Padmanabhan's Harvest as a Dismodernist Narrative: A Critical Posthumanist Exploration

Transplantation narratives have been instrumental in the understanding of biomedical technology and its role in disability studies in this globalized era of twenty-first century. Manjula Padmanabhan’s 1997 play Harvest has hitherto been investigated as a futuristic dystopian narrative as well as a piece of science fiction from the perspectives of organ trafficking, postmodernism, ‘technoscape’, virtual reality, and globalization theories. However, it has rarely been studied as a posthumanist text that exposes the ubiquitous nature of disabilities. The present study substantially explores the aspects of, as Lennard J. Davis defines, ‘dismodernism’ and its three ethics, namely, ‘care of the body’, ‘care for the body’, and ‘care about the body’. Having gone through the lens of disability rights movement and the pertinent theoretical framework, it is also discovered that Padmanabhan’s surrealistic approach critiques the evolution of the mid-nineteenth century eugenics discourse to the present-day genetics technology, such as prenatal screening and genetic engineering. At length, the analysis concludes by addressing the problematic liaison between the globalizing forces on the one hand, and the prerogatives of the disabled on the other, especially in the context of the South Asian territories. It ventures too to define Padmanabhan’s positionality in this matrix, as reflected in her text.