Manjula Padmanabhan is primarily known as a playwright and a novelist. However, she is also a graphic artist, designer, and cartoonist. Born into a diplomat’s family in 1953, she spent her early years in Europe and Southeast Asia. Her cosmopolitan upbringing is evident in her approach to the social issues that she represents through her works. Currently, she divides her time between her homes in the US and India. The multiple hats worn by Manjula Padmanabhan as a novelist, short-story writer, journalist, playwright, children’s book author, illustrator, comics writer, etc., can be contended as the struggles of a woman writer in finding firm ground in the arena of Indian Writing in English. The history of Indian Writing in English can be traced back to Macaulay’s minute and the subsequent introduction of English studies in India for an efficient colonial administration. In the earliest phase of this new band of writers, one would not find male and female names in parity. The reformist policies enabled women’s education and women’s participation in the Indian nationalist movements, resulting in the emergence of scattered names like Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain etc. During the post-independence period, there was an increase in the number of women writers in English which can be juxtaposed with the rise of feminist movements in India. Rekha Pande notes in the essay, “The History of Feminism and Doing Gender in India,” that “in the post-independence period, the women’s movement has concerned itself with a large number of issues such as dowry, violence against women, women’s work, price rise, land rights, political participation of women etc” (np). Quite evidently, Manjula Padmanabhan’s oeuvre directly fits into this phase of the history of women’s movements and feminism in India. Padmanabhan’s first play came out in the year 1983, when India was already four decades into its independence. Her contributions to the literary history of Indian literature will help one reimagine the contours of Indian Writing in English. Her plays were published as two edited volumes in 2020. The first volume, Blood and Laughter, is mostly on science fiction and social issues, while the second volume, Laughter and Blood, is a collection of her short performance pieces.
Manjula Padmanabhan can be perceived as a writer who has carefully distanced herself from being called a political ideologue. Even where her writing is inspired by historical events, she has distanced herself from their political ramifications. However, a close study of her works suggests that Manjula Padmanabhan is a futuristic writer, particularly in her choice of themes. She is a feminist science fiction writer whose characters openly question issues such as patriarchy, gender inequality, poverty, unequal distribution of resources etc. Her most recent collection of science fiction stories, Stolen Hours and Other Curiosities, was published in 2023. This essay takes a closer look at the multiple worlds in Manjula Padmanabhan through a survey of her plays, novels, short stories, and comics.
Manjula Padmanabhan stands out for the unconventional themes she chooses for her plays. Her Onassis prize-winning play, Harvest (1997), belongs to the genre of science fiction, a rather challenging genre for theatre. It was initially rejected by Indian theatre professionals as they felt that it was un-performable. The play was eventually directed by Mimis Kougioumtzis and performed at the Teatro Technis Karolous Koun, Athens, in 2000. It was also broadcast on the BBC in 2001. It was adapted into a bilingual movie Deham which was directed by Govind Nihalani in 2002.
In this futuristic play, a transnational, pharmaceutical company named InterPlanta Services is in the business of providing healthy organs to its wealthy, aging, and unwell First World customers. The healthy organs for transplantation are procured from the impoverished and racially subjugated parts of the world. In the play, we also find that the humans who serve as donors are groomed and taken care of in a healthy viable environment for whole body transplants. Harvest progresses through five main characters and the story closes with the literal and figurative elimination of all the characters except one.
The three main categories of characters in the play are the Donors, Receivers, and the Agents and Guards. Each of these categories represents a socio-cultural class. The Donors stand for the impoverished class which includes Om Prakash, who signed up for a job with InterPlanta services, his wife Jaya, his brother Jeetu, who is a prostitute, and their mother Ma, Indumati, who dislikes Jaya. They live in a chawl in Mumbai and represent the indigent Third World nation. The Receiver is Ginni/Virgil who represents the First World. The third group is the Guards and Agents – the interface between the Donors and Receivers. They represent the corporation that facilitates organ harvesting. The Donors sacrifice their personal freedom and privacy in exchange for the material comforts provided by the corporation on behalf of the Receivers.
The digitization of identities in Harvest (the Prakash family is under constant surveillance through the ‘Contact Module’, a virtual meeting platform), and a separation from the physical form foreground a blurring of boundaries along the categories of technology, gender, and humanity.
