Author: Abilash Valluri, Dr. N. Solomon Benny

Abstract: This article reconceptualises violence in the work of the Indian playwright and novelist Manjula Padmanabhan, arguing that her dramatic and fictional worlds dramatise violence not as a series of discrete, spectacular events but as a continuum that extends from the visible and direct, through the structural and systemic, to the cultural and symbolic. Drawing on Johan Galtung's triad of direct, structural, and cultural violence and Slavoj Zizek's distinction between subjective and objective violence, and supplementing these with Giorgio Agamben's account of bare life, Achille Mbembe's necropolitics, and Pierre Bourdieu's symbolic violence, the study offers close readings of three works that span two decades and two genres: the one-act play Lights Out (1984; published 2000), the award-winning dystopian drama Harvest (1997), and the speculative novel Escape (2008). It contends that Padmanabhan's signal achievement is to render perceptible the objective violence that ordinarily remains invisible precisely because it constitutes the normalised background against which subjective violence appears as aberration. In Lights Out, bystander apathy exposes the cultural violence that licenses and aestheticises gendered assault; in Harvest, the commodified organ-donor body materialises the necropolitical and structural violence of global capital; and in Escape, state-sponsored gendercide reveals the terminal logic of a patriarchal order that has rendered an entire category of life ungrievable. The article concludes that Padmanabhan's characteristically open endings reposition the spectator-reader from complicit passivity toward implicated responsibility, transforming the recognition of violence into an ethical demand.

Keywords: Manjula Padmanabhan, violence, structural violence, necropolitics, bystander apathy, gendercide, Indian English drama, dystopia, biopolitics, postcolonial body

Article Info: Received: 24 May 2026; Received in revised form: 21 Jun 2026; Accepted: 25 Jun 2026; Available online: 29 Jun 2026

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.113.86