An Indian, Female Jules Feiffer
From January 19 to February 5, 2006, La MaMa E.T.C. will present East Coast Artists (Richard Schechner, Founder and Artistic Director) in the New York premiere of "Harvest" by Manjula Padmanabhan, an award-winning play from India that centers on the international organ trade. The production will be directed by Benjamin Mosse.
Playwright Manjula Padmanabhan is a Delhi-based writer and artist. Being both a cartoonist and socially-conscious playwright, she invites comparison with America's Jules Feiffer. Padmanabhan's books include "Hot Death, Cold Soup," a collection of short stories; "Getting There," a travel-memoir; "This is Suki!", a collection of her New Delhi strip SUKI; "Hidden Fires," a collection of five dramatic monologues; and "Kleptomania," a second collection of short stories. Her comic strips appeared weekly in the Sunday Observer (Bombay, 1982-86) and daily in the Pioneer (New Delhi, 1991-97). Padmanabhan has illustrated twenty-four books for children including her own two novels for children, "Mouse Attack" and "Mouse Invaders. Her most recent book is "Double Talk", a collection of the Bombay strip by the same name.
"Double Talk" first appeared in the Sunday Observer in Bombay, 1982. Suki, its central character, was a bushy-haired, baggy- clothed free spirit. With neither job nor family to tie her down, her life was uncluttered, unencumbered and always unconventional. In four years, she had just one romance, and her best friends were non-human. In the nineties, Suki was resurrected in a daily strip of that name, in the Pioneer in New Delhi, where it ran for six years. Despite. all the changes that have occurred in the real world since Suki's birth, the character and the illustrations continue to bristle with their own quirky brand of humour-or lack of it. Bombay's feisty readers had strong views about the cartoon, and sent in close to sixty letters of complaint to the editor!
This is an excerpt from "Double Talk" that was published by Penguin, India in 2005.
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