As the play progresses, it is revealed that the male bodies are harvested for their organs whereas the female bodies are nourished and secured for their wombs as the First World women have lost their ability to reproduce. Subsequently, Virgil offers to impregnate Jaya. However, she refuses to accept the offer and threatens to take her life. She is the only character in the play who is assertive about her personal rights over her life and body. Harvest can therefore be read as a feminist science fiction play as well.
The commodification of human body parts is a dismal reflection of human greed, corporate profit, and an economy of death. Lesley Sharp’s cultural study of transplant medicine argues,
today the human body is a treasure trove of reusable parts, including the major organs (lungs, heart, liver, kidneys, pancreas, intestine, and bowel); tissue (a category that includes bone, bone marrow, ligaments, corneas, and skin); reproductive fragments (sperm, ova, placenta, and fetal tissue); as well as blood, plasma, hair, and even the whole body (11).
Manjula Padmanabhan’s depiction of organ harvesting in Harvest is not about cadaveric donations of body organs, but real time breeding and grooming of healthy viable bodies from which organs can be taken out depending on the age and ailment related requirements of the receivers. This also appropriates the language of capitalism as the demand and supply of this invaluable commodity keeps increasing. Moreover, capitalist medical practices facilitate organ transplantation for life sustenance, prolonging of life, and for body augmentation and modification. This commodification of the human body is without social and moral conscience. Nevertheless, Harvest grants agency to the female lead character Jaya to question the capitalist, materialist, dehumanised treatment of human body and life.
Padmanabhan wrote her first play Lights Out (1984) from a sense of guilt and shock. As she elaborated in an interview with Sharmila Joshi, the riots and the ruthless brutality that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 made her reassess the collective paralysis of the society and the lack of an ideological stance in her literary contribution. The play is based on a real-life incident about the frequent rapes in a middle-class locality in Mumbai, where instead of helping the victim, the entire neighborhood resorted to a set of absurd practices like switching off the lights when the crime recurred or avoided dinner at that time. Lights Out makes a visible statement — it questions the absence of compassion among individuals. The play does not offer solutions but it urges the readers and viewers to take responsibility for the sake of humanity and to foreground the affective quality of compassion towards fellow beings. Kelly Oliver suggests, “the victims of oppression, slavery, and torture are not merely seeking visibility and recognition, but they are also seeking witnesses to horrors beyond recognition” (79). Lights Out emphasises the need for witnessing. It goes beyond the politics of representation to suggest strategies of affect, accountability, and retribution. The representation of the victim in Lights Out questions the authenticity of depicting and witnessing the pain of the ‘Other.’ Quite strikingly, the woman who is raped in the play never appears on the stage except in terms of her screams. This mode of representation symbolizes the larger context of women’s helpless screams. Though neither Harvest nor Lights Out gained a lot of attention when they appeared, the themes discussed in these plays are now ideological commonplace.
This section looks at Padmanabhan’s novels and short stories which negate gender binaries and construct a dystopic matriarchal solidarity. Unprincess! (2005) is a collection of three children’s stories that deconstruct the traditional representations of a fairy-tale princess. Each of the stories subverts and questions the stereotypical caricatures of princesses as petite damsels in distress, waiting for their gowns and ballrooms. These stories interrogate patriarchal constructions of womanhood and validate its existence beyond such restrictive parameters.
Padmanabhan interrogates the question of gender using the lens of postcolonialism and ecological concerns. These contingencies are seemingly disconnected, yet her works present a convincing case for the emergence of feminist science fiction as a postcolonial phenomenon. Feminist science fiction echoes the (anti)colonial narratives of postcolonial writers. The characters question their subjugated positions, and exhibit a subversive potential to challenge the normative. Padmanabhan presents womanhood as subaltern in terms of gender as well as by virtue of being a postcolonial subject. In Harvest, there is a commodification of body parts from the Third World countries, which includes the purchase of wombs. This can be viewed as a continuation of the colonial project of commodifying and exploiting the resources of the East. In Padmanabhan’s more recent dystopic fiction Escape, women are absent within the world of the novel, and the act of reproduction occurs through technology-assisted-cloning.
