Ethics, Technology and Human Value in a Globalized World: A Literary Reading of Manjula Padmanabhan’s play Harvest

This chapter offers an extended doctoral-level examination of Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest (1997) as a critical dystopian drama that interrogates the ethical implications of biotechnology, neoliberal globalization, and postcolonial inequality. Situating the play within late-twentieth-century Indian economic liberalization and contemporary debates on organ trafficking, surveillance capitalism, and biopolitics, the study argues that Harvest dramatizes the transformation of the human body into a commodified resource under global market regimes. Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s theory of biopower, Donna Haraway’s cyborg paradigm, Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist existentialism, Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy, and postcolonial critiques of neo-imperial extraction, this chapter demonstrates how Padmanabhan exposes the structural coercion masked by the rhetoric of consent and humanitarian exchange. Through close textual analysis of key scenes—particularly the contractual agreement, corporate surveillance mechanisms, Jeetu’s substitution, and Jaya’s final act of defiance—the chapter argues that Harvest challenges liberal bioethical models grounded in autonomy by foregrounding systemic inequality. Ultimately, the play redefines human value not as biological utility but as ethical agency. In an era marked by medical tourism, genetic commodification, and data surveillance, Harvest remains urgently relevant as a theatrical meditation on dignity, technology, and justice in a globalized world