Revisiting Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest: Transhumanism and Its Impact on the Neo-Imperialist Periphery

The note at the beginning of Manjula Padmanabhan’s 1998 play Harvest states that the setting of the play is Bombay only to maintain coherence. According to the note, the play should “take on racial identities, names, costumes and accents more suited to the location.” She also states that the guards should resemble the Donors more than the receivers and that they act as the intermediate between the extremes. The Donor world is to be no different to those of Third World citizens. 

The play was published by Kali for Women, India’s first feminist publication house, and Padmanabhan dedicates it to her mother and sisters. From the outset, there is a tone that the play takes. It critiques the global liberal economy that relegates the population of entire nations to a position where they are reduced to simple ‘human capital’. Within this ‘human capital ’, where the body is reduced to tools for economic growth, she locates the position of women through the main character of the play, Jaya. 

Despite having been written almost thirty years ago, the play holds exceptional weight today, especially about two very prevalent issues: a)the exploitation of the Third World citizen and b) the individualistic desire to ‘ascend’ or to grow beyond one’s potential, and how access to such a ‘growth’ is limited. 

I want to draw attention briefly to the online discourses around ‘looksmaxxing’ that have recently gained popularity with proponents like Brian Johnson and Clavicular promoting the use of peptides to not only “looksmaxx” in order to improve social desirability but also to increase longevity. There is, within the language used on these looksmaxxing forums, a stubborn insistence on categorising the human body based on terms often associated with more eugenic political movements of the past. ‘Subhuman’ is the lowest a person can score. Subhuman, or Untermenschen, was a term often used during Nazi rule against members who were not part of the ingroup. Such a categorisation of the human body and the further implications pushed by such categorisation seek to reduce human attributes to measures of marketability. 

With a reading of Padmanabhan’s Harvest, which presents rich material for critique of the seemingly benevolent hegemonic powers that promise employment and growth that is sometimes indistinguishable from exploitation, we can form a critique of the TESCREAL¹ movement. The soft-transhumanism of looksmaxxing and the use of illegally sourced peptides, the growing wellness industry and its effects on the environment, the desire to ‘ascend’ one’s potential and an anthropocentric focus on growth that turns a blind eye to the fact that humanity does not exist outside of nature or above nature, all point to a rather dangerous shift in the understanding and valuation of human life.

Imperialism, Neo-Liberalism and TESCREAL

The play came out in a 1998 post-globalisation India. It follows the story of a family going through economic troubles as the only earning member, Om, is in between jobs. The play begins with Jaya, his wife, waiting patiently for her husband to return from a job interview. She is being berated by her mother-in-law, who claims that Jaya is putting up a pretence and does not care at all about her husband. Their argument continues, and given the tragic ending of the play, they never really resolve their differences. Jaya’s husband Om returns with good news: he got the job. But the news does not bring forth feelings of elation from Jaya. This confuses Ma. Jaya asks Om to reveal to Ma what his job actually entails. Upon learning that Om has agreed to be an organ/body donor to somebody from another country, Ma is confused; she enquires, “Do they not have people of their own?” to which Om responds, “They do not have people to spare.”

Manjula Padmanabhan’s note, which we discussed at the start of this essay, warrants a discussion on Imperialism. Imperialism refers to the maintaining and extending of power over foreign nations.  Said used this term to describe the domination and subordination reflecting an imperial core and a periphery. Said analyses Austen’s Mansfield Park and the representation of the empire and colonies^.  He highlights the importation of wealth from the invisible, subordinate plantation. In a sort of reversal, just as we never ‘see’ the plantation in Austen’s work, we never see Virgil’s country in Harvest either. In Padmanabhan’s play, we never physically enter the ‘metropolis’ or the imperial core. The imperial actors also never set foot; in fact, Virgil never even shows his actual face to Jaya. Jaya’s life is being controlled as she is groomed to bear the child of this power that exists in a place that is never revealed and a place she has no access to.

We cannot separate imperialism and neoliberalism as they exist as part of a hegemonic project that concentrates power in the hands of trans-national elite groups. Many proponents of neoliberalism believe it to be the way ahead with a free-market economy and free trade. Despite growing wealth disparity, this model is often purported as one that can help individuals grow through pure hard work. Neoliberalism, with its focus on growth, and imperialism with its focus on expansion are both linked to the process of globalisation, where expansion of capital and technology often replicates historical power imbalances between developed and developing nations.

When Manjula Padmanabhan wrote Harvest, the Indian job market was going through substantial changes due to the globalisation process. Though globalisation led to an increase in GDP, there was also an increase in the wage gap and in the number of contract workers, which led to people working multiple jobs. Om’s unemployment, the existence of a major foreign company in Bombay and the freedom with which power is exerted by these companies is an obvious nod to the globalisation process. 

Transhumanism

Om informed the family of the thorough background and physical check he went through. The organisation also sent guards to visit them and install a device through which Om can talk to the Receiver. This device, as we learn later, becomes a means for extreme surveillance and control. It is through this device that the Receiver stays informed of their movements within the house. 

