Watching The Reluctant Fundamentalist: What a Film Screening Taught Me About Empire, Identity, and Belonging
Professor's Worksheet: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/394454061_Worksheet_on_Screening_The_Reluctant_Fundamentalist
Postcolonial Literary and Film Analysis: Examining Identity, Empire, and Belonging
A Different Kind of Assignment
Mira Nair's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012), adapted from Mohsin Hamid's 2007 novel, explores identity, belonging, empire, and the political tensions between East and West after 9/11. Through Changez's journey from Lahore to New York and back again, the film raises important postcolonial questions about hybridity, Orientalism, re-orientalism, capitalism, cultural identity, and the experience of being treated as the Other.
In this blog, I examine the film as a literature student, connecting Mira Nair's cinematic choices with ideas from Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, Ania Loomba, Hardt and Negri, and other postcolonial thinkers. I also compare important changes between Hamid's novel and Nair's adaptation and reflect on how the film changed my understanding of identity, empire, and belonging.
Introduction
Three days ago, our professor, Prof. Dilip Barad, posted a worksheet on Google Classroom to prepare us for a film screening. I remember reading through it and feeling a bit nervous, because it was not a simple "watch a movie and enjoy" kind of task. It asked us to read theory before the film, to observe things carefully while the film played, and to write about the film once it was over. Yesterday, on 21 August 2026, we finally watched the film in our classroom, Mira Nair's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012), based on Mohsin Hamid's 2007 novel of the same name. Looking back now, I am glad Barad sir designed it this way, because a film like this cannot really be understood on a single casual viewing.
This post is my attempt to bring everything together into one connected piece: my pre-watching preparation, my notes from during the screening, and three separate rounds of reflection I wrote afterward a general response, a longer analytical essay, and a more personal reflective journal. I am writing this mainly for myself, as a way to remember what I learned, but also for any junior student in our department who might be assigned this same film in the future and wants to know what to expect from it.
Before I go further, let me say a word about why this film matters at all for a literature classroom. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is not really about terrorism, even though the title might suggest that. It is about a young Pakistani man named Changez who studies at Princeton, gets a dream job on Wall Street, falls in love with an American woman, and then watches his entire sense of belonging collapse after the September 11 attacks. Hamid wrote the book over almost seven years, and the story shifted a great deal during that time because of what was happening in the world around him. Mira Nair adapted it into a film in 2012, and her version changes several things from the book, sometimes in ways that work beautifully, and sometimes in ways that scholars have genuinely argued about. That tension between the novel and the film is, honestly, what made this whole assignment interesting for me.
Changez's Journey: From Wall Street to Lahore
Video: The Reluctant Fundamentalist — Official Trailer
Part One: Getting Ready Before the Screening
Empire Without a Centre
Before watching the film, we were asked to read parts of Ania Loomba's writing on the "New American Empire" along with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's book Empire. I will be honest, my first reaction to Hardt and Negri was confusion. Their whole argument is that the old idea of colonialism, where one country physically rules another from a capital city far away, does not really describe how power works anymore. Instead, they describe something called Empire, a kind of power that has no single centre and no fixed borders. It moves through global finance, trade networks, and information flows instead of through soldiers planting a flag. This new Empire dissolves geographic and cultural borders instead of guarding them the way old colonial powers did.
Once I understood that idea, something clicked for me about the film. Changez does not work for a government. He works for a private valuation firm called Underwood Samson. Yet the film keeps hinting, quite deliberately I think, that this firm is doing the work of an empire without anyone calling it that. The company's initials are U.S., which cannot be an accident, and this seemed to me a direct signal that Nair and Hamid both want us to read corporate finance as a stand-in for national power. Its entire philosophy is "Focus on the Fundamentals," a phrase that strips away anything human from a business decision and reduces a company, a person, or even a country to a number on a balance sheet. I found this genuinely unsettling to sit with. We are taught to think of empire as something that happened in the past, something with viceroys and railways and flags. This reading forced me to consider that empire today might look like a spreadsheet, and that Changez, once he starts working there, is being folded into this system whether he consciously agrees to it or not.
