play by Manjula Padmanabhan concerned with organ-selling in India set in the near future. It was first published in 1997 by Kali for women. Harvest won the 1997 Onassis Prize as the best new international play. The play was published by Aurora Metro Books in 2003. It is a critique of the commoditization of the third world body.

Harvest is a darkly comic and unsettling tale of globalism and organ harvesting in India. Harvest poses a potent critique about how the “first” world cannibalizes the “third” world to fulfill its own desires. The play is set in the future, at a time when multinational companies have gone to the Third World not for software, minerals or fabric, but to harvest organs for their rich customers in America. It’s about India and the gritty Third World reality. Harvest is set in 2010 when a destitute nation will be openly preyed upon by the richer superpowers who have amassed everything. Harvest is a futuristic play about the sale of body parts and exploitative relations between developed and developing countries.

The play is an ironic, sci-fi examination of the relations between developing and developed countries. Set in the imminent future, Harvest imagines a grisly pact between the first and third worlds, in which desperate people can sell their body parts to wealthy clients in return for food, water, shelter and riches for themselves and their families. As such, it is a play about how the “first” world cannibalizes the “third” world to fulfill its own desires.

Harvest is a dark, bitter, savagely funny vision of the cannibalistic future that awaits the human race...a parable of what will happen when the rich denizens [a foreigner allowed certain rights in their adopted country] of the First World...begin to devour bits and pieces of the Third World poor. Harvest poses a potent critique about how the “first” world cannibalizes the “third” world to fulfill its own desires.

Summary

The play is set in the future, at a time when multinational companies have gone to the Third World not for software, minerals or fabric, but to harvest organs for their rich customers in America. It’s about India and the gritty Third World reality. Set in the imminent future, Harvest imagines a grisly pact between the first and third worlds, in which desperate people can sell their body parts to wealthy clients in return for food, water, shelter and riches for themselves and their families. As such, it is a play about how the “first” world cannibalizes the “third” world to fulfill its own desires.

The play confronts us with a futuristic Bombay of the year 2010. Om Prakash, a jobless Indian, agrees to sell unspecified organs through InterPlanta Services, Inc. [a multinational corporation] to a rich person in first-world for a small fortune. InterPlanta and the recipients are obsessed with maintaining Om's health and invasively control the lives of Om, his mother Ma, and his wife Jaya in their one-room apartment. The recipient, Ginni, periodically looks in on them via videophone and treats them condescendingly. Om's diseased brother Jeetu is taken to give organs instead of Om.

In Harvest, Om, a just-laid-off breadwinner [(of an employer) To dismiss (workers) from employment, e.g. at a time of low business volume, often with a severance package.] for a struggling Indian family living in a cramped Bombay tenement, decides to sell his organs to a shadowy company called Interplanta in hopes of reversing his financial plight. Om’s family is monitored around the clock, receiving frequent video phone-type inquiries and directives from the supposed organ recipient, an icy young blonde named Ginni. Om’s mother falls into a stupor, constantly absorbed by programs on the TV provided by Interplanta. The family’s lives continue to go awry. The play may be set in the future, but it reflects contemporary conditions as well. India, one-third the size of the United States, has three times the population and almost 30 percent of its employable labor force is out of work, and the country’s biggest problems are overpopulation and inadequate education.

The story, centers on Om who had recently become jobless. Joblessness, desperation, cynicism are the defining national sentiment. Om, a just-laid-off breadwinner for a struggling Indian family living in a cramped Bombay tenement, decides to sell his organs to a shadowy company called Interplanta in hopes of reversing his financial plight. The family portrait is an archetypal picture of dissolution and decay. It is into this world of disorder that Inter Planta Services brings apparent order and respectability when Om signs up to be an organ donor for an American woman named Ginni because there are no other jobs available for him in Mumbai. As the family’s life becomes more comfortable, their relationships become more strained than they ever were in their poverty, and eventually the whole family is at risk of losing not only body parts but their souls and identities as well. The corporation, personified as three anonymous, masked guards dressed all in white, gradually takes over every aspect of their lives.

Guards arrive to make his home into a germ-free zone. Om’s family is monitored around the clock, receiving frequent video phone-type inquiries and directives from the supposed organ recipient, an icy young blonde named Ginni. Ginni pays him to lead a “clean” and “healthy” life so she can harvest healthy organs whenever she needs them. Ginni begins to control every aspect of Om’s life, from when and what he eats to whom he sees and how he uses the bathroom. In fact, Ginni comes to control the entire family until the end of the play.

