Diasporic Female Precarity and Agency in Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways﻿﻿﻿

Mirza, Maryam

doi:10.1163/9789004466395_007

Diasporic Female Precarity and Agency in Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways

Mirza, Maryam

Authors

Dr Maryam Mirza maryam.mirza@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor

Contributors

Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamf
Editor

Marion Gymnich
Editor

Klaus P. Schneider
Editor

Abstract

Sunjeev Sahota’s Booker Prize shortlisted novel The Year of the Runaways (2015) charts, alternating with numerous flashbacks, a year in the life of three Indian men in Sheffield: Tochi, an illegal Dalit immigrant, Avtar, who enters the United Kingdom on a student visa but very much with the intention to work, and, trying to escape a shameful past, Randeep, who arrives in the country on a spouse visa resulting from a sham marriage. My essay, however, is concerned with the two female Sikh characters, Randeep’s ‘visa wife’ Narinder and her unlikely friend Savraj, who, as we will see, are central to Sahota’s preoccupation with the various forms that precarity can assume for women and the complex expressions of agency that it can spawn in a transnational context. In particular, I trace Narinder’s changing relationship with her religious faith to demonstrate that the subtle exploration of female agency and defiance in the novel is intimately bound up with pressing questions of ‘honour’, freedom and moral responsibility in a profoundly unjust and unequal world.

Citation

Mirza, M. (2022). Diasporic Female Precarity and Agency in Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways. In B. Schmidt-Haberkamf, M. Gymnich, & K. P. Schneider (Eds.), Representing Poverty and Precarity in a Postcolonial World (88-102). Brill Academic Publishers. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004466395_007

Online Publication Date	Feb 22, 2022
Publication Date	Feb 22, 2022
Deposit Date	Aug 11, 2021
Publicly Available Date	Nov 18, 2021
Publisher	Brill Academic Publishers
Pages	88-102
Series Title	Cross/Cultures
Series Number	215
Book Title	Representing Poverty and Precarity in a Postcolonial World
Chapter Number	5
ISBN	9789004465657
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004466395_007