There is a scene, based on a moment from the novel, where a character named Juan-Bautista tells Changez about the janissaries. These were Christian boys captured by the Ottomans centuries ago and trained to fight against their own people, so completely reshaped by their training that they eventually forgot where they came from. Juan-Bautista tells Changez that he is a modern version of this, a man trained by an American firm to work against the interests of countries like his own, valuing and dismantling businesses in the developing world for profit that flows back to the West. I underlined this part of my notes twice, because it is the moment the whole psychological structure of the story becomes clear to me. Changez is not simply an ambitious young man who took a good job. He is, without fully realising it at first, a soldier for an economic empire, and his "fundamentals" are corporate rather than religious, which is exactly the irony the title is built on.
The Janissary Metaphor: A Soldier for Economic Empire
A Self Caught Between Two Places
The second theoretical thread I prepared before watching was Homi Bhabha's idea of hybridity, sometimes called the "third space." Bhabha argues that identity for someone caught between two cultures is never a simple, stable thing. It is a constant process of negation, negotiation, and integration, a back and forth between the culture a person came from and the culture they are trying to belong to. For Changez, this means he is never fully able to relax into either Lahore or New York. He carries both places inside him, and for a while this feels less like a burden and more like a natural, pluralistic way of being. He loves America genuinely the ambition of it, the energy of it even as he stays rooted in his love for his family and his home in Lahore. However, the world of global Empire does not easily allow for such a plural sense of self, especially once his identity is suddenly viewed through a lens of suspicion after 9/11.
Orientalism and Re-Orientalism: The Vocabulary I Needed
Alongside hybridity, I also had to sit with two related ideas that kept surfacing in our reading. The first is Edward Said's concept of Orientalism, his term for the Western habit of viewing the East as a fixed, exotic, and often threatening "Other," a static image rather than a living, changing place (Said). In the post-9/11 world, this old Orientalist lens sharpens considerably. It stops being simply about camels and harems in old paintings and starts being about the Muslim man on the subway who might, in the eyes of a suspicious stranger, be a threat simply because of how he looks.
The second, newer idea is Re-orientalism, discussed by scholars such as Lisa Lau and Ana Cristina Mendes. This happens when a director or writer from the East, someone trying to represent their own culture honestly and perhaps reach a wider global audience, ends up reproducing some of the same old Western tropes they are trying to push back against (Lau and Mendes 78-91). I found this idea genuinely humbling, because it means good intentions are not automatically enough. Even a film made by a South Asian director with real affection for Lahore can still, without meaning to, fall back into a familiar thriller shape that a Western audience already expects from a "Muslim story." Keeping this vocabulary in mind before the screening meant I was watching for these patterns rather than just reacting to the plot.
Contextual Research: Why Hamid's Novel Changed Direction
For my research notes, I looked into Mohsin Hamid's own history, which is genuinely fascinating given his upbringing in Lahore and the many years he later spent living and studying abroad. It is remarkable that he spent almost seven years writing this particular novel, and the timing of that long process is what truly shifted its direction. Hamid started the book well before the September 11 attacks, when the story was meant to explore globalization and what he calls a "mongrelized" identity, his own term for the pleasant, pluralistic feeling of belonging to more than one place at once. However, the tragedy of 9/11 changed the narrative voice completely partway through his writing process. What was once a story about international life and hybridity became a book charged with the politics of fundamentalism and the harsh reality of Islamophobia. Changez's own journey in the finished novel mirrors this shift, moving from a general exploration of a mixed, mongrelized identity to a narrative overshadowed by suspicion, showing how a single historical event can force a person to be viewed suddenly through a lens of cultural conflict rather than as an individual.
Video: Mohsin Hamid on Writing The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Part Two: What I Noticed During the Screening
Watching this film in our classroom with my classmates was a different experience from reading the book quietly on my own. Cinema forces certain choices that a novel does not have to make, and it was fascinating, as someone studying both literature and film, to watch Nair translate an internal, spoken monologue into something visual. Being a Postcolonial Studies student, I found myself moving beyond the plot fairly quickly, watching how the camera frame itself creates a kind of liminal space where cultures collide and commodify one another.
