Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist: A Postcolonial Perspective

Abstract

The study attempts to explore the post-colonial concerns in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is the story of Changez, a Pakistani immigrant, who is blindly in love with America and its culture. Times and again, he expresses his unlimited love for both. But after 9/11 the hidden enmity of America towards Muslims is revealed to him and he comes back to his native land with a broken heart and a new thought in his mind. In the novel, Hamid brings forth certain postcolonial concerns like the war on terror, intrusion, Hybridity, misrepresentation, stereotyping, Otherness and Orientalism, etc. This paper gives special attention to issues like misrepresentation, otherness, and discrimination of Muslims by Americans, and tries to bring forth how these issues are being handled by the writer. Hamid has attempted to explore the concept of stereotyping of immigrants by western society and counter-stereotyping of the oriental people in a very interesting manner.

       Keywords: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, misrepresentation, otherness, discrimination of Muslims by Americans, the concept of stereotyping of immigrants