The Grotesque Use Of Power And Its Effects On Characters In Manjula Padmanabhn's Harvest.

Abstract

   The grotesque, as a phenomenon in literature and art in general, is visual and predominately  physical. However, in this research, I try to show how power, from Foucault perspective, is as an affective  grotesque element, used to turn most of the characters in Mnajula Padmanabhan's Harvest into submissive, humiliated, grotesque subjects whose main existence  is to supply the Westerners with life and continuity, how the nation in this play works as a narrative script on which ideologies and principles of power are engraved or expunged. And how the characters are suffering from a loss of identity although they live in their original home .  It will be noticed that the aim of grotesque in the play is not to show satire or black comedy or to give signs for hope, reconciliation or reformation, rather it is used to show bitter reality and the true face of modernism .This grotesque use of power makes  hope and victory only slight dreams of the individuals that fulfil and present  nothing to the nation. The research also argues that whereas the play centers on the ambivalence in power affairs and relations, Manjula's vision is quite unambivalent in its utopian notion of political change  and its gendered depiction of women within nationalist discourses. The research shows that the playwright’s illustration of the Indian world as being intoxicated by the notion of power which is depicted as complex, monstrous and ambivalent .