The Warmth of Lahore Against the Cold of New York
The very first thing I noticed was colour. Lahore in this film is golden, warm, and humid, full of music and crowded streets. New York is shot in a much colder palette, all glass towers and blue light. This is not subtle, and it is not meant to be. Nair wants the audience to feel the emotional difference between these two worlds before a single line of dialogue makes the point explicit.
The opening sequence uses a Qawwali performance, and I found this genuinely moving even before I understood its full purpose in the film's structure. Sufi devotional music like this is meant to sit with grief and transform it into something bearable, which is part of why the scene is intercut with the kidnapping of an American professor happening elsewhere in the city. The film is telling us, right from the start, that beauty and danger exist in the same space in Lahore, and that one does not cancel out the other. This rhythmic, Sufi-infused music felt to me like the soul of the film, standing in total opposition to the clinical world of corporate audits where everything, even art, gets reduced to an asset value.
The Warmth of Lahore vs. The Cold of New York
A Father Who Writes Poetry: The Generational Conflict
One change from the novel that I noted carefully is that Nair makes Changez's father an actual practising poet, someone who reads poetry aloud at home and clearly values art over material success. In Hamid's novel, it is only a great-uncle who has this role, mentioned briefly. By making it the father, and by making him a constant presence in the film, Nair sharpens the contrast between the "divine music" of Changez's home life and what I can only describe as the "brute strength" of his life on Wall Street. Every time the film cuts from a boardroom in New York to a quiet evening of poetry in Lahore, I felt that contrast land a little harder than the last time. It struck me as a sharp ideological friction poetry against profit playing out almost entirely through symbolism and narrative tension rather than direct confrontation.
Erica and the Camera That Objectifies
The relationship between Changez and Erica, the American photographer he falls for, is where I think the film departs most sharply, and most controversially, from the book. In Hamid's novel, Erica is described as fragile, still grieving her dead boyfriend Chris, almost too delicate to hold a real relationship with Changez, a kind of "frail America" mourning its own past. The film gives her a much harder, "Ugly America" persona. Through her camera lens, Changez is visually objectified and treated as a human prop. The scene in Central Park where she poses him for a photograph felt deeply uncomfortable to watch. This reaches a peak in her art exhibition titled "I Had a Pakistani Once."
I sat with that title for a long time after the screening. To me, this title is a kind of character assassination. It reduces Changez's entire identity to a specimen for Western cultural consumption, a trophy briefly owned and then displayed, showing that their relationship was never a meeting of equals but a small, personal metaphor for how the West consumes the East. It is one thing to read about objectification in a theory class. It is another thing to watch it happen to a character you have grown to care about over two hours of screen time.
"I Had a Pakistani Once" — Objectification and Cultural Consumption
Profit Versus Knowledge: Why Istanbul Instead of Chile Matters
A major cinematic change I analysed carefully was the decision to move Changez's epiphany from ValparaÃso, Chile, in the novel, to Istanbul in the film. The visuals of the Hagia Sophia, a site of deep historical layering, create a sharp contrast with the clinical, high-rise office spaces of New York that strip individuals of their history. It is here that the janissary metaphor becomes fully real for Changez. He realises he has become a servant of the American empire, a soldier trained to help erase civilisations like his own, when the publisher Juan-Bautista hands him a book of his own father's poems and observes that Changez is "very unlike" his American colleagues.
In the book, this turning point happens in Chile instead, and this location is not random. Chile has its own history with a September 11 the 1973 coup in which the United States was deeply involved. By setting the epiphany there, Hamid draws a direct, historically specific line between American economic power and American foreign intervention. Nair's choice of Istanbul, and specifically the Hagia Sophia, shifts the emotional register of this scene toward something more spiritual or religious. It is visually stunning, there is no doubt about that, but it also means the film loses that specific historical echo of American-backed political violence, softening a critique that Hamid clearly wanted his readers to sit with, since it suggests Changez's transformation is religious rather than a response to a documented pattern of American intervention abroad.
Alongside this, I kept a running list during the film of what I began calling cinematic metaphors of commodification. A few stood out to me clearly. The phrase "Focus on the Fundamentals" is repeated so often at Underwood Samson that it starts to feel less like ordinary business advice and more like a rigid, soul-stripping corporate creed. The high-rise glass offices of New York, all that supposed transparency, ironically hide how clinical and cold the actual decision-making really is. And the valuation of the publishing house in Istanbul, where books, objects that are meant to represent knowledge and culture, get treated only as numbers on a ledger, made the film's argument about profit versus knowledge almost unbearably direct.
