Worksheet: The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Blog is given by Barad sir. 

Research Gate link: 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/394454061_Worksheet_on_Screening_The_Reluctant_Fundamentalist

A. Pre-Watching 

1. Critical Reading & Reflection 

Ania Loomba’s discussion of the “New American Empire” and Hardt & Negri’s theorization of Empire both interrogate globalization as a process that resists the simple binaries of center and margin. Loomba emphasizes the restructuring of imperial power in a post–Cold War, neoliberal order, where military dominance and cultural hegemony intertwine to maintain American global supremacy. Hardt and Negri, meanwhile, argue that Empire represents a decentered, reterritorialized form of sovereignty—no longer tied to a single nation-state but distributed through multinational corporations, international institutions, and transnational networks of governance. Together, these frameworks move beyond the notion of a unidirectional flow of power from metropole to colony, instead illuminating the ways in which power circulates, mutates, and becomes embedded within global systems of capital and security.

Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist resonates deeply with these theoretical interventions. Changez’s trajectory—from Princeton and Wall Street to disillusionment in post-9/11 America—embodies the entanglement of individual subjectivity with global economic and political forces. His hybrid identity as a Pakistani educated in elite U.S. institutions destabilizes the neat opposition of West versus East; he is at once insider and outsider, privileged and suspect. The narrative reveals how the “new empire” operates not solely through territorial conquest but through financial networks, cultural assimilation, and the policing of belonging. Post-9/11 geopolitics expose the fragility of hybridity: while Changez initially thrives within global circuits of capital, he becomes alienated as suspicion and securitization collapse his complex identity into the reductive figure of the threatening Other.

Thus, the novel can be read as a meditation on empire in its contemporary, deterritorialized form, where the effects of global power are experienced intimately—through careers, relationships, and the body itself. Hamid’s text underscores both the possibilities and the profound limits of hybridity under the shadow of the new imperial order.

2. Contextual Research 

Mohsin Hamid began writing The Reluctant Fundamentalist in the late 1990s, prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks, but completed it several years afterward. This timeline is significant because it reveals how the novel is not merely a reaction to 9/11 but a work reframed by the seismic geopolitical shifts that followed. Hamid has noted that his initial drafts explored themes of globalization, identity, and migration; however, after 9/11, these concerns acquired heightened urgency and a sharper political edge. The attacks, and the ensuing “War on Terror,” foregrounded questions of belonging, suspicion, and empire, prompting Hamid to recast Changez’s personal disillusionment within a global narrative of U.S. ascendancy and its fractures. The novel’s monologic form—a Pakistani man narrating to an unnamed American listener—mirrors this historical moment of tense dialogue and mutual incomprehension. In this way, Hamid’s process reflects how literature can evolve alongside geopolitical upheaval, embodying both continuity and rupture.

B. While Watching 

1.Character Conflicts and Themes

The film sets up a deep generational and cultural conflict through the figure of Changez. On one side, he is drawn into the sleek, corporate modernity of Underwood Samson, which values profit, efficiency, and measurable success. On the other side lies the poetic, intellectual tradition of his Lahore upbringing, represented in small gestures and symbolic details. The narrative tension emerges in how Changez is torn between a world that commodifies everything—including culture—and one rooted in memory, language, and art. This split mirrors a father–son dynamic, where the modern “father” (corporate America) seeks obedience, while the “son” (Changez) increasingly longs for a voice of his own.

The relationship between Changez and Erica highlights another thematic conflict—objectification and estrangement. Erica, haunted by her dead boyfriend, never fully sees Changez as a person; instead, she projects onto him an image that satisfies her own emotional void. The film visually emphasizes this estrangement through framing and physical distance, often showing Changez in shadow or outside her gaze. This dramatizes how personal intimacy is eroded by larger cultural divides, reflecting the alienation of immigrants in post-9/11 America.

A further theme is the struggle between profit and knowledge. In Istanbul, when Changez evaluates a publishing house, the tension between books as cultural inheritance and books as commodities is foregrounded. The scene serves as a metaphor for the broader clash between corporate logic and humanistic value. Changez recognizes that efficiency-driven decisions erase intangible heritage, underscoring his growing disillusionment with the corporate world.

