ShodhPatra: International Journal of Science and Humanities

Narratives of Care and Vulnerability: A Politics of Caregiving in Amandeep Sandhu’s Sepia Leaves

Caregiving has progressively been recognized in modern literary studies as a central point of interest in addressing the issue of vulnerability, the ethics of relations, and the everyday practices of responsibility. Unpaid caregiving is often placed within the context of traditional Indian English fiction and is often placed in the familial context, where emotional labour, moral necessity and social precarity come into play, but minimal attention has been given to it as a political and narrative practice. In this article, the relationship between caregiving as affective and ethical labour is interrogated in Sepia Leaves through foregrounded care as a lived reaction of mental illness, old age, and vulnerability to an individual or sentimental action. The research hypothesizes that the construction of caregiving by Sepia Leaves is a relational survival which is influenced by intimacy, exhaustion, silence, and endurance and consequently to illustrate the disequilibrium of provision of care in family structures. Using close reading, the analysis clarifies the extension of vulnerability to caregivers, whose identities are re-constructed due to a process of long-term emotional and physical labour. The novel reveals to the reader a weak line between duty and compassion and how care giving exists in wider social, cultural and ethical contexts rather than in isolation. Reading caregiving as one of the political practices of everyday life, this article illustrates that the most prevalent biomedical and institutional approaches to care are challenged by Sepia Leaves. As opposed to making care a fixed personal domain, it introduces care giving as a continuous negotiation that is shaped by memory, relational dependency and moral accountability. It makes contributions to the literature and medical humanities scholarship by foregrounding the idea of care giving as a prism through which one can comprehend vulnerability, ethics, and politics of care within contemporary Indian fiction. Keywords: Caregiving, Mental Illness, Medical Humnaities, Vulnerability