Title Significance and the Trap of Dual Fundamentalism
By the time the film reaches its second half, its title finally makes complete sense to me. The film develops fundamentalism as a rigid trap, suggesting that the New American Empire and religious extremism are two sides of the same coin. I observed that the film parallels this market fundamentalism with its religious counterpart quite deliberately. At Underwood Samson, the mandate for single-minded attention to productivity requires what feels very close to a loss of soul, similar in shape to religious fanaticism. Both are single-minded creeds that leave no room for human distraction or doubt. Whether it is the market or the mosque, the requirement is the same: a sacrifice of the individuated self to a rigid, unyielding doctrine.
Changez's journey through the film follows something close to a hero's myth structure: leaving home, hitting an abyss of paranoia in New York, and eventually finding a kind of rebirth back in Lahore. I found myself wondering, while watching, if Changez is really the only true rebel in the film. He refuses to fully join the CIA-adjacent world represented by Bobby Lincoln, but he also refuses the extremist religious factions gathering outside the tea house at the end. His reluctance, the very word the title insists on, is not a weakness. It is his refusal to join a coerced dialogue where he is expected to pick a side in a war that does not actually represent him.
A Name That Carries History
Something I had not thought about deeply until this screening is Changez's full name, Changez Khan, which is obviously a version of Genghis Khan. It is not a subtle reference. It suggests a kind of ancient, unclaimed strength sitting inside a man who spends most of the film being told who he is supposed to be by everyone around him, his employer, his girlfriend, the American public, and eventually the extremists in Lahore too. His journey through the film becomes, in a way, a fight to remain his own master while powerful forces on both sides try to claim his name and his loyalty for their own agendas.
Surveillance, Borders, and the Body Under Suspicion
The character of Bobby Lincoln, the American who listens to Changez's story across a café table in Lahore, is a pivotal cinematic invention. In the novel, this listener has no name and never speaks. By making him a journalist who also happens to be a CIA operative, Nair highlights the blurring of boundaries between communication and surveillance in the post-9/11 world. In a sharp postcolonial irony, it struck me that the CIA in this story monitors everything despite being, in the film's own framing, unilingual and monocultural. They watch the local protests outside the tea house, but they do not really listen to them. This shift turns the story from something closer to a confession, as it functions in the novel, into something closer to an interrogation, where the dialogue between Changez and his American listener is always at least partly coerced.
Nair's representation of this Othering is visually quite brutal elsewhere too. The degrading strip search at the airport, where Changez is pulled aside while his white colleagues walk past freely, and the moment he is later called a "homegrown bomber" on the subway, show how conditional the American Dream really was for him all along. The moment the towers fall, his Ivy League status simply vanishes, and he is reduced back to a suspect body. Even the beard he grows later in the film becomes a performative signifier here. In the novel this beard is a coded, quiet protest. In the film, Nair shows Bobby Lincoln also wearing a beard, and I found the contrast pointed. On a white American man, a beard reads as a fashion choice or even a disguise. On Changez, the same beard is read by everyone around him as an ideological weapon.
The Lahore tea house itself is the film's most tense setting, with gun-wielding men inside and protesters gathering outside, representing a world where power feels constantly threatened from every direction. It captures the truly in-between world Changez now inhabits, a liminal space where he is viewed with suspicion both by the Americans he once loved and by the extremists who want to use him for their own purposes.
The Ending: A Business Card, Not a Weapon
The film concludes with a glint of metal in a stranger's jacket that turns out to be just a business card holder, nothing more. As a student of film, I find this ending intentionally open-ended. While Changez speaks of wanting a "shared intimacy" between East and West, the New Empire still seems to hold the final word through surveillance and lingering threat. I am left reflecting on whether true dialogue is even possible in a world like this, or if all of us, on some level, are caught in a cycle where the New American Empire quietly dictates the terms of every conversation, even the friendliest ones.
