BookTalk with Saumya: The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

Though I’ve been fortunate with an international upbringing, it comes with the constant experience of balancing the beam between my Indian and Western identities.  The novel “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” by Mohsin Hamid, the first I’ve read by a Pakistani author, offered me a mirror that was both familiar and unsettling. It magnified the experiences the South Asian diaspora actually shares and yet is divided by- forcing me to confront the nuanced and often contradictory experiences that we, as brown people, navigate daily.

At its core, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” is a narration of identity and the perils of trying to fit into a world that is determined to see you as “other.” Changez, the protagonist, embodies the familiar struggle of distancing ourselves from our desi identities and trying to be more palatable  to the western world. As Changez morphs himself into the archetype of the successful and globalised professional, he finds that his efforts never seem to be enough. Almost as a rite of passage for many brown people in the west, it results in a painful realisation: in the pursuit of acceptance, we ever only end up stranded in between- neither brown enough for our own people nor white enough for the others. 

The author captures this internal conflict by showing Changez's stride to assimilate into American society, and his simultaneous disillusionment with it. Changez’s initial success in the US as an ivy league graduate with a high status job, offers him the American dream: if you work hard, you will be rewarded. Yet his class is only temporarily able to shield him from the aggressions that seep their way up and down the social pyramid. Post 9/11, the struggle is exacerbated as the world becomes even more polarised and the image of muslims is distorted. With growing awareness of how he and his people are perceived- less than and dangerous- we see that despite the elite education and social class, Changez cannot escape the microagressions and prejudices that engulf the world around him. 

As a non-muslim Indian, Changez’s story, both parts I identified with and those that I could not relate to, were uncomfortable and eye opening for me. The tension between India and Pakistan and the political divides that form our perspectives were not lost on me. Yet it was exactly the discomfort that made this novel all the more inspiring, because Mohsin Hamid wrote in a way that forced readers to confront the ways in which we are complicit in maintaining these divisions. More importantly, he does so while keeping us cognisant of the similar struggle we share against racism and xenophobia.

Now I wouldn’t call myself a literary nerd, but I can appreciate a unique style of writing when presented with it. Hamid tells the story of Changez entirely in a first person monologue. We only know Changez and the world through his eyes. All other characters, especially the “American” to whom he speaks, remain figures known only through Changez’s interpretations of their actions. Actions laced with suspicion and fear, implying that the “American” is a composite character representing the community he [Changez] is ostracised from. This one-sided narration places the reader in the same position as Changez’s listener- the “American”- forcing us to confront our own biases and, possibly harmful, assumptions.

The author audaciously ends on an unresolved note. Changez and the “American” are left in a tense situation and the reader is left questioning what was about to happen. Were Changez and the waiter really about to do something bad, affirming the “American’s” suspicions all along, or did we, like many others, fall victim to the deep rooted stereotypes that have been ingrained into us? Ending on an open and ambitious note allows the moment of introspection to last well beyond the chapters of the book, for the readers.

“The Reluctant Fundamentalist” by Mohsin Hamid is a novel that feels as relevant today as it probably was when it was first published. In an attempt to hear from diverse voices- I’d reckon this was a great start for me. As a brown person in the Netherlands, within the contemporary context of what is happening around the world, I was both validated and challenged by Changez’s story. It served as a reminder that while our experiences are shaped by different backgrounds, the fundamental struggles we face are often the same. Somewhere in the journey of acknowledging these similarities, we can bridge the divides that have been ever so worn out to pit us against each other.