Peer Webinar: Chapter 10

The Department of English, The Bhawanipur Education Society College, Kolkata, organized Peer Webinar: Chapter 10 on August 30, 2022 at 7 pm. Ms Chitrangada Deb was the speaker for the session, and her paper was titled as ” Strange ‘Bodies’: Investigating Techno-Violence and Organ Trading in Harvest”. The event was held on Google Meet and was attended by the faculty members , and the PG Semester III students of the Department of English.

The paper, extracted from one of the chapters of the speaker’s MPhil dissertation, attempted to depict a dystopian future of 2010, as imagined by the playwright Manjula Padmanabhan. Composed in 1996, Harvest dwells upon the dismal surrounding and perverted exchanges based on the real occurrences of organ trading. About the choice of the title of her play, Padmanabhan mentions, ““Harvest” was once the common term for the surgical removal of organs from bodies for re-use. In recent years it’s been replaced by the word “procurement”. No doubt the word owes its origin to agriculture, but I used it to mean organ harvesting – while simultaneously also suggesting agricultural harvests and the bounty of nature. There’s also a shadow definition, in the notion of “consequences”: a harvest is a result of actions and conscious decisions taken in the past. We reap what we sow”. 

The speaker emphasised on the haunting spectres of colonial capitalism in post-independence India that exploits the poor and weak with global technological advances. Harvest lashes out against man’s growing obsession with technology banishes the innate human qualities, and alerts the audience against the debilitating effects of techno-madness and cyber fascination. The audience is poised between the extreme cybernetic culture on the one hand and the bare bodies of the poor on the other. The techniques of surveillance and subservience penetrate not only the four walls of the single-room of the Prakash family but also drill holes inside the psyche of the audience who are held up uncomfortably within their own technophilia. The transformed bodies of the members of the household are no longer the human body as we know it; augmented by raw sciences they can reduce and sustains themselves simply an image. This alteration from material being to artificial nothingness is what uproots the audience from its utopian faith in science and progress.

The session concluded with questions and observations directed towards the speaker. It further allowed the listeners to ponder over the rather unconventional, unchartered and unpleasant aspects of humankind and inspired deeper stimulating thoughts. The Department aspires to conduct such other compelling talks and hopes to continue to enrich its peers with academic diversity.