There occurs a radical change to their dingy room and it acquires an air of sophistication. The most important installation however, is the contact module placed at the centre of the room to facilitate communication between the receiver and the donor. The contact module and the apparent order brought in by Inter Planta seem to create turmoil in personal relationships. The donor and his family is kept under the constant gaze of the receiver as the module can rotate round to face each corner and can flicker to life at any moment. Ginny compares Om’s flat to a “human goldfish bowl” (Harvest 43) which she can observe and amuse herself with. The concept of the design is to allow a watchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without their being able to tell whether they are being watched or not. Thus the inmates of the Third world are trapped under the unrelenting gaze of the First world. This total deprivation of privacy can be interpreted as the ultimate form of surveillance.

Om’s diseased brother, Jeetu, is taken to give organs instead of Om, and the recipient, Ginni, turns out to not be what she initially seemed. In a final act of defiance, the seeds of rebellion flower in a “checkmate” ploy by Om’s wife, Jaya.

Om’s younger brother has abandoned the family homestead [The dwelling house and its adjoining land] and earns his upkeep as a bi-sexual sex worker, Om’s mother has been frayed [(of a person's nerves or temper) showing the effects of strain] by years of want and penniless living. So much so, she sees nothing amiss with her son’s trade-off, [an exchange where you give up one thing in order to get something else that you also desire.] as long as she gets her long-desired television set, her fridge, her microwave and all the other things that money can buy.

Om, on his part, is too smitten by the beautiful blonde — his buyer from across the seven seas — that keeps staring down at him from the television screen and drives him queasy [sick/unsettled] with her tantalizingly delivered sermons.

When Jeetu, his brother returns unexpectedly, he is taken as the donor. Om can’t accept this. He leaves to get back his position as the donor. Jaya, his wife is left alone. She was seduced into selling her body parts, for use by the rich westerners. Jaya, the sensitive young wife seems to have somehow managed to retain her not-for-sale soul despite the overarching gloom.

Characters

Being an uneducated lower middle class woman, with no means of earning a livelihood, she represents a large chunk of the female population who go through life as financial dependents on men.

“Ma” in Padmanabhan’s Harvest. All of them had to lead submissive lives with their husbands. They were subjected to humiliation and even physical abuse. Consequently, they now take revenge by wielding power over their sons and daughters-in-law. They provoke their sons into ill-treating their wives and derive sadistic pleasure from this.

“Ma in Padmanabhan’s Harvest hates her daughter-in-law, Jaya, and lavishes all her love on her elder son, Om. But as a result of her over concern, Om turns out to be a weak-willed, cowardly, spineless man.

This gives rise to a dual personality in such women, sycophancy toward the male holding the purse strings and tyranny toward the other dependents.

While Om (the earning member) is addressed with endearments such as “my only delight”, Jaya, her daughter in law and Jeetu, her younger unemployed son, are abused. “ho-you”,“barren dog”, “pimping rascal”, “soul’s disgrace” are some of the words she uses for them. Oppression can warp, undermine, turn us into haters of ourselves

But this kind of survival comes at the cost of loosing ones self and one can survive only by developing a sense of detachment to people and surroundings. By the end of the play Ma is “through caring for or about anybody ”. Even when the guards drag Jeetu away (mistakenly) for his organs, she is interested only in watching T.V. The distaste which women feel for their restricted life is well dramatized in the method that Ma chooses to escape from this kind life. She buys a Super Deluxe Video Coach. Once she lies down in it tubes are attached to a recycling and bio-feeding processor that takes care of all her needs. Ma, who appears a tyrant but is herself a victim of a repressive patriarchal society chooses to cut herself off mentally and physically from it. She chooses total silence as a route of escape.

A miniature version of the panoptic [seeing the whole at one view] system can be perceived in Om’s mother’s total absorption in the fantasy world. She willingly shuts herself off from all outward manifestations of life. She is unmoved even as she sees her son Jeetu being taken away by the guards for an organ transplant by mistake. The Super Deluxe Video Couch she orders for herself is representative of her self-imposed withdrawal. Om’s mother’s renunciation of the world is complete, unhesitating and unquestioning. She chooses for herself electronic annihilation [extinction].

Jaya

The gest which underlines the effects of the vice like grip of poverty and patriarchy is where Jaya angrily wipes off the kum-kum mark on her forehead saying “ my forehead burns, when I say the word sister”, when she comes to know that Om, without her knowledge, has declared her as his sister to the company employing him to donate his organs.

