ABSTRACT
Until 1997, when her play, Harvest, won the inaugural Onassis Prize for Theatre (the world’s richest playscript award), Manjula Padmanabhan was better known as a cartoonist, and for a while had a daily comic strip in The Pioneer, a Delhi-based newspaper. However, she had previously written several plays that address complex moral and social issues while evincing flashes of the penetrating wit that is honed to a fine art in Harvest. Of these earlier works, Lights Out! (1984) examines communal apathy in relation to a pack rape, The Artist’s Model (1995) deals with metaphysical questions relating to art and exploitation, and Sextet (1996) comprises a series of six short skits about aspects of sexuality. These dramatic experiments notwithstanding, it is perhaps Padmanabhan’s book of short stories, Hot Death, Cold Soup (1995), that best anticipates both the matter and the mode of her award-winning play. Using surrealist and Gothic forms, several stories in this collection focus on issues such as sati, dowry murder, and suicide, while others satirise government bureaucracy in India and the culture of acquiescence that leads the public to accept the status quo. In one Kafka-esque tale, ‘A Government of India undertaking …’ (Padmanabhan 1993), the image of the common citizen worn down and mystified by an endless process of queuing and form-filling suggests the kind of dehumanisation taken to the extreme in Harvest. The story’s metaphysical exploration of its protagonist’s efforts to exchange her body with that of someone rich, famous and indolent more specifically anticipates the global trade in body organs that is the play’s central focus.
