Harvest is an ironic examination of the relations between developing and developed countries. The play is set in the imminent future, it imagines a grisly pact between the first and third world desperate (sic) people who can sell their body parts to wealthy clients in return for food, water, shelter and riches for themselves and their families.

				Harvest is an ironic, sci-fi examination of the relations between developing and developed countries. Set in the imminent future, it 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 third world provides the raw material that the first world consumes for its own survival and expansion.  The writer criticizes both

				As of yet, Manjula Padmanabhan has only written five plays. Her most famous, Harvest, is a science fiction about an impoverished part of the world where people agree to let their bodies become available for harvest by wealthier Westerners who offer all kinds of luxuries in return. It’s a pretty clear metaphor for the globalized affects of capitalism on third-world workers. What Padmanabhan brilliantly does, however, is represent both ends of this equation in a single family in a small apartment in India. As the character Om spirals into fear inspired, in part, by the people who obsess over his health and control his life, his mother gradually sedates herself in the luxuries brought to her by his sacrifice. The person who owns Om, represented by weird holographic apparitions, believes herself to be generous and helpful to him. Through these, and other characters, the audience is forced to watch magnified versions of the different mercenary parts of themselves. Even Om ends up dishonest, ever the victim.

				Manjula Padmanabhan’s futuristic play Harvest (1997) which takes for its theme the purchase and sale of human organs is described on the cover blurb as The play is set in a Mumbai chawl in the year 2010. In a cramped one room tenement, reside four members: Om Prakash, the tense and jobless clerk, his wife Jaya, who has succumbed to the tense life of privation and insecurity, his old mother, the frustrated, ill-natured and satiric figure and his younger brother Jeetu who works surreptitiously as a gigolo. Om is dismissed from his petty clerical job and hence the family is thrown into economic and emotional disarray. Om and Jaya are only maintaining the semblance of a meaningful marital relationship. Jaya is carrying on a clandestine affair with her brother-in-law Jeetu. Mother’s love extends only to the eldest son, Om, the bread-winner. She is also jealous of her Daughter-in-law. These four characters are locked in a loveless relationship, claustrophobically confines within the four walls of a one- room apartment. Neocolonial intervention It is into this world of disorder that Inter Planta Services brings apparent order and respectability. Om is hired to donate the healthy organs of his body when required by the receiver. 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. Since Inter Planta needs only the services of the bachelors, Om is forced to conceal the fact that he is married and hence Jaya masquerades as his sister. Om and his family members appear to be unable to question the complete hijacking of their personal lives by Inter Planta. It is worth noting that while the receiver can see Om, his family members and all other aspects of his life, the donor Om, gets to see only the face of the receiver and her sugary voice(that too deceptive). 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. vision of the cannibalistic future that awaits the human race...a parable of what will happen when the rich denizens of the First World...begin to devour bits and pieces of the Third World poor...“.

				The play Harvest, with very apt title, describes how one such family fall victim to the flesh-market controlled by the Western world. An attempt made herein is to describe how the machine world governs the human world and how the playwright has cleverly used the electronic devices turning them into characters. There begins the play of machines and machine-like men (representatives of the machine world) instructing, commanding, interfering and grabbing the human lives. The entry of the Guards from the Interplaza services is the beginning of the machine era and end of the human era. Manjula Padmanabhan in Harvest presents  battle a war between machine and man for possession human beings have to wage in future if not learn to control machines. Where machine will succeed at the initial ground, but final victory will lie with a (wo) man. The play also shows the futuristic picture of the modern times where the machines will be replacing and distancing human beings gradually. The play warns through the character of Jaya how one has to govern the machines instead of being governed.

				Helen Gilbert in her introduction to the Anthology of the Post-colonial Plays rightly comments on the nature of the play. She observes: 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 (216) /