Human Commodification in Dystopian India: Connecting Tribal Displacement with the Body-Market in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest

tribal displacement; biopolitics; neoliberalism; body-market; postcolonial studies; exploitation; surveillance; development politics.

This paper examines the unity between commodification of human beings, bio capital, and exploitation of the resources, placing the Harvest of Manjula Padmanabhan in socio-political context of the tribal displacement in the present-day India. The dystopian body-market of the play whereby financially disadvantaged people sell their organs and physical services to the wealthy Western beneficiaries is interpreted as the allegorical expansion of the materiality of how the marginalized tribal communities are dispossessed of land, labour and possession of their bodies in the pretext of development and globalization. The paper uses postcolonial, feminist and biopolitical theories that Padmanabhan futuristic narrative exaggerates the power imbalances that exist in the current India neoliberal development plan in which the land is commodified as are human bodies being sold in the bloc markets.

The analysis also shows how Harvest reveals the turn of body to be a venue of transaction, surveillance, and discipline, which reflects the lived experiences of displaced tribal populations whose daily experiences are mediated by forced migration, extractive industries and collusion between the states and corporations. The donor receiver machine of the play is a metaphor of the hierarchical order wherein the population of the tribal ends up deprived of control over the physical space and bodily bodies to serve as fungible commodities of a bigger economic engine. Showing the correlations of the dystopian commodification of body integrity with the manifestations in the real world, where people are deprived of their human dignity due to the development paradigm that places global capital in the first place, the paper shows the resonance between the moral and ethical collapse that Padmanabhan criticizes the development paradigm in its entirety.

The paper posits that Harvest is not merely the movie that questions the commodification of human body, but it also prefigures the more general socio-political processes of turning the subjugated communities into exploitable assets. In the paper, his work by Padmanabhan is staged as a strong culture text, which cautions the situalization of the commodification of bodies and territories in modern day developmental arena in India.