Jaya, in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest, is the only person to survive the power play between the First World and Third World countries. While her husband and brother-in-law give up the fight soon, and her mother-in-law succumbs to the material charms offered, Jaya alone maintains her identity and establishes her right to be thought of as a human being.

Om does this to circumvent the precondition of the company that the donor has to be unmarried. This gesture, usually associated with widowhood, is useful in making the audience critique the mental anguish of Jaya who does this when her husband is still alive.

Out of a job for over two years and hemmed into a tiny house, the couple are increasingly frustrated over the quality of their lives when Om finally gets an interview call for a job.
The catch being that it is from a company, Interplanta Services, that promises a luxurious life in exchange for signing up as an organ-donor for its wealthy clients.

For Jaya the word ‘sister’ being used in connection to herself and Om is like a death knell to her marital relationship. Her actions create an empathy in the audience as it is on the basis of this relationship, a large part of her identity, that Jaya is living in that home. The pain that this distortion of relationships causes is reinforced when Ma says “ But these aren’t words! They are people”. The word ‘sister’ negates the very foundation of her life and so the gest forms a point of enquiry into the circumstances forcing Om to take such a decision. For a person like Om, unemployed and struggling to provide two square meals to his family, calling his wife ‘sister’ on paper is a small price to pay if it ensures financial solvency. The gest problematizes the desperate situation in modern day society which forces a man to choose between being cut up/ dying one day at a time and abject poverty.

When Jaya’s life seems to be at stake. Jaya comes to know that she has been the actual target of the organ buyer, Virgil, and that after using the bodies of both Om and Jeeten, he is now intent on impregnating her with his seed mechanically to propagate his race, irrespective of her wishes.

Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest tells the futuristic story of a family in a third world country which becomes the “donor” for a member of a first world country. Jaya, “passionate and spirited (2) is the only strong character in the play. No other character, except Jaya, shows any development. The play begins with Jaya and her mother-in-law waiting for the arrival of Om, Jaya’

What characterizes Jaya is her boldness. She is the only one bold enough to ask questions during the mtallation of the contact module and the food supply. She puts up a resistance as her kitchen utensils are thrown away. Being dissatisfied with her marital life, she seeks distraction with Jeetu. She is aware of her sexual urges and finds fulfilment with him. Her compassion for him :makesher take care of him when he comes back sick and covered with sores. Again, she is the only one to protest when Jeetu is taken away instead of Om.

It is in the final scene of the play that Jaya evolves into the towering figure. When Virgil appears before her as an illusion created by the contact module, in Jeetu’s body, Jaya realizes that Jeetu’s body has been used by Virgiltoprolong his life:. Virgil had observed Jaya through the module and had grown to admire her spirited nature. He needs Jaya-”We’re interested in women where I live, Zhaya (sic).Childbearing women“ (95).His country has lost the art of having children and is now in the process of getting bodies from poorer countries to populate it. He entices her with sweet words and with the promise of sensual pleasures to accept the implant which will make her insemination possible. However, though she wants to attain motherhood, she is not ready to get it by sacrificing her womanhood. She demands that if he needs her, he come to her in person. He refuses because her world would be a health hazard for him. She inslsts that she will not deal with a phantom any longer. Finally, she blackmails him by threatening him with suicide. The play ends with Jaya setting the terms and conditions. She will take pills for staying awake. If he does not come when she runs out of them, she will kill herself. ”. . . I’ll die knowing that you, who live only to win, will have lost to a poor, weak and helpless woman. And I’ll get more pleasure out of that first moment of death than I’ve had in my entire life so far!“ (102).

In the meantime, she tells him to learn to pronounce her name correctly. Thus, “her spirit remains unconquered even in the face of insurmountable odds” (Molly 30). The only way one can salvage one’s sense of pride and self- esteem is through a willingness to die if the need arises- and through great courage and self control. She fights for her rights as a woman and as a human being. The dramatist ends on a positive note “that hope still lies in this woman, a symbol of procreation’’ (Purohit45).

Thus, Jaya emerges victorious in this power play between man and woman. She does not succumb to the panoptic gaze of the contact module. The reproductive power of women, often seen as a debilitating factor, is made by the dramatist into a trump card. She seems to stress the point that in this matter woman will always score over man. “Penis envy” is supplanted by “womb envy”.

