Screening Film Adaptation of The Reluctant Fundamentalist

 This blog is written as a task assigned by Prof.Dilip Barad Sir. Here is the link to the professor's article for background reading: Click here.

Empire Without Borders: Reading The Reluctant Fundamentalist through Loomba, Hardt, and Negri

Ania Loomba’s idea of the “New American Empire” and Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri’s theory of Emionary underside. Changez, once a celebrated cosmopolitan figure, becomes a suspect foreigner his hybridity tolerated only until geopolitics makes his identity threatening.

The novelpire reimagine globalization beyond the older colonial binary of center and margin. For Loomba, U.S. dominance in the post–Cold War and post-9/11 era represents a form of imperial power that does not require direct territorial rule but works through global markets, militarized security regimes, and cultural hegemony. Hardt and Negri similarly argue that Empire is a decentered, networked form of sovereignty diffused across multinational corporations, international institutions, and transnational military alliances. This makes power “everywhere and nowhere” not confined to one metropole but circulating through global systems.

Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist offers a literary exploration of these dynamics. Changez’s journey from Princeton to corporate success in New York and eventual disillusionment illustrates how individuals are caught within global circuits of power. His work at Underwood Samson, which thrives on valuing corporations in unstable regions, reflects the logic of Empire: capital profiting from crisis without direct conquest. Yet after 9/11, the same networks of empire reveal their exclus’s narrative structure Changez speaking to a silent American listener further dramatizes imperial power relations. The American embodies the surveillant gaze of Empire, while Changez’s attempt to reclaim the narrative reflects resistance within this asymmetrical exchange. In this way, the text illustrates Loomba’s claim that the New American Empire operates not only through armies and corporations but also through cultural suspicion and identity politics.

Thus, read through Loomba, Hardt, and Negri, The Reluctant Fundamentalist emerges as a meditation on empire, hybridity, and the fractured post-9/11 global order an order where power is diffuse, identities are contested, and belonging is always precarious.

Hamid’s Background and the Impact of 9/11 on The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Mohsin Hamid, born in Lahore in 1971, studied at Princeton and later Harvard Law School, experiences that shaped his transnational outlook and directly influenced his fiction. He began drafting The Reluctant Fundamentalist in the late 1990s, originally as a story about a young Pakistani negotiating ambition, identity, and belonging in America. At this stage, the novel reflected globalization’s promise mobility, opportunity, and hybridity. However, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, dramatically altered the global climate and Hamid’s narrative. Post-9/11, the immigrant’s position became fraught with suspicion, surveillance, and cultural exclusion, especially for Muslims. Hamid rewrote the novel in this context, transforming it into a work about geopolitics, disillusionment, and the shifting dynamics of empire. The fact that the novel was conceived before but completed after 9/11 gives it a unique double perspective: it captures both the optimism of pre-9/11 globalization and the fractured world order that emerged afterward.

Character Conflicts & Themes in The Reluctant Fundamentalist

In Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the father son or generational split is not staged as a loud quarrel but as a quiet tension humming beneath the surface. Changez, bright and ambitious, chases the glittering promise of global modernity, embodied by his job at Underwood Samson. There, life is measured in numbers, value is stripped of sentiment, and efficiency becomes a new creed. His father, by contrast, belongs to the old Lahore worlds of poetry, subtle irony, and dignity untainted by corporate greed. He regards Changez’s pursuit of wealth with a kind of amused skepticism, sensing that such success risks hollowing the soul. The conflict, then, is symbolic: the son’s immersion in modern corporate culture collides with the father’s rooted values, revealing how globalization breeds a generational dissonance between tradition and ambition.

Equally poignant is the conflict between Changez and Erica, the American photographer whose camera becomes both her shield and her symbol. Changez longs for intimacy, but Erica remains ensnared in the ghost of her lost lover, Chris. She looks at Changez, yet often seems to look through him as if he were a photograph to be captured rather than a soul to be understood. Their relationship embodies objectification and estrangement: Changez is welcomed into Erica’s world but never truly allowed to belong. On a deeper level, Erica personifies America itself captivating but emotionally inaccessible, clinging to its past while unable to embrace the “other.” Changez’s rejection, both in love and in nation, is thus complete, leaving him suspended between longing and alienation.

