Human trafficking and surveillance: a close examination of Manjula Padmanabhan’s Drama Harvest

Abstract

Human trafficking –  defined as organ and sex trafficking, and slavery materialized through numerous stratagems – is a growing problem worldwide. There has been a rising interest in the topic of human trafficking, and its mounting complexity and challenge. However, research has scarcely included literary representations of human trafficking achieved via e-surveillance processes: in this respect, Asian plays have received no sufficient critical attention. This article aims to redress this dearth by investigating the processes of human trafficking as depicted in the Indian playwright Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest, which premiered in 1999 in Greece. The play, a literary testimony to the complexity and subtlety of human trafficking processes, features storylines about human trafficking exercised through the forms of coercion, abduction, sexual seduction, fraud, deception, and abuse of power. Therefore, Harvest is closely read through Fanon’s, Foucault’s, and Bauman and Lyon’s perspectives of surveillance in this article. Reading the play provides a point of discussion of the third world’s vulnerability and its resistance to the first world’s human trafficking. It sheds much light on diverse human harvesting means such as organ harvesting and repopulation, and miscegenation, utilized through e-surveillance. The article offers complex insights into human trafficking victims of surveillance – both their vulnerability and the attempts of their agency.

KEYWORDS: E-surveillance, Panopticon, Postcolonial drama, Third/First World, Indian  playwright