Critical analysis of Manjula Padmanabhan’s “Harvest”
as a postcolonial and postmodern play.
Cyberculture’s influence in our lives and its
possible threat to human physical identity is well documented in “Harvest”. This
is the most important feature in the postmodern world. 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. Problematization of identity
in cyberspace is pivotal to the discourse of postcolonialism. 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 “body” gains centre stage in Manjula
Padmanabhan’s dystopic, futuristic play “Harvest”. The play distinguishes between the
impoverished but healthy donor body of the Third World and the wealthy but
ailing First World body. The variegated distinctions also include, inter alia,
the differences between the male and the female body, the aged and the young
body and real and the virtual body. Manjula Padmanabhan’s play, “Harvest”,
written in 1997, has a futuristic setting in a Bombay of the year 2010 against
a backdrop that assumes that all debates over the legal, moral and ethical
validity of organ sales and transplants have been resolved and that the market
for sale of organs has been fully institutionalized. The fictional
transnational corporation in the play, viz. “InterPlanta Services”, that
performs these procedures is an embodiment of the increasing proliferation of
global capitalism. The play highlights the unequal relations between the
wealthy First World populations and their impoverished Third World
counterparts.
The lure of a better lifestyle seduces the donor, Prakash
family to enter into an ethically questionable transaction of organ sales. The
First World receiver, Virgil, in the guise of Ginni, appropriates their
dignity, pride and identity with the inducement of rewarding the poor family
with “quick money”. Padmanabhan registers a protest against this practice. The
insistence of Jaya, Om’s wife, on physical touch and contact with the First
World receiver upsets this hegemonic construct. She prefers to die with dignity
than to live ignobly by sacrificing her identity, rooted in her Third World
body. The play aims to bring forth the pivotal role played by technology in
tempting the Third World donors into compliance. For this, the play uses sci-fi
gadgets and a futuristic, dystopic setting. It is via one such gadget, viz. the
“Contact Module”, that we see Ginni visible only through a screen suspended
from the ceiling but never in her physical form on the stage.
Identity in a Posthuman World Padmanabhan’s play is
a postcolonial and posthumanist protest against the ominous future in which man
has no place. The “technologized” body aims to displace the corporeal self. It
marks the redistribution of the positions of self and non-self, equilibrium and
non-equilibrium, body and consciousness. Harvest needs to be contextualized in
the hypotheses of posthumanism rooted in the changing concepts of the western
self. Identity in the play is problematized across many levels. The blonde,
light skinned “youth goddess” is a
manifestation of Virgil, the aged, diseased American male who has worked
through four bodies in fifty years. The hint at the desire for a more “perfect”
body is explicit here. Padmanabhan takes a dig at popular stereotypes of
western consumerist culture that exploits our desires to acquire physical
features and personality traits popularized and commoditized by media and
technology.
Globalization and capitalistic forces have taken
this obsession with body alteration into the age of technology. Identity is now
embodied in a new discourse – “cyborgology”. Over the past two decades,
high-tech companies in Japan, USA and other parts of the World have been trying
to develop humanoid robots that can emulate our way of living right down to our
bodily functions and physical appearance. The aim is to create an external
agent on which the “human” can be imposed − a simulated man as well his replacement
in the digital future. Cyberculture provides clues to the proliferation of
globalization and technology that the First World uses to dominate in
transactions with the Third World. In the posthuman state, it is spread
throughout the cybernetic circuit. The “Contact Module”, performs an integral
role in obscuring the actual physical existence of Ginni, while concurrently
enabling her to monitor the daily activities of Om and his family members. It
allows her to maintain her distance from the unsanitary conditions of the site
of colonization i.e. the home of the Prakash family.
Capital is one such consideration that creates and
controls cyberculture. It determines the production, distribution and
consumption of goods and services in the global market and is also a mechanism
for control. The invention of modern gadgets like the computer, mobile,
internet and wireless communication has further broadened the horizon of
globalization.
For the marginalized and subaltern sections of
society, the sites of resistance and justice need to be situated within the
body and are tenuous if placed within a disembodied and abstract
“consciousness” (ibid.). The protest against the lure of an “improved”,
abstract consciousness and staunch loyalty to the embodied form is initially
mirrored in the character of Jeetu, Om’s brother. He is introduced as a male
prostitute, about the same age as his brother Om, but bearing a more easy-going
persona. He is described as being conscious of his body. This is in stark
contrast with Om’s. The donors of the Prakash family i.e. Om’s mother, referred
to as “Ma”, Om’s wife Jaya, and Om are all described as malnourished, unkempt
and physically unimpressive. The instinctive desire for them, particularly, Om
and his mother, to be rid of these bodies is palpable. Jaya is described as thin
and haggard, she looks older than her nineteen years while Ma is stooped,
scrawny and crabby. Jeetu’s active resistance against “InterPlanta” and its
insidious objectives is evident when he fails to turn up at the First briefing
by the agency’s guards to the Prakash family. At Jaya’s pleading to return home
and register himself with the agency he clarifies his stance. His corporeality is a site of resistance
against the imperialistic order and pervasive reach of technoglobal gadgetry
that aims to obliterate all impediments to its rule.