Together, these conflicts between father and son, and between lovers mirror the larger theme of the novel: the fracture of identity in a world where tradition wrestles with modernity, and intimacy is fractured by cultural and political divides.

Title Significance & Dual Fundamentalism

The title The Reluctant Fundamentalist is deliberately paradoxical. The word fundamentalist immediately evokes religious extremism, yet Hamid and Mira Nair (in the film) complicate this association. Changez, though branded a “fundamentalist” by both Americans and Pakistanis, is reluctant to embrace either the label or its ideological rigidity. His trajectory reveals that “fundamentalism” is not restricted to religion but can equally describe the uncompromising demands of global capitalism. The title thus challenges audiences to reconsider what fundamentalism means in a post-9/11 world.

Visually, the film creates subtle parallels between corporate extremism and religious extremism. When Changez works at Underwood Samson, the camera emphasizes sleek boardrooms, sharp suits, and ruthless corporate rituals. These images mirror the discipline, uniformity, and “sacrifice” demanded by militant groups. Both systems ask for loyalty, both demand the abandonment of personal attachments, and both measure worth in absolutes. The boardroom becomes as ritualized as the mosque, suggesting that capitalism itself is a form of fundamentalist dogma.

Changez’s reluctance surfaces most poignantly in two ways. First, in his corporate life while he thrives as a financial analyst, the film uses cold lighting and detached framing to reveal his discomfort with the dehumanizing “focus on fundamentals” at Underwood Samson. His inner resistance is visible in quiet, pained expressions when his cultural identity is mocked or when he realizes he is complicit in economic exploitation. Second, in the political sphere though suspected of terrorism, Changez repeatedly insists on his rejection of violence. The film underscores this ambivalence through tense close-ups and long silences: he sympathizes with Pakistan’s grievances yet recoils from bloodshed. His “reluctance” thus becomes a refusal to fully belong to either camp: not the terrorist, not the corporate zealot.

Ultimately, the duality of the title mirrors Changez’s divided life. He is reluctant to be America’s economic soldier, yet equally reluctant to be cast as a radical. The novel and film both argue that in a polarized world, even neutrality or ambivalence becomes suspect. The title crystallizes this irony Changez is never fully a “fundamentalist,” but the world insists on reading him as one.

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Empire Narratives in The Reluctant Fundamentalist

The film situates itself in the post-9/11 world order, where the remnants of empire manifest through paranoia and mistrust between East and West. America, framed as the self-appointed guardian of “freedom,” projects suspicion onto racialized bodies, while Pakistanis navigate the ambivalence of resisting both Western dominance and internal extremism. The narrative reveals that empire is no longer territorial but discursive: it thrives in surveillance, suspicion, and the policing of identities.

Post-9/11 paranoia and mistrust emerge most directly in Changez’s detention at JFK Airport. The scene is dimly lit, stripped of warmth, emphasizing his vulnerability as his brown body becomes an object of suspicion. The camera lingers on the humiliation of being searched this embodies the empire’s logic of control: to reduce individuals to stereotypes, collapsing nuance into a binary of loyal citizen or potential terrorist. Similarly, in America, Changez notices the shift in gazes, tones, and unspoken hostility his identity is re-coded from cosmopolitan professional to racialized threat.

The film also dramatizes dialogue across borders through the framing conversation between Changez and the American journalist Bobby Lincoln. Their conversation in Lahore is both tense and tentative, filled with ambiguities: is Bobby genuinely seeking truth, or is he an intelligence operative? This deliberate uncertainty reflects the larger climate of suspicion. Their dialogue stages the impossibility of transparent communication in a world governed by mistrust, yet it also gestures toward the possibility of cross-cultural understanding.