Part Three: My Reflections After the Screening
Does the Film Actually Build a Bridge Between East and West?
Once the film ended, our small group discussion in class kept circling around one question: Does this film actually create a genuine dialogue between East and West, or does it simply repackage old stereotypes in a more sympathetic wrapping? I do not think there is one clean answer, and honestly, the more I think about it, the more I believe both things are true at once.
Mira Nair's cinematic project is strategically positioned to move beyond the "clash of civilizations" rhetoric that has defined so much of the post-9/11 era. By blending the high-stakes tension of a Hollywood political thriller with the rich, sensory textures of Lahori life, she attempts to build what Homi Bhabha would call a genuine third space for dialogue. In the film, Lahore is not just a backdrop for terrorist activity. It is a place of high culture, poetry, and domestic intimacy, and by humanising Pakistan beyond the headlines, the film does move past a reductive "us versus them" binary. This humanising effort matters, because it challenges the Western viewer to see Pakistan through a lens of specific, lived particularity rather than a monolithic threat.
However, I have to ask the harder question: Does this humanisation actually lead to reconciliation, or does it simply dress up old stereotypes in warmer colours? In the novel, the American listener is silent and completely nameless, a deliberate strategic move by Hamid that forces the Western reader to finally sit and listen to the Other without interrupting. In Nair's hands, this silent listener becomes Bobby Lincoln, a voluble, active CIA operative. This single change fundamentally alters the power dynamic of the whole story. What was once a monologue from the margins becomes what I would call a coerced dialogue, often conducted with a gun somewhere nearby. Even the shared intimacy that briefly appears in the café is tainted by the surrounding, almost bloodthirsty atmosphere and by the simple fact that Bobby is, underneath his friendliness, a state agent.
Does the Film Build a Bridge or Reproduce Old Patterns?
If I try to lay this out honestly, a few things genuinely feel like points of reconciliation. The opening Qawwali sequence, where the music sweetens the sting of death, effectively transports the audience into the spiritual heart of Lahore. The Sufi-infused aesthetic throughout the film attempts to frame the whole East-West encounter through Pakistani folk songs and spiritual intoxication rather than only through political violence, and that choice deserves credit. At the same time, a few things feel like reproduced stereotypes despite the film's good intentions. The journalist-spy trope embodied by Bobby risks reinforcing the dangerous idea that Western journalists are, at bottom, agents of empire. The atmosphere of surreptitious phone calls and a mysterious duffel bag plays directly into thriller-style suspense, the classic terrorist trope. Nair does subvert this a little, since the bag turns out to contain alcohol for a Christian bootlegger rather than weapons, reminding us that in this mongrelized world, appearances can be deceiving. But the fact that the suspicion was built up so carefully in the first place says something about which audience the film is ultimately speaking to.
Ultimately, I think the shift from Hamid's silent American listener to Nair's active, speaking one changes the narrative's entire soul. It moves the story away from a subaltern character finally speaking his own truth, and toward a visual political thriller where Western agency quietly remains the dominant force, which leads me to genuinely question how necessary this particular structural change was.
From Monologue to Cinematic Language
Adapting Hamid's dramatic monologue is a genuinely difficult task. The novel's power lies almost entirely in its internal psychological journey, a single voice speaking in the dark to an unseen listener. To translate this onto the screen, Nair had to find a cinematic language that could visualise something inherently invisible an internal state of mind. While Hamid's prose is lean and economical, Nair's visual style is all colour, richness, and variety. This shift is necessary for a visual medium, but it fundamentally re-encodes the story's political meaning through visual and auditory symbols rather than through careful, controlled narration.
Nair replaces Hamid's internal reflections with a complex, layered soundtrack. The use of Sufi songs provides an auditory symbol of Changez's reluctant turn back toward his roots, yet it risks suggesting a religious turn that the book's focus on Wall Street's own "fundamentals" purposefully avoided. The psychological Othering described carefully in the book is given visceral, physical form through scenes like the Kennedy Airport strip search. The visual of a financial wunderkind being reduced to a suspected "homegrown bomber" delivers a kind of gut-punch that prose alone simply cannot replicate, making his loss of soul fully visible rather than only implied. And the tea house itself, an almost unreal, dreamlike frame in the novel, is transformed in the film into a high-tension interrogation space. Nair uses tight framing and the ambiguous glint of metal business card holder or weapon? to heighten the thriller elements, moving the narrative from something closer to an apologia into something closer to a political battle of wits.
