“Reimagining Reluctance: The South-Asian Diaspora and Global ‘Homing’ in Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist.”

Bhattacharjee, Shuhita (2020) “Reimagining Reluctance: The South-Asian Diaspora and Global ‘Homing’ in Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist.”. In: Diasporic Inquiries into South Asian Women’s Narratives: Alien Domiciles. Lexington Books, pp. 1-107. ISBN 978-1498591768

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Abstract

In this chapter, I examine Mira Nair’s 2013 film, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Nair, Pilcher, Boghani, et al. 2013), as an adaptation of and in relation to Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel by the same title—a post-9/11 novel written from a non-western perspective that Nair, as a South Asian female filmmaker rooted in the very turbulence the text describes, turns into a film in a post-2011 world. I will argue that Nair, located within the South-Asian diaspora, and therefore part of the community most affected by situations of global violence and most invested in the questions raised by Hamid, adopts a less contentious and more geopolitically strategic position than the novel—advocating global peace, suggesting the moral relativity of agents on both sides of this conflict (East and West, South-Asian / Muslim and American), and emphasizing the need for them to connect in order to recuperate the possibility of a global ‘home’ for the diasporic inhabitant of fractured spaces.

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