In 1996, when Delhi playwright Manjula Padmanabhan sat down to write Harvest for an international competition about the challenges facing humanity in the next century, the internet was still in its infancy, video calling belonged to the realm of comics, and globalisation was largely being sold as a promise of prosperity.
In 1997, Harvest won the prestigious Onassis Prize in Greece and has since become one of the most internationally recognised works of modern Indian theatre. Three decades later, it is returning to the Delhi stage at Black Box Okhla in a new Hindi production directed by Nikhil Mehta.
The play follows Om Prakash, a lower-middle-class man in a near-future Mumbai who signs away his organs to a wealthy foreign recipient through a multinational corporation. In exchange, his family gains comfort and stability, but their lives soon come under corporate surveillance and control.
Written as a futuristic dystopia set in 2010, Harvest now finds itself being staged 16 years after the future it once imagined. Padmanabhan admits that its continued relevance after three decades is bittersweet. “As an author, I should feel glad that my play is still relevant,” she says. “But at another level, it is very disturbing. I would have hoped that by now people would have become more compassionate. The world is now much worse than when I wrote it.”
Mehta encountered the play as a graduate student at Columbia University and recalls Harvest being the only play from India in the Wadsworth Anthology of Drama. “Harvest is one of the most important modern Indian plays, rarely performed in the subcontinent,” he says. “It is so rare to come across new writing for the stage from India, let alone one that is so sharp in its imagination and foresight.” He was struck by its combination of dark comedy, futurism and political critique, which ultimately led him to bring its first major Hindi production to the Delhi stage.
Friend or facade?
The play’s most memorable presence is Ginni, a charming digital intermediary who appears on screens, offering friendship, reassurance and intimacy while quietly serving the interests of an exploitative system.
For Padmanabhan, Ginni is a variation on a very common theme. “People coming to sell us things, people trying to get something from us, but by their presence and their charm, they appear to be befriending us,” she explains.
Ginni feels especially relevant in an era of AI chatbots, virtual companions, influencers and online personalities with whom users often form parasocial relationships. “They’re always presenting themselves as likeable and friendly,” Padmanabhan says of today’s digital personas. “And you have no idea what they actually look like and what their intention is.”
Mehta notes that this technological familiarity changes how audiences understand the play. “Many of those technologies have become everyday reality now, but this has only helped bring the story closer to us,” he says. “We’re no longer wondering how this technology works, but what it is being used for.”
The body as commodity
At its core, Harvest asks an uncomfortable question: what happens when the human body becomes something that can be bought, sold and managed? Padmanabhan confirms that the central issue of the play is now a fact. “Bodies are being bought and sold the whole time,” she says.
From organ markets to surrogacy arrangements, from physical labour to reproductive work, the body has long been an item of trade. “Many do that to improve their lives. In a sense, anyone who sells their services — an engineer, doctor or lawyer—does so to make a living. It’s just that the body is finite. If you sell a body part, it’s gone forever.” The concern is embodied by Jaya, Om’s wife, who recognises that the loss of an organ cannot be reduced to money.
“What does it mean to lose a body part? What agency do we have over our own bodies?” Padmanabhan says, describing the questions that emerged as she wrote the play. Jaya’s resistance becomes one of the play’s emotional centres, transforming Harvest from a story about commerce into a story about autonomy, dignity and personhood.
A new life in Hindi
Harvest was written in English, but has been staged in Greek and Italian. A new translation into Spanish has just been published in Colombia. Mehta’s production in Delhi marks the first authorised staging of the play in an Indian language, using a new translation by actor-director Rahul Rai and published by Hachette India.
For Mehta, the linguistic shift is central to the production. “I felt the English text was distancing us from the reality of the world the play created,” he says.
Padmanabhan, who worked closely on the translation process alongside a four-member editorial team from Hachette, says the experience of hearing the play in Hindi is revelatory. The playwright, who is not a Hindi speaker, feels that the change in language had a powerful impact on the audience. Terms describing family relationships carried deeper emotional and cultural meaning than the equivalent terms in English.
“I realised watching the audience that they were reacting to these words – like ‘saas’ and ‘bahu’ – because they are related directly to the people in their own families,” Padmanabhan says, recalling the rehearsed reading of this Hindi version at Black Box Okhla in 2025. She believes Hindi-speaking audiences may find it easier to identify with the characters.
When Harvest premiered in 1998, audiences were being asked to imagine a dystopian future. In 2026, however, the distance between the play’s imagined future and reality has narrowed considerably.
“Harvest was always a reflection of the world we’re living in,” Mehta says. It’s just become a little clearer now.”
Harvest will be staged at Black Box Okhla on June 11 to 14 at 8 pm