These visual choices force me to look at Changez not just as a narrator recounting his own story, but as a person whose identity is genuinely a site of struggle between external empires and internal loyalty, a struggle that defines his status as a figure of both victimhood and resistance at once.
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From Internal Monologue to Visual Cinematic Language
Changez: Resistance, Victim, or Both
Changez's arc is defined throughout by the janissary metaphor, the idea of a servant of Empire trained to erase his own civilisation from the inside. In the film, he is caught between two extremes: the market fundamentalism of Underwood Samson, a firm name that feels pregnant with symbolic meaning "Underwood" suggesting something unconscious and buried, "Samson" suggesting raw, brute strength and the religious and nationalist fundamentalism of parts of his own homeland. His early success at the firm is a near-perfect example of Bhabha's concept of mimicry, where the colonised subject becomes "almost the same but not quite" as his American colleagues, a mimicry that eventually curdles into a profound ambivalence toward the whole American project.
Is Changez a victim of Empire or a figure of resistance? He is undoubtedly a victim of post-9/11 suspicion, subjected to degrading searches and professional Othering that has nothing to do with anything he has actually done. Yet in his return to Lahore, he emerges as something closer to a figure of resistance, an activist professor advocating openly for Pakistan's disengagement from American influence. However, the film's conclusion complicates any simple "class betrayal" reading. By ultimately collaborating with Bobby Lincoln and the CIA to help locate a kidnapped professor, does Changez compromise the stance he has spent the whole film building? By providing this crucial information, he risks becoming a kind of janissary once again, leveraging his own elite status to negotiate with a case officer in a way his own students never could.
I keep coming back to the idea that Changez occupies a genuinely liminal space of identity, one that refuses a single correct answer. He is what Hamid calls mongrelized, a hybrid identity shaped by the messy reality of globalised power. He is a lover of America who seeks a certain freedom of the soul but rejects the Gospel of Growth and the market fundamentals that Underwood Samson lives by. He is a Pakistani nationalist whose very resistance is, ironically, informed by the Western education and personal agency he once embraced so eagerly. And he remains reluctant to the very end, refusing to fit neatly into the box of either the sociopath or the terrorist that others keep trying to place him in. In the final analysis, the film itself feels like a mongrelized text, one where the prose version and the cinematic version are quietly at war with each other. By giving Bobby Lincoln a name and a voice, Nair may have diminished the purity of Changez's original monologue, but she has also, perhaps unintentionally, mirrored the messy reality of postcolonial identity far more honestly than a cleaner adaptation might have.
Scholarly Views: Where Critics Disagree
Scholars are genuinely divided on whether Nair's adaptation succeeds on its own terms. Lisa Lau and Ana Cristina Mendes, in their comparative study of the novel and film, argue that Nair's version is ostensibly more conciliatory than Hamid's original, attempting to build bridges and stress the tragedy of mutual mistrust between Pakistan and the United States, even while remaining entangled in the same cycle of orientalism and re-orientalism it tries to move past (Lau and Mendes 78). This feels like a fair and balanced way to describe what I saw on screen.
A more optimistic reading comes from KaiPing Wang and Bahramand Shah, who argue that Hamid's exploration of cultural hybridity, and by extension Nair's visual translation of it, successfully reconfigures identity as a mutable, fluctuating, and genuinely dynamic process, one that works to dismantle the essentialised, fundamentalist "Otherness" that the West tries to project onto figures like Changez (Wang and Shah 121-127). In their view, the story does not fail to resolve Changez's hybridity into something simple. It simply shows, honestly, how difficult it is to remain hybrid in a world that keeps insisting on stark, binary divisions.