Framing many of our posthuman fantasies, this other
of technology permanently impels us to know, to direct and control, to
transform and modify, without ever strictly defining the limits we may arrive
at in our hunger for Posthumanism, Cyberculture & Postcolonialism in
Manjula Padmanabhan’s “Harvest” completeness. Constrained by physical
incapacitation and/or death, the human species wishes to change from its
assigned mode of being to become what its best machines already are. Hollywood
blockbusters like Iron Man, Transformers, and The Matrix announce the end of
man in their celebration of the body made perfect or left behind, their dream
of the dissolution of self through computer technology, bioscience, or the
intersection of consumerism and the new digital environment. Posthuman provides
new images and new terms of human evolution, and examine transitory stages in
the development of human intelligence.
Resistance to Posthumanism; “Harvest” addresses this
notion in the image of Ginni. In Act III scene 2, Virgil’s voice reaches Jaya.
He is the actual First world receiver, willing to pay for the youthful bodies
of hapless Third-World donors. Jaya is filled with terror at the disembodied
voice from the whirring, ablaze Contact Module. When Jaya asks about Ginni, Virgil
explains that she was a “Nothing. Nobody. A computer-animated wet dream”. Ginni,
the young, beautiful woman is a manifestation of Virgil’s machinations to
seduce his desired target. She’s a primitive form of cyborg having no links to
the human world of physical boundaries or wholeness. Throughout the play, we
see her face and hear her querulous voice prompting Ma to call her an angel.
The gifts that she has bestowed upon the Prakash family seem nothing short of
miracles to them. She always appears to be out of their reach since her
location affords her geographical distance. Even her transient image is
untouchable as the Contact Module swings away every time a donor, be it Jeetu
or Jaya, tries to touch it. In Act III scene 1, we watch the InterPlanta guards
mistake Jeetu for Om and take him away, only to bring him back swathed in
bandages. It is a horrible realization of the separation of identity from the
human body. His clothes, white on white, and his face and head covered in
bandages give him the likeness of an unnamed machine, a faceless entity. He has
been transformed into an individual cyborg with implants in place of eyes and a
visor across them, a posthuman body that is first disembodied and then
re-embodied enabling his transition into another consumer body.
Ginni’s images are transmitted directly into Jeetu’s
brain and he is completely entranced by her. Ironically, it is only by turning
Jeetu into a likeness of her own mechanic self that Ginni, the virtual
projection, has been able to appear in her full avatar to him. She beams images
of her “body” into Jeetu’s brain so that he is mesmerized into agreeing to
further extraction of organs from his own corporeal body. The body that Ginni
shows off to Jeetu is nothing but a digital projection, a virtual incarnation
of the desires of the flesh. It is almost a mockery of the physical form and
its locational limitations. When Virgil communicates with Jaya through the
Contact Module and coaxes her to look at him, she refuses by turning her face
away. When she turns, a projection of Jeetu is standing before her. Padmanabhan
defines this as “apparition”.
Even as the image of Jeetu speaks, the voice
emanates from the Contact Module. Virgil tries to lure Jaya by using the body
of Jeetu, by exploiting her desires for Jeetu. She argues that Jeetu is dead
and so is his body. But Virgil asserts that he has a “casing”. This scenario once again raises the issue of
the body as a manifestation of identity. In the era of contemporary social and
critical theory, the notion of a stable, unified and coherent identity is
rejected. Instead, modern age theory sees identity as a series of negotiations,
differences and discourses. In a world where race, class, gender or sexuality
are of importance to the adoption of the persona, cyberspace allows an
individual to choose an identity, to masquerade, mimic and transcend bodily
identities and interact with the world as somebody else. The individual’s
subjectivity exists in a dispersed state, where the boundaries of the self are
no longer the body or the skin.
It is Jaya who finally launches a protest against
this “fluidity” of identity. She rejects the “body” of Jeetu that Virgil has now
occupied. She resists Virgil’s advances and the claims of his desire for her.
He insists that she has known the mouth that is now speaking to her or the body
that will plant a child inside her. Jaya questions the voice emanating from
Jeetu’s body regarding the paternity of the child she will bear. Will the child
be Virgil’s because he has donated his sperm or will it be Jeetu’s since the
body is his? The problem of ownership and parentage is intimately entwined with
the problem of identity. Jaya asserts that she wants the pain, the agony of
childbirth even as Virgil proposes a painless procedure. Her final resistance
is symbolized in her decision to end her life if the InterPlanta guards try to
break her door down and force her to comply. She has found a new way of winning
− winning by losing. Jaya refuses to allow her womb to be treated as a
laboratory for the First World colonizer for his experiments with self
preservation and securing right to perpetuity.
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