Spaces of ambiguity are crucial cinematic tools. The café in Lahore where Changez narrates his story is one such liminal space at once a zone of hospitality and surveillance, conversation and interrogation. Similarly, Changez’s ambiguous positioning between America and Pakistan reflects both complicity and resistance. He participates in Underwood Samson’s exploitative capitalism, yet later resists by rejecting its dehumanizing logic. He sympathizes with his students’ frustrations but resists militant violence. These shifting positions keep him in a zone of ambiguity, forcing the viewer to confront the uncomfortable truth that identities in the post-9/11 world cannot be neatly categorized.

In this way, the film critiques empire’s narratives of clarity and control. By foregrounding paranoia, mistrust, and liminal spaces, it shows that the true legacy of empire lies not only in military or economic dominance but in the persistent inability of cultures to trust one another, a condition where even gestures of resistance risk being misread as complicity.

Post-Watching Activities

Discussion Prompts (Small Groups)

Here’s a structured set of Discussion Prompts with Model Points and Debate Directions you can use directly in class or group work:

Discussion Prompt 1

Does the film provide a space for reconciliation between East and West or does it ultimately reinforce stereotypes?

🔹 Possible Points for Reconciliation

• Changez and Bobby’s conversation itself creates a dialogic space.

• Cross-cultural romance between Changez and Erica shows genuine intimacy.

• The film attempts to humanize the “other,” giving Pakistan a modern, intellectual face.

🔹 Possible Points for Reinforcing Stereotypes

• Surveillance and suspicion dominate the framing, leaving the Muslim man still under the gaze of the West.

• Erica’s use of Changez as a symbolic figure of her own trauma plays into Orientalist desire.

• The thriller-style narrative leans toward depicting terrorism as an inevitable backdrop to Muslim identity.

Discussion Prompt 2

How successfully does Nair’s adaptation translate the novel’s dramatic monologue and ambiguity into cinematic language?

🔹 Strengths of Adaptation

• Camera framing and point-of-view shifts create moments of uncertainty.

• Use of music and mise-en-scène adds cultural texture absent in the novel.

• Flashbacks mirror the novel’s layered storytelling.

🔹 Limitations of Adaptation

• The visual medium reduces ambiguity—viewers see what the camera shows, unlike the novel’s single, unreliable voice.

• The thriller pacing sometimes overshadows the introspective, philosophical tone of Hamid’s text.

• Political urgency in the film makes Changez’s motives more legible, less mysterious.

Debate Prompt

Is Changez a figure of resistance, a victim of Empire, both—or neither?

🔹 Changez as Resistance

• Rejects the American Dream after 9/11 suspicion.

• Reclaims identity by teaching and writing in Pakistan.

• Critiques neo-imperial corporate structures.

🔹 Changez as Victim of Empire

• Racial profiling at airports.

• Loss of dignity and career due to Islamophobia.

• Erica’s withdrawal symbolizes the West’s refusal of intimacy with the colonized.

🔹 Changez as Both

• His resistance emerges precisely because he was victimized.

• The ambivalence makes him emblematic of postcolonial identity.

🔹 Changez as Neither

• He never fully joins a resistance movement.

• His choices remain intellectual, not militant.

• Ambiguity resists easy categorization he is a human caught between worlds.

Short Analytical Essay (1,000 words)

 Prompt: Using postcolonial theory (hybridity, third space, orientalism, re-

orientalism), analyze how the film represents through visual and narrative

strategies the complexity of identity, power, and resistance in a post-9/11

world.

 Support with reference to the novel’s framing, the film’s adaptation choices,

and relevant scholarly critiques (e.g. Lau & Mendes on re-orientalism)

Hybridity and the “Third Space” of Identity

Bhabha’s concept of hybridity disrupts colonial binaries by insisting that cultural identity is formed in the “third space” of negotiation. Changez embodies this hybridity: a Pakistani educated at Princeton, thriving in the world of American corporate finance, yet rooted in Lahore’s cultural history. In the novel, his voice is simultaneously cosmopolitan and local, ironic and sincere an unstable hybridity that resists categorization.