There is also a strand of scholarship on postcolonial Othering more broadly, including work by Muhammad Qadar, Sadia Rizwan, and Zeeshan Ahmad, that examines how both The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Hamid's later novel Exit West stage the same basic drama: a protagonist caught inside a Western gaze that never fully lets him narrate himself on his own terms (Qadar et al. 536-546). Reading their argument alongside Lau and Mendes helped me see that this tension between resistance and reproduction is not unique to this one film. It seems to be a recurring problem for almost any adaptation that tries to bring a story about the margins into a mainstream cinematic form built largely around Western thriller conventions.
Reflecting on My Own Positionality as a Viewer
I want to be honest about something here, because I think it matters for how I have written this entire post. Watching this film is different for me than it might be for a viewer with no connection to South Asia at all. Changez is Pakistani, a neighbouring country to my own, and his journey from a middle-class background toward Western corporate success is a story that felt genuinely familiar to me in ways I did not fully expect going in. I recognised the ambition in him, the quiet pride his family takes in his achievements abroad, and the particular kind of loneliness that comes with succeeding in a country that never quite lets you feel you fully belong there.
As Ania Loomba points out in her work, it has become harder than ever, since the events of September 11, to see our world as simply "postcolonial" in the older sense of that word. Instead we see a New American Empire developing quite openly, one that reshapes how all of us, not only Pakistanis or Americans, come to perceive ourselves and each other. My position as an Indian viewer is therefore one of critical empathy rather than pure academic distance. I do not see the Othering of Changez as some distant, foreign phenomenon happening to someone else. I see it as a direct, visible result of the same broader power structures that Loomba and Said both describe in their work, structures that our own region has also had to live inside.
This personal closeness made certain scenes genuinely harder to sit through than I suspect they would be for someone watching purely as an outsider. The strip search scene, the subway accusation, and the gallery exhibition that treats Changez as a curiosity did not feel like abstract political points to me while I was watching them. They felt like a quiet warning about how quickly belonging can be taken away from someone who did everything right by the rules he was originally given.
Fundamentalism Beyond Religion: The Market as Doctrine
One of the most striking parts of this whole assignment, for me, has been rethinking the word "fundamentalism" itself. We are so used to Western media reserving this word almost exclusively for religious extremism. But both the novel and the film point insistently toward a market fundamentalism that is, in its own way, just as absolute. At Underwood Samson, whose initials again clearly gesture toward the American Empire, the mandate is simply to "Focus on the Fundamentals." This corporate creed demands single-minded attention to financial profit, treating human beings, at times quite literally, as redundant assets to be cut away when they no longer serve the numbers.
Connecting this back to Ania Loomba's critiques, I can see how the New American Empire she describes operates partly through institutions like the World Bank and IMF, imposing economic policies on developing nations that can carry the feel of a colonial ruler even without a single soldier ever being deployed. This economic fundamentalism is, in a real sense, just as religious as any formal dogma. It has its own gospel of growth, its own rigid unyielding creed, and it demands the same total sacrifice of a worker's individuated soul that religious fundamentalism is usually accused of demanding. Sitting with this for a while, I started to see that the fundamentalism the West so often fears in the East can, in this story at least, be read as a mirror of the economic fundamentalism the West quietly practises on the rest of the world.
Representation and the Symbolic Erica, Once More
In postcolonial literature, female characters often function as allegories for the nation itself, and I think that is exactly what is happening with Erica here, even though the film changes the allegory in an important way. In the novel, Erica is "ethereal" and fragile, mourning her dead sweetheart Chris, a metaphor for an "Am-Erica" that is broken and looking backward rather than forward. Nair's film gives us a far more "Ugly America" instead. This Erica, played by Kate Hudson, is robust and reckless, and in a major plot change from the book, she is the one directly responsible for Chris's death in a drunk driving accident.
This single change makes her a metaphor for active destruction rather than passive grief. For me, the most visceral moment in the entire film remains her art exhibition, "I Had a Pakistani Once." This Erica is entitled and unsympathetic in a way the novel's Erica never quite is, consuming Changez, the "Other," for her own artistic and emotional gain. She represents a nation that does not just mourn its own losses quietly but carelessly, almost thoughtlessly, damages the lives of others while still managing to present itself as the primary victim of the story. Watching this scene as an Indian viewer familiar with how our own region gets represented in Western media, I found this particular reversal from fragile to reckless one of the most quietly damning choices in the entire adaptation.