2. Title Significance and Dual Fundamentalism

The film’s title gestures toward more than religious extremism; it also critiques corporate fundamentalism. Mira Nair’s visuals often juxtapose scenes of business discipline with scenes invoking religious devotion, suggesting both are driven by unquestioned loyalty to an absolute system. For example, Changez’s rigorous corporate training sessions echo the rituals of faith, underscoring how capitalism itself can be fundamentalist in its refusal to question its own values.

At the same time, the narrative captures Changez’s reluctance toward both religious extremism and corporate dominance. He does not embrace terrorism, nor does he remain comfortably inside the corporate machine. Instead, his ambivalence becomes the very essence of his journey: he rejects absolute belonging to either side. This hesitation is what makes him a “reluctant” fundamentalist—his identity is shaped in the refusal to collapse into one ideology, reflecting the complexity of post-9/11 identities.

3. Empire Narratives

The film foregrounds the climate of mistrust and paranoia in post-9/11 America. Changez’s success is suddenly shadowed by racial profiling, suspicion, and humiliation at airports. These experiences show how empire narratives define who belongs and who is always marked as a threat. Rather than portraying America as a space of free opportunity, the film uncovers the costs of empire: surveillance, exclusion, and fear.

Mira Nair also uses spaces of ambiguity—cafés in Lahore, classrooms, and intimate dialogues between Changez and the American journalist Bobby—to suggest both complicity and resistance. These conversations often unfold in half-lit, transitional settings, signaling the uncertainty of truth in a world divided by empire. Changez’s storytelling itself becomes a form of resistance, as he insists on narrating his experience against dominant Western discourses that seek to fix him either as “terrorist” or “loyal capitalist.” Through this, the film highlights the urgent need for dialogue across borders, where ambiguity becomes not a threat but a space of possibility.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

C. Post Watching 

Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist opens an important conversation about whether cinema can create spaces for reconciliation between East and West in the aftermath of 9/11. On the surface, the film offers multiple points of dialogue. Changez’s storytelling to Bobby, the American journalist, becomes a direct attempt at bridging two worlds divided by suspicion and fear. The café in Lahore, where much of the narrative unfolds, is itself symbolic—a public space that allows voices from different sides to meet. In this way, the film imagines dialogue as a possible site of reconciliation.

At the same time, the film does not present reconciliation as simple or complete. The narrative continually returns to moments of mistrust: the way Changez is profiled in airports, the suspicion in his colleagues’ eyes, and even Bobby’s hidden motives as a CIA-linked figure. These reminders suggest that stereotypes and prejudices remain deeply entrenched. By the film’s end, there is no perfect resolution. Instead, Nair leaves viewers with the sense that reconciliation is fragile, conditional, and always shadowed by mistrust. In this way, the film offers not closure but a more realistic depiction of how cultural dialogue unfolds—messy, partial, and easily undone by larger political forces.

The second question concerns how successfully Nair adapts Mohsin Hamid’s novel, which is built around a dramatic monologue full of ambiguity. In the book, the reader is never certain whether Changez is confessing to a stranger, luring him into a trap, or simply narrating his past. The ambiguity of voice and intention is central to the novel’s impact. Translating this into film is a complex challenge, as cinema cannot sustain monologue in the same way literature can. Nair addresses this by using visual framing and narrative cross-cutting. Changez’s recollections unfold in flashbacks, giving cinematic shape to his words. This technique allows the audience to see, rather than only imagine, the tension between his life in New York and his rediscovery of Lahore.

However, the move from text to screen inevitably reduces some of the novel’s radical openness. In the film, Bobby is given a concrete identity as an American journalist, and the framing device leans more toward a political thriller than an ambiguous confession. This makes the narrative more accessible but somewhat less destabilizing than the novel. The audience is guided to see Changez as more of a victim of stereotyping than a potentially dangerous figure, which narrows the interpretive possibilities available in Hamid’s text.

That said, Nair’s film develops ambiguity in a visual register. Through shadowed lighting, tense silences, and the constant presence of surveillance, the film preserves a feeling of uncertainty about who can be trusted. The ending, where events erupt in violence without clear resolution, reinforces this cinematic ambiguity. In this sense, while the film cannot replicate the exact effect of Hamid’s monologue, it creates its own language of uncertainty suited to the screen.

In conclusion, Nair’s adaptation both opens and limits reconciliation. It provides a dialogic space but also reveals how fragile that space is. It cannot entirely reproduce the novel’s textual ambiguity, but through cinematic devices it offers a different form of complexity, leaving the audience unsettled rather than reassured.