Nair visualizes this hybridity through mise-en-scène and costuming. Changez’s transformation from clean-shaven Wall Street consultant in tailored suits to bearded professor in Lahore is not simply a shift from “West” to “East,” but a negotiation of dual affiliations. The Princeton classroom scenes, shot in warm tones, depict hybridity as intellectual dialogue; the Lahore protest sequences, framed with handheld cameras and urgent movement, suggest hybridity turning into resistance. These spaces visualize Bhabha’s “in-between” identity—not assimilation, not rejection, but a contested negotiation.

Yet hybridity is also precarious. The airport strip-search sequence dramatizes how the West collapses hybridity into suspicion, reducing Changez to an “Oriental” figure. Here, Nair critiques the impossibility of maintaining fluid identity under the rigid gaze of post-9/11 America.

Orientalism and the Western Gaze

Said’s orientalism is pivotal to both novel and film. The American gaze reduces Changez and Pakistan to stereotypes: threatening, backward, and suspect. In the novel, this is conveyed through the American stranger’s silence, which doubles as the reader’s gaze. In the film, Nair externalizes this gaze through visual framing. Surveillance shots of Changez watched by CIA operatives, profiled in airports, trailed in Lahore depict the persistence of orientalism in the post-9/11 security state.

At the same time, Nair resists reproducing orientalism by foregrounding Lahore as a vibrant, cosmopolitan city. The film’s lush cinematography of Lahore’s streets, tea houses, and cultural landmarks resists the monolithic portrayal of Pakistan as a site of terror. By placing American viewers within a cultural landscape often unseen in Western media, Nair destabilizes orientalist frames, opening what Hamid himself called a “humanizing window” into Pakistan.

Still, the risk of re-orientalism remains. Lau & Mendes argue that diasporic authors and filmmakers, while critiquing orientalism, may inadvertently re-package “authentic” Eastern culture for Western consumption. Nair’s aestheticization of Lahore music, bazaars, Sufi shrines while celebratory, risks exoticizing Pakistan in order to counteract negative images, thereby participating in what Lau & Mendes call a “re-orientalist economy of representation.”

Re-Orientalism and Self-Representation

Building on Lau & Mendes’ critique, Nair’s adaptation illustrates the paradox of re-orientalism. On one level, the film contests orientalist stereotypes by giving Changez narrative agency, allowing him to tell his own story to Bobby Lincoln, the American journalist. This framing mirrors the novel’s monologue structure, emphasizing voice and perspective. On another level, the cinematic medium funded partly through Western production channels requires a certain legibility to Western audiences, leading to what Lau & Mendes describe as “reverse exoticism.”

For instance, the depiction of Lahore protests against U.S. intervention is visually coded with familiar imagery of angry crowds, fire, and anti-American slogans. While politically accurate, such imagery risks reinforcing Western assumptions of perpetual unrest in the Muslim world. Nair attempts to balance this by showing Lahore’s intellectual spaces universities, artistic circles, family gatherings but the tension between critique and marketability remains unresolved.

Thus, the film embodies the ambivalence of re-orientalism: it critiques orientalist narratives while also depending on their recognizability. This reflects the structural challenge of postcolonial cultural production within global circuits of power.

Narrative Ambiguity and Cinematic Translation

A central challenge in adaptation lies in translating Hamid’s dramatic monologue and deliberate ambiguity into cinematic form. The novel’s ambiguity whether Changez is a threat, whether his listener is an assassin, whether the final confrontation ends in violence forces readers to interrogate their own biases.

Nair modifies this ambiguity by embedding the story in a thriller-like frame narrative between Changez and Bobby. This shifts the novel’s open-endedness into a more dialogic encounter. While this allows the film to dramatize East–West dialogue, it also reduces the interpretive indeterminacy of the text. In other words, cinema’s demand for resolution undercuts the novel’s destabilizing power.

