I’ve been reading several Indian plays; I loved Girish Karnad’s Fire and Rain. The Guthrie did it several years ago, but for our traveling theatre group on a shoe string budget, it is not a viable choice. What might be a good choice is a play called Harvest that I recently discovered.  I’ve sent you a PDF scan of the play, but it’s also available at Amazon.  

Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest is an award-winning play about how desperate Indian people are forced to sell their body parts to wealthy clients in return for food, water, shelter and riches for themselves and their families.  Her dark sci-fi satire, set in the fast approaching future, dramatizes how the “first” world cannibalizes the “third” world to fulfill its own desires.  The third world provides the raw material that the first world consumes for its own survival and expansion.  Harvest is about how one particular Indian family falls victim to the flesh-market controlled buy the Western world.  As Helen Gilbert in her introduction to the Anthology of the Post-colonial Plays states:

Harvest can be read not only as a cautionary tale about the possible (mis) use of modern medical and reproductive science but also a reflection on economic and social legacies of Western imperialism, particularly as they coverage with new technologies.  

What I particularly like about the play is that it is not a simple polemic about white devils of the West destroying a developing country; she aptly turns a critical eye to both the Eastern and Western worlds.

Important: I think this is a very interesting play, but it is by no means a done deal at this point.  The play has very interesting costume and set challenges.  See what you think.  I’ll be sending you another play soon.

Terry