Hardship and exploitation in Harvest by Manjula Padmanabhan

Harvest

Exploitation and Hardship in Harvest

The gap in living standards between those in the developed and developing spheres is substantial. And in the context of a global recession, this gap has only grown wider. Globalization has given us over to a concentrated form of socioeconomic exploitation within which wealthy Western nations strip poor Third World nations of their most precious resources. In this way, the global economy has come to be driven by the systematic deprivation of the Third World's critical commodities. This arrangement doesn't simply lower living standards and opportunities for those in the poorest parts of the world but also reinforces the notion that the wealthy are simply more entitled to these commodities and resources than are the poor. This arrangement is taken to its most absurd and disturbing ends in the 1997 play Harvest by Manjula Padmanabhan. Centering on the experience of Om, his wife Jaya, and his brother Jeeta, Harvest describes a frightening future world (now several years prior to the actual present date) where the poor citizens of the developing world can sell their organs to wealthy westerners for much needed cash. This terrible opportunity is what drives the action of Harvest, inducing a profound appreciation for the hardship and exploitation that are experienced by the world's poorest citizens and revealing the terrible choices that these citizens must sometimes make.

Discussion:

At its center, Padmanabhan's play is a frightening assessment of the relationship between poor and wealthy nations. Just as powerful nations like the United States venture out into the world to acquire petroleum, to set up low-cost production facilities in nations without labor protections, to engage in industrial operations in the developing sphere without concern for the environmental hazards, Harvest describes a world in which poor and desperate Indian citizens may offer up unspecified organs for sale to their western counterparts. Just as our general affluence and ethnocentrism has produced a sense of entitlement for the industrial and natural resources of any given poorer nation, Harvest suggests that this entitlement extends beyond even to the bodies and lives of the human beings that we've exploited.

According to Gonio (2006), the Padmanabhan play "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." (p. 1)

What is most compelling about the play is that the seemingly absurd and far-fetched world described by the playwright is not necessarily that far from the reality of life in a global economy. India, in particular, has experienced the decidedly mixed-bag that is the process of trade liberalization. At once becoming a destination for the money and interest of Western businessmen and investors, India also remains a nation pockmarked by extreme inequality, stifling poverty and widespread, grave economic suffering. The agreement between Om and Ginni serves as a perfect representation of this relationship. Here, Om's recent job loss has placed him in a position of extraordinary desperation, a position from which he will clearly do nearly anything in his power to protect and secure the needs of his family.

And in the context of this hardship, Padmanabhan shows how the values of the poor can become equally as skewed and distorted as those of their wealthy Western counterparts. As Om gives his own brother for organ harvesting rather than himself, we can see the moral degradation that also becomes a consequence of living under the thumb of such exploitation. In fact, as much as this play centers on the imposition of western exploitation, it also identifies the dehumanization to which the poor ultimately make themselves complicit. The concept of organ harvesting as a way of achieving material comfort, in fact, renders dehumanization as a distinctly physical and literal process as opposed to a spiritual one. As Gilbert (2001) explains, "Om Prakash's Faustian pact with InterPlanta organ transplant services brings into focus the spiritual emptiness of a society so seduced by the promise of wealth that its members will sell their body parts for material profit. As the narrative progresses, the full horrors of this kind of trade are suggested not only by the gradual disintegration of the donor body but also by the complete breakdown of the Prakash family as a social unit." (Gilbert, p. 215)