In 1996, when Delhi playwright Manjula Padmanabhan sat down to write Harvest for an international competition about the challenges facing humanity in the next century, the internet was still in its infancy, video calling belonged to the realm of comics, and globalisation was largely being sold as a promise of prosperity.
In 1997, Harvest won the prestigious Onassis Prize in Greece and has since become one of the most internationally recognised works of modern Indian theatre. Three decades later, it is returning to the Delhi stage at Black Box Okhla in a new Hindi production directed by Nikhil Mehta.
The play follows Om Prakash, a lower-middle-class man in a near-future Mumbai who signs away his organs to a wealthy foreign recipient through a multinational corporation. In exchange, his family gains comfort and stability, but their lives soon come under corporate surveillance and control.
Written as a futuristic dystopia set in 2010, Harvest now finds itself being staged 16 years after the future it once imagined. Padmanabhan admits that its continued relevance after three decades is bittersweet. “As an author, I should feel glad that my play is still relevant,” she says. “But at another level, it is very disturbing. I would have hoped that by now people would have become more compassionate. The world is now much worse than when I wrote it.”