Yet Nair compensates through visual ambiguity. The final standoff, filmed with rapid cross-cutting between Changez, Bobby, and the armed protesters, preserves uncertainty about culpability and violence. Unlike Hollywood thrillers, the film resists closure, ending instead with the image of Changez walking into the crowd an unresolved figure caught between reconciliation and resistance.

Power and Resistance

In both novel and film, Changez oscillates between victimhood and resistance. His humiliation at the airport exemplifies how imperial power reduces the hybrid subject to an object of suspicion. Yet his eventual decision to leave Wall Street and teach in Lahore marks a form of resistance—not through violence, but through pedagogy and cultural critique.

Nair emphasizes this through cinematic juxtaposition: scenes of Changez’s corporate success (boardrooms, skyscrapers, wealth) are intercut with his father’s modest study in Lahore, signaling a tension between capitalist assimilation and cultural rootedness. His resistance is not framed as fundamentalist violence, but as intellectual dissent a refusal to participate in Empire’s economic machinery.

In this sense, Changez becomes what Gayatri Spivak might call a “strategic essentialist”mobilizing Pakistani identity as a site of political critique while remaining aware of hybridity. His figure embodies the ambivalence of postcolonial resistance: neither wholly victim nor wholly revolutionary, but a complex negotiation of power.

Conclusion

Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist offers a layered representation of identity, power, and resistance in the post-9/11 world. Through hybridity and the third space, it dramatizes the instability of cultural identity; through orientalism and re-orientalism, it exposes the persistence of imperial gazes while acknowledging the risks of counter-representation. While the adaptation sacrifices some of the novel’s ambiguity, it compensates by foregrounding visual strategies that challenge stereotypes and highlight dialogue.

Ultimately, the film neither wholly reconciles East and West nor fully escapes orientalist tropes. Instead, it inhabits an uneasy but productive space of ambivalence a postcolonial third space where identity and resistance remain perpetually negotiated.

Reflective Journal

Reflect on your own positionality as a viewer: Did the film shift your

perspective on issues of identity, power, or representation? How might these

reflections deepen your understanding of postcolonial subjects under global

empire?

Watching The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a viewer situated in the post-9/11 world compelled me to re-examine my own assumptions about identity, power, and representation. The film does not simply tell the story of Changez; it unsettles the gaze of the viewer, pushing us to confront how we ourselves might be complicit in the binaries of “East versus West,” “terrorist versus patriot,” or “modern versus traditional.”

Initially, I found myself reading Changez through the lens of suspicion the same gaze that the U.S. security apparatus directs at him. This realization was unsettling, as it revealed how deeply media narratives and post-9/11 paranoia have shaped even my own interpretive frameworks. The film’s ambiguity whether Changez is complicit or resistant forced me to acknowledge the limits of certainty and the danger of stereotypes.

Visually, Mira Nair creates liminal spaces the café in Lahore, the claustrophobic U.S. boardrooms, the intimate yet fractured spaces of romance that destabilize any fixed cultural identity. As a viewer, these spaces made me reflect on Homi Bhabha’s idea of the third space, where cultural identities are negotiated, hybrid, and contested. I realized how often I unconsciously sought “closure” or a definitive answer about Changez, rather than embracing the productive ambiguity that resists imperial categories.

The film also shifted my understanding of power. Before, I might have thought of empire purely as an external structure military, corporate, or political. But Changez’s narrative reveals how power seeps into everyday interactions, surveillance, suspicion, and even love. This helped me see how postcolonial subjects are not only victims but also agents navigating and resisting within these structures.

Finally, reflecting on my own positionality, I see that I approached the film from within a globalized, digitally connected world where narratives of terrorism, nationalism, and identity remain charged. My reaction exposed my own biases but also expanded my capacity to listen across borders. This reflective engagement deepened my understanding of postcolonial subjects: they are not passive figures of victimhood or exotic others, but complex individuals negotiating belonging, loss, and resistance within the shadow of empire.

References 

• Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Houghton Mifflin, 2007.
• Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard UP, 2000.