In an interview with Sunita Paul, Manjula Padmanabhan savs that the play talks of the power equation between the first world and the third world:

I hope it does try and address the duality of this relationship. It isn’t purely first world-third world, power-powerless. The power equation does flow back and forth. There is a dependence of the first world on the third world which is recognised in real life. As people living in the third world we are encouraged to think that we have nothing to give, but in fact even today, we are actually giving our minds, our body and our labour to the first world all the time. (39)

If we replace the first world with man, and the third world with woman, we have b3re the relation between them. What needs to be acknowledged is the interdependence of man and woman. In the same interview, Padmanabhan stresses this point: “The Ardhanarishwar concept appeals to me greatly. The idea of a joined consciousness that borrows from both sides” (41).

As Ma and Jaya await Om’s return, Jaya, knowing what the job entails, hopes that he will not.

Cyberculture’s influence

Cyberculture’s influence in our lives and its possible threat to human physical identity is well documented in Harvest. American Virgil, posing as Ginni, seduces and controls the Prakash family. He uses gadgets like the “Contact Module” or the “Video Couch” to disperse identity through “cybernetic circuits”. Both the receiver and the donor assume new identities in the digital arena. Harvest highlights important questions about “digitization” of identities and separation from the physical form. Can a body “vacated” of its owner be claimed by another? How is identity determined if cyberspace can disguise one’s gender, class or race to divest them of their unique markers? Problematization of identity in cyberspace is pivotal to the discourse of post colonialism. For marginalized bodies identity politics and suffering is rooted in the physical body. In Harvest, first world exploits the third world via wireless communication and unlimited money. Jaya sustains a postcolonial resistance to such capitalist domination. She claims her body, evocative of her dignity, through the corporeal limitation of death − the postcolonial Other’s triumph in the colonizer’s world of coercion and control.

The play “Harvest” contains political and social arrangements. Padmanabhan writes about a futuristic live in the year 2010, when legal, moral and bioethical debates about organ sales and transplants have been overcome. The title “Harvest” relates to human organs which are taken from people in the Third World within a fully institutionalised trade with body parts. The scientific technology has advanced far enough to enable the prolongation of human life by body-transplants. Om, a young Indian man suffering from poorness and unemployment, sells the rights to his body parts to a buyer from the Western world. In change for organs Om can improve the living standard of his family with enough food and household goods: a toilet, a shower and television, later a mini-gym and luxury items. Now they consume exciting technological products like the contact module. This science fiction module enables the family to communicate with the receivers.

Two opposite groups come into conflict in the play: on the one hand Om’s impoverished family consisting of his mother (Ma), his brother Jeetu and his wife Jaya, on the other hand the receivers Ginni and Virgil, from Northern America and the company InterPlanta Services, represented by three aggressive guards. These characters present the contemporary global distribution of power, because Western companies dominate citizens in Third World countries by economic relations. Ginni, a beautiful, young, computer animated woman, wants to longer her life by living in bodies of other humans. Finally Om’s brother Jeetu is taken against his will as a donor due to Ginni’s decision. This stresses the disrespect for donors. After all, Om prefers to be a donor and decides to submit to the power of the receivers although they don’t offer a self-determined life. In the end Jaya and Virgil, who is another receiver, fight via the contact module. Virgil lives now in Jeetu’s body and wants to impregnate Jaya virtually. She denies, but demands real closeness and trust. This means that Virgil should risk something for her and accept his mortality. However, Virgil wants to push through ruthlessly followed by Jaya’s threatening with suicide. The resistance of Jaya warns the reader or the audience that one has to act or to govern instead of being governed like Om, Ma and Jeetu.

Although the family members have the same enemies they don’t start a common initiative against them. A consensus among the family could weaken the power position of the receivers and the guards, but the selfish relatives always argue. The receivers and the guards don’t respect the dignity of the donors and treat them as anonymous group, more as goods than as human beings. Ginni equips the donor’s household with sanitary stuff and food for holding the organs healthy. The inhuman and brutal treatment becomes obvious when the guards catch Jeetu instead of Om as donor:

JEETU (as he runs) You fools! Can’t you see I’m not your man?

GUARD 1 (dodging around the others) Always the same story - no one wants to pay their dues. Come on! It’s hopeless to run away. (catches Jeetu) There - there! (as Jeetu struggles) I’ve got you now!

JAYA Don’t hurt him - don’t hurt him - oh he’s sick! Please!

GUARD 1 Resistance is useless. (starts to drag Jeetu kicking and struggling) we’ll have you knocked out in a second. (Padmanabhan 58)

Every individual interest was excluded in the name of the General Will. (42) Private life and psychic privileges are totally ignored by the receivers. They keep the family under surveillance through the contact module. The guards of the organisation InterPlanta Services function like an army for them. Nevertheless the deal with organs is seen as a chance by Ma and Om to improve their life. Ma, who is bored by real life, doesn’t protest against the danger for his sons and watches the whole day TV. Finally she orders a TV coach and stops having contact with anybody.