Global Empire and the Post-9/11 Shift, in My Own Words
The September 11 attacks mark, in this story, what I would call a historic moment of transition, where the Othering of Muslims became a kind of global default setting almost overnight. I was genuinely moved by the scenes of Changez's strip search and his later arrest, in essence, as a "homegrown bomber." In these moments he realises that, in the eyes of this New American Empire, his individuality has quietly vanished. He is no longer Changez the Princeton graduate or Changez the promising analyst. He is simply "Muslim" or "Arab," a category to be feared first and understood later, if at all.
Changez himself describes what he has become as a modern-day janissary, a soldier trained to erase his own civilisation from within, and this metaphor has stayed with me as something like a haunting reminder for anyone of us who might, someday, find ourselves working inside global structures we did not fully choose and cannot easily walk away from.
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The Post-9/11 Shift: From Individual to Category
Conclusion on the Ending, Revisited
The film's ending, that glint of metal which turns out to be nothing more than a business card holder, mirrors our own postcolonial reality rather precisely, where identity remains a dynamic, fluctuating process taking place in Bhabha's third space rather than something ever fully settled. Writing this whole reflection has moved me from seeing identity as something fixed, something you simply have, toward seeing it as a site of constant, ongoing struggle, one that does not resolve itself neatly just because the credits roll.
Ending Scenes from The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Mind Map: Postcolonial Concepts and The Reluctant Fundamentalist
View Full Resolution Mind Map
The Reluctant Fundamentalist Novel vs Movie Analysis
Conclusion
Preparing for, watching, and then writing about The Reluctant Fundamentalist turned out to be one of the more demanding assignments I have done this semester, but also genuinely one of the most rewarding. Reading Loomba, Hardt and Negri, Bhabha, and Said before the screening gave me a vocabulary I would not have had otherwise, a way to name what I was seeing on screen instead of only reacting to it emotionally. Watching the film with that vocabulary already sitting in my head changed how closely I paid attention to small choices colour, music, the placement of a camera choices I might easily have missed on a casual viewing without any preparation at all.
What stays with me most, even now, is how completely the film refuses easy answers. Changez is not simply a victim, not simply a rebel, and not simply a cautionary tale about radicalisation dressed up in an arthouse aesthetic. He is a person trying to hold onto a stable core of self while two different systems American corporate capitalism on one side and religious or nationalist extremism back home on the other each try to claim him completely and demand the same thing: total, unquestioning surrender. I think that is exactly why Barad sir chose this particular film for us to watch together as a class. It does not let a literature student sit comfortably on one side of an argument. It asks you to stay in that uncomfortable, in-between space right alongside Changez, and to think seriously, without flinching, about what it actually costs a person to live there. Whether one can ever truly disengage from these global structures remains, I think, a genuinely difficult and unresolved question, and I suspect it will stay with me for a long time as I continue further into my own academic journey in this deeply divided world.
📚 Works Cited
Barad, Dilip. "Worksheet on Screening The Reluctant Fundamentalist." ResearchGate, Aug. 2025, doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.29824.55047.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Hamish Hamilton, 2007.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2000, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674006713.
Lau, Lisa, and Ana Cristina Mendes. "Post-9/11 Re-Orientalism: Confrontation and Conciliation in Mohsin Hamid's and Mira Nair's The Reluctant Fundamentalist." The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 53, no. 1, 2018, pp. 78-91, https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989416631791.
Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. 3rd ed., Routledge, 2015.
Qadar, Muhammad, et al. "The Concept of Postcolonial Othering in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West by Mohsin Hamid." Global Language Review, vol. 8, no. 2, 2023, pp. 536-546, https://doi.org/10.31703/glr.2023(VIII-II).44.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Directed by Mira Nair, performances by Riz Ahmed, Kate Hudson, and Liev Schreiber, Mirabai Films, 2012.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Pantheon Books, 1978.
Wang, KaiPing, and Bahramand Shah. "Beyond Multicultural: Cultural Hybridity in Mohsin Hamid's Novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist." Global Sociological Review, vol. 6, no. 2, 2021, pp. 121-127, https://doi.org/10.31703/gsr.2021(VI-II).15.
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