How do we remember the land when it no longer feeds us? Can theatre restore the smell of soil, the effort of bending down, the weight of the harvest? In The Harvest of Broken Promises, Indian director and performer Pankaj Tiwari weaves together personal memory and collective history to recount the transformation of agriculture in India since the 1990s, when the neoliberal opening to the global market marked an irreversible turning point. Raised in a farming family, Tiwari retraces the sustainable practices of his childhood and their gradual disappearance under the impact of multinational agribusiness, emblematic of a model based on genetically modified seeds and new forms of economic dependency. Through video, interviews, visual arts, and folk narratives, the performance moves between document and myth, between intimate and political dimensions. Testimonies from farmers across different parts of the world expand the personal narrative into a generational portrait. The Harvest of Broken Promises is a powerful work that interrogates the relationship between progress and survival, asking what remains when the land no longer remembers how to feed those who inhabit it.