The guards keep track of and check everybody in the family. The only person who could not be available for the checking and would not agree to this lifestyle was Om’s brother Jeetu. (Jeetu is a sex worker; he is loathed by his mother, who favours Om over him.) Their food is also monitored.

They are given tiny pills to consume which seem to contain all necessary nutrition. Food, instead of possibly being enjoyed, is only looked at as a form of sustenance. 

Transhumanism presents a paradoxical biologistic anti-naturalism that, on the one hand, aims to detach human beings from their evolutionary origin and, on the other hand, proposes that we humans take control of our evolution by generally biological means such as genetic engineering.

There is a line within the play where Virgil admits that as they began to live longer and healthier each generation, they lost the art of reproduction. Hence, the need for Jaya’s body. 

TESCREAL and transhumanism are based on what is called techno-optimism. The belief that technology will save the world from all sorts of inequalities. But as Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 398) asserted, societies ‘select’ the techniques that characterise them so that technology cannot be expected to disrupt the status quo but rather to reproduce it. Transhumanism, like technology, does not promote a radical discontinuity concerning the status quo of our societies but rather develops in harmony with the powers that govern them, whether tacitly or explicitly.

Another important criticism against transhumanism and its techno-optimism is that individual choice will probably not be decisive. Once the ‘enhanced’ set the standards, it will pretty much be impossible for the ‘unenhanced’ not to have to try to keep up. Ultimately, as one author states, their continuing recognition as members of society will be at stake.

Where are the Women?

The initial image of the receiver as projected on the device is of Ginny. A young blonde woman. It is with Ginny that the family creates a bond. She is presented as this benevolent master who is willing to give the family every bit of luxury they could hope for. Except Ginny never really listens to them. When she realises that they have to use a community washroom, she insists that they get a stall installed inside their apartment despite resistance from Jaya, who claims that the space is already too crammed without a stall. It is later revealed to us that Ginny was a projection— she was not real; she was an artificially created and projected image. 

Virgil, the actual receiver of Om’s organs, tells Jaya the actual purpose of the whole project, which was to generate offspring, an ability lost to the people of his country in the war to live forever. There were almost no women in this enhanced and developed part of the world that Virgil belonged to. They had to create and project a woman to manufacture trust and consent from the donors they exploited. Virgil reveals to Jaya that the body he ‘occupied’ while talking to her was his third— it was Jeetu’s body. He also says to Jaya, who had been told before that she could never have children, that she can finally have a child because he wishes for it. 

Jaya refuses. She tells him that she will only bear his child if he comes down to her place. She tells him that she will not go through any procedures. She tells him she will kill herself, to which Virgil responds by reminding her of the ‘anti-suicide’ drugs she had been given, taking away her last bit of agency too. Her final act of protest is to refuse to comply and to sit and watch the Television until she runs out of all the pills unless Virgil comes down to her apartment himself. 

Jaya is the only character within the play whose existence is limited to the apartment. Jeetu occupies a wider space outside the apartment than he does inside; Om is trying to make space for himself in the world outside the walls of the apartment, but the job he acquires finally restricts his movements to the space inside until he finally runs away. There are mentions of Ma waiting in long lines for the washroom. But apart from one incident where Jaya goes to meet Jeetu, the rest of the narrative confines her to the apartment. Her final act is not to run away either but a different kind of resistance: it is to stay planted, to invite Virgil, to challenge him to come to her and take her himself.  

Within Virgil’s desire for longevity lies a desire for freedom. Freedom from societal constraints, freedom from human relations, freedom from mortality. Freedom lies at the centre of many transhumanist beliefs; they are gravely serious about it. This freedom is individualistic and, much like other neo-liberal promises, is not as emancipatory as it is made to sound, but instead is built on the exploitation of a few sections of the world.  Women from the Third World, under the imperialistic ideas of the West, often suffer a dual subjugation. 

Jaya has to rely on her husband for funds, and her sphere of life is limited to the domestic. Her desire to have a child is also ‘sanctioned’ by Virgil— just like Ginny was entirely Virgil’s creation. She is also not given any privacy as Virgil follows her every move. Jaya’s final act is a mixture of protest and is also one of full submission. She gives herself away but only agrees to do it on her terms. And all she asks for is this power that was ruling over them and governing them to cross over into their world. 

With reports of women workers in India having to watch hours of abusive content to train AI models and workers in Kenya having to sit through sensitive footage to train and improve Meta’s AI glasses, the question of who this transhumanist freedom is available to and what it is built on are glaring at us— it stands there, an elephant augmented into every screen we watch. 

1. TESCREAL: transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism,cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism and longtermism. Torres, É.P. (2024) Tescrealism: The acronym behind our wildest ai dreams and nightmares, Truthdig.
2. “Western cultural forms can be taken out of the autonomous enclosures in which they have been protected, and placed instead in the dynamic global environment created by imperialism, itself revised as an ongoing contest between north and south, metropolis and periphery, white and native.” 
3. Edward Said, “Consolidated Vision”, in Culture and Imperialism, ed. Terry Eagleton (New York: Knopf, 1993), 80-97