In the novels Escape (2008) and The Island of Lost Girls (2015), Padmanabhan creates a dystopic world where gender itself is challenged. These narratives trace the life of a young girl, Meiji, who escapes the civil war and a genocide that erases all women in a certain region. Having grown up in a world with no women, Meiji finds the differences between a man and a woman’s bodies truly puzzling. This biological difference and its rarity in the dystopian world highlight the politics of gender in our society. Moreover, Escape depicts the sociotechnical design and the future of gender. It is a study of the discrimination of women through female foeticide which is still popular in many parts of India. In other words, it portrays the position of women within a state apparatus which is otherwise vocal about technological flawlessness and gender equality.
Padmanabhan’s imagination of the future of gender gestures at technological determinism, and a technological reshaping of our material relations with the world. Padmanabhan suggests that changes in socio-technological relations may effect our notions of gender. In Escape, women are not even required for reproduction. Male species reproduce by cloning themselves as and when required. Women are no longer ‘useful’ for sexual pleasure either, since heterosexuality has been replaced with homosexuality. This model of a civilisation ruptures the relations between human beings, and processes such as procreation and sex, because technology replaces, or at least determines, the processes. Within this context of a technological reconfiguration of feminist speculative fiction, Sherryl Vint proposes that
what is needed, then, is not merely more women but a ‘gendered makeover’ of the technological imagination itself. Technologies come embedded with systems of values that have been built into their design, often without one consciously reflecting on this fact because the hegemonic values present themselves as if there were no alternatives to them. (5) Padmanabhan critiques the invalidation of women’s contemporary roles. As Esterino Adami suggests,
it evokes the classic sci-fi theme of eradication of individuality in favour of an identity-less and dehumanised wholeness, devoid of selfhood and conscience, whilst on the other, it dramatises the treatment of women, when they are considered nearly a burden in Indian society given their liminal position. (“Feminist” 3)
The position of women in Padmanabhan’s works connects feminist science fiction with postcolonialism. In patriarchal societies that are known to deny women’s identity and marginalise women because of their life-bearing capacities, the location of Padmanabhan’s contemporary works is noteworthy. They explore non-conforming alternatives in postcolonial countries like India. While extending alternative femininities, Padmanabhan’s work splices women with Nature in postcolonial societies, showing how both are exploited, and thus, calls for an “oriental ecofeminism” (Panda 72).
In Escape, uncontrolled pollution and continued storage of nuclear waste from the West have transformed India into a wasteland. The nation devoid of women recalls popular practices like female infanticide and the decline of sex ratio in contemporary India. Padmanabhan’s short stories like “Gandhi-Toxin,” “2099,” “Sharing Air” etc from the collection Kleptomania also deal with environmental anxiety. Her science fiction addresses humanity’s tendency towards self-destruction and anthropogenic ecocide.
Manjula Padmanabhan is also credited as India’s first woman cartoonist and she earned this title while writing and illustrating a comic strip with the central character Suki for The Sunday Observer (1982-1986) and The Pioneer (1991-1997). Suki was one of the earliest comics from India when it appeared in newspapers as a comic strip during the 1980s. Suki currently appears once a week in The Hindu’s Business Line, as Sukiyaki. In Peter Griffin’s coverage of the The Hindu’s “Lit for Life” event, Padmanabhan mentions that Suki started as her alter ego and later evolved to become an independent character known for her unruliness and a certain quotidian nature (Griffin np). Suki stands out as she is an emblematic female comic icon of the 1980s India. If one is to compare Indian graphic narratives of the time with their Western counterparts, Suki fills the gap of a relevant woman comic presence in India.