Padmanabhan reviews the problems that globalisation brings. While Third World countries have difficulties with misery, poverty and violence, Western nations are wealthy, use modern technologies and live with pleasure. Nevertheless this point is simplified, because the reality is more complex. In Padmanabhan’s play the commoditization of organs is a metaphor for socio-economic exchange. Nowadays numerous people in the Third World, also children, work for Western companies under bad conditions. That is a significant reason, why “Harvest” shows a scenario of neo-colonialism, even neo-cannibalism, where people from India are exploited by superior Western science fiction humans. It seems that Om makes a voluntary decision to be a donor, but he decides under pressure of unemployment, starvation and poorness. Maybe he even feels responsible for his mother and his wife, who both don’t work and haven’t a regular income. The family doesn’t care about an individual way within their cultural identity, but assimilates into the Western living standard. They don’t analyze the benefit of TV or the contract with InterPlanta Services. Instead they live in affluence what is a common wish in most economically underdeveloped nations.

Whereas utopian fiction describes happiness within an ideal or perfect place or state or any visionary system of political and social perfection, in dystopian fiction the reader is confronted with a creation of a horrible or degraded society. The ‘roots of all evil’ exist, because it is a dystopian play. It shows a negative picture of the future. Under pressure of unemployment and his bad living conditions Om decides to sell his body parts. He is not the only one who wants to be a donor. Many Indians apply for this “job” and Om is chosen through a long and strict procedure. we as individuals have a relationship with material things like property and money. As a result many people are greedy and cannot imagine a life without these things. In “Harvest” the meaning of money and property is very strong, what emphasizes its dystopian character. Especially Ma develops greed for property and consumption.

In conclusion, “Harvest” demonstrates the contrast between impoverished India and wealthy West. This dystopian play bases on political and social arrangements that are against human dignity. The organ market in “Harvest” functions like a new slave trade where nobody of the donors has the possibility of a free choice. ‘Roots of all evil’ in terms of Fredric Jameson like the greed for property and unemployment are an important part of the plot. Padmanabhan wants her readers and the audience to get aware of problems that globalisation and capitalism bring. She criticizes the exploitation of people in Third World countries by First World employers. Apart from this Padmanabhan shows the pressure applied to donors, furthermore the surveillance and violence that is used against the donor family. As a result the family members lose control over themselves. Finally, this lost of control of one’s life happens not only in the Third World but also in Western societies. Sometimes people in responsible positions exert a lot of pressure in order to accelerate decisions or to manipulate others. Therefore, everybody has to be careful when deciding important matters in life. Open communication with other people, enough information, support and education is necessary to avoid exploitation and mutilation of vulnerable human beings.

Manjula Padmanabhan's Harvest: a Study"

Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest: a Study The author Manjula Padmanabhan (b. 1953) is best known as a journalist, illustrator, cartoonist, and author of children’s books and short stories. She became a celebrity when her fifth play, Harvest (written in 1996; published in 1997), won the first prize in the first Onassis International Cultural Competitions for Theatrical Plays in 1997. The characters In the play the themes of economic exploitation, reification (=commodification) and acculturation are presented through the mercantile as well as surgical metaphor of body-parts transplantation. The Donors and the Receivers in the play represent the natives of the Third World and the First World respectively. The chief attraction for Virgil is of Jaya because she is the only person in that house capable of procreation and genuine emotion. There is a passing reference to a seer’s prediction that she would never become a mother. As prophecies are often equivocal, the curse on Jaya may be in fact indicative of her husband’s impotence. The illicit relationship with her brother-in-law must be seen as the manifestation of her irrepressible yearning to become a mother. Though her mother-in-law always finds fault with her sexual transgressions, she is the only character in the play who is true to herself. She desperately protests against the encroachment of colonial coercion and urban mechanization that enter in the form of the Guards and Agents. Her thirst for motherhood remains unquenched by the sham finger-play of her pitying brother-in-law. She is the only person who stands her ground in spite of the devious argumentations and warnings of Virgil. And she alone is fully conscious of the present condition: “It is not really a life any more. We’re just spare parts in someone else’s garage –” (34T). Ma Indumati Prakash, the mother of Om and Jeetu, represents the older generation, preoccupied with the petty concerns of their narrow world. Her self-centeredness matches that of Virgil, both being old and preying upon the young for the purpose of seeking pleasure at the personal level.

American	British
gas	petrol
rates	taxes
baggage	luggage
fall	autumn
faucet	tap

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