Fig 1: The first panel of “The History of Humankind” Pioneer, New Delhi
Suki’s observations highlight the multiple dimensions of Indian feminist thought. Suki claims an agency for women by questioning the objectification of women in media while also arguing for improved visibility for women. Her social dilemma can be largely understood as the anxieties of the time period. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan points out,
the connections between the educated bourgeois woman’s knowledge of western literature and her emancipation cannot be offered in the spirit of simple celebration. The costs and limitations of the enterprise are only too apparent: a ‘western’ feminism that essentially promotes the individualism of the singular female subject, and access to which is mediated by an elitism of class and caste positions is clearly limited and problematic. But the fact remains that to a notable extent the rallying cries for the emergent new Indian woman were framed by the literary representations of an Antigone, a Nora Helmer, or a Jane Eyre. (66)
This influence of western feminism is evident in the case of Suki. It can be argued that Padmanabhan’s Suki witnessed the evolution of India as a nation-state through its radical transformations like the rise to power of women political leaders, the establishment of modern banking systems and the introduction of new communication technologies in the 1980s. Suki has responded to normative gender roles, climate change, existential questions, financial crisis, economic inequality, religion, spirituality, extra-terrestrial beings, racism, foreign travels, body shaming, romance, etc. She is a signifier of an educated Indian woman in the 1980s, who questions the injustices around her – a radical presence in the graphic narrative medium. In fact, Suki is outspoken and responds to corruption in very creative ways, as in the following conversation:
Fig 2: “The Protesting Reader”, Sunday Observer, Bombay
Padmanabhan is an artist who located herself within the context of coming-of-age of ‘Indian English’ as a medium of creative expression in post-1980s.
Select List of Works by Manjula Padmanabhan
Padmanabhan, Manjula. Taxi. Hachette India, 2023
—. Stolen Hours and Other Curiosities. Hachette India, 2023
—. Shrinking Vanita. Tulika, 2021.
—. Blood and Laughter: Plays. Hachette India, 2020.
—. Laughter and Blood: Performance Pieces. Hachette India, 2020.
—. Getting there. Hachette UK, 2020.
—. Lights Out. Worldview Publications, 2020.
—. The Island of Lost Girls. Hachette India, 2015.
—. Three Virgins and Other Stories. Zubaan, 2013.
—. Escape. Hachette India, 2008.
—. I Am Different! Can You Find Me? Tulika Books, 2007.
—. Double Talk. Penguin, 2005.
—. Unprincess! Penguin, 2005.
—. Kleptomania: Ten Stories. Penguin Books India, 2004.
—. Mouse Invaders. Macmillan Childrens Books, 2004
—. Mouse Attack. Macmillan Childrens Books, 2003
—. Harvest. Kali for Women, 1997.
—. Hot Death, Cold Soup: Twelve Short Stories. Kali for Women, 1996.
Works Cited and Consulted
Adami, Esterino. “Waste-Wor(l)ds as Parables of Dystopian ‘Elsewheres’ in Postcolonial Speculative Discourse.” Anglistica AION: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 19, no. 2, 2015, pp. 91-102.
—. “Feminist Science Fiction as a Postcolonial Paradigm.” Institutional Research Information System. University of Turin, 2010
Gilbert, Helen. “Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest: Global Technoscapes and the International Trade in Human Body Organs.” Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 16, no. 1, 2006, pp. 123-130.
Griffin, Peter. “Manjula Padmanabhan described the evolution of Suki in her illustrated talk.” The Hindu. 21 Jan. 2019. https://www.thehindu.com/lit-for-life/manjula-padmanabhan-described-the-evolution-of-suki-in-her-illustrated-talk/article26048831.ece?homepage=true .
Joshi, Sharmila. “I Wrote Under Compulsion of an Extreme Sense of Guilt and Shock.” Sunday Observer, August 1986.
Oliver, Kelly. Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Padmanabhan, Manjula. “Strip the Skin.” The Outlook, 05 Feb. 2022. https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/strip-the-skin/267567 .
Panda, Punyashree and Panchali Bhattacharya. “Oriental Ecofeminism Contrasting Spiritual and Social Ecofeminism in Mitra Phukan’s The Collector’s Wife and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape”. UNITAS: An International Online Peer-reviewed Open-access Journal of Advanced Research in Literature, Culture, and Society, vol. 92, no. 2, 2019, pp. 72-96.
Pande, Rekha. “The History of Feminism and Doing Gender in India.” Revista Estudos Feministas, vol. 26, no.3, 2018.https://doi.org/10.1590/1806-9584-2018v26n358567.
Sharp, Lesley A. Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and The Transformed Self. University of California Press, 2006.
Vint, Sherryl, and Sümeyra Buran, editors. Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction: Gender, Artificial Life, and the Politics of Reproduction. Palgrave, 2022.
