Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist As An Example Of Post-migratory And Post-postcolonial Writing

Post colonialism often elaborates about the effects of colonization on cultures and societies. Historians used the word post-colonial state after the Second World War. Post-Colonialism has its meaning from the post-independence period. Many literary critics used it from 1970’s to debate on the topic of various cultural effects of colonization. Post colonialism pacts through the outcome of colonialism. It explains about the unpleasant experience of being sovereign.

The humanity is set free from being encumbered and allowed to live their life to the fullest. However, as the people have transformed, their culture too has transformed, so they are in need to identify their identity. After the transformation, they cannot look back at their deep-rooted culture as the colonizers have pulled it apart. The subjects of post colonialism should represent either the past, which is not at right-hand as it is idiosyncratic, or the postcolonial theories. The postcolonial literature is considered to be what the east writes back, and half of it is associated with the true individuality which is the revival of a nation.

The quality of being others is the established concept of postcolonial theory. It is the product of the multifaceted uniqueness. The quality of being others comprises of the dichotomy, which embraces of modification and individuality, because of that each supplementary, dissimilar and left out is formed and it comprises of the colonizing cultures morals and senses, though the supremacy is discarded to describe the concept of notions in race, identity and multiculturalism. It is the chief notion of this theory. It represents the colonizing and the colonized cultures integration of artistic signs and performances. The action or process of integrating denotes the assortment of tricks, because of that people they themselves adapt to their necessities, leading their life hooked on unfamiliar cultural outlines because of their own empathetic understanding and producing something familiar but new. The social practice that has been adapted is seen as optimistic, inspiring as well as tyrannical.

In this aspect, politics which is close similar and politics which is regarded as belonging to a particular category have the possibility to become as the associated actors in a common political process. Fanon and Bhabha were the two authoritative theorists whose views concerning the principle of the identity changed. Fanon stands an exceptionally good critic in the sector whose aim, together with Bhabha provides a withstand force for the study of cultural impacts in the field. Bhabhas theories known as hybridity and the third space represents the rambling conditions of the act of pronouncing words that ensure that the meaning and symbols of civilization have no basic or fundamental integration or fixity; that even the same signs can be suitable, interpreted and read new.

Hybridity is the concept which helps to cut down the untrue intelligence that colonized cultures or colonizing cultures are fossilized. The closure of the inflexible social boundaries is the development of hybridity. The anthropology in this arena explains the development of identity, how it is conceived, reconceived and attained a form for political and other drives. Studies have identified that individualities are determined with illogicalities and it should not be considered as a united inclusive social unit, and it is intolerable to step back to the inventive one. Identities were formed and took its place for the process of social and economic forces; these are the militaries that form the socio-economic clusters.

In particular identity has to be considered as what causes change. Colonies underwent many changes during their time of existence. Regarding pre-colonialism the indigenous culture of the pioneer area though susceptible to some external changes; the intense structure upon which a culture has laid its basis can be still recognized. Colonialism pursues at changing all things, but the restrained nature of ethnic changes makes it very difficult to change the intense structures swiftly, even after centuries the indigenous culture can be identified and restored. Mostly in all cases of colonialism, the standards, reliance and cultural worth of the substantsial power are enforced upon all of the territories natives. The colonists’ application is more generally accepted and they could easily lose control over all natives who withstand or decline to observe the new culture. This is where the exhaustion of the colonizers culture begins.

Natives react in an accepting manner without active response to the colonizers culture and show pessimistic refusal to accept the case of Indians with colonizers, the native stopped the repeating systems of Christianity. In most cases they transform to Christianity, as because it is enforced onto them. In order to interface with the colonizers or settlers, they began to speak the settlers dialect. The division of the settled from the majestic power is the formation of the settlers place, this independence left the power of the immigrant behind. In Literature a new genre was introduced and it attracted the mindset of the people towards the racist thoughts of America in the post 9/11 world. The independence of the post- colonial state is insincere, because of the knowledge of the European notion. The former European powers were modelled by the new post-colonial states and it often referred to the struggle of the European’s concept. The postcolonial nation states also have the same boundaries of the colonial organizational parts.

The pre-colonial entities were united as modern post -colonial nation states that, it has only a notional relationship with the modern political units. Often a deliberate fusing or dividing of a number of existing territories was created by the post-colonial nation states. The built-in national mythology binds together the unifying symbols like flags, names and national symbols which were the essential elements. Especially, the name Pakistan was formed by rearranging the names of the North-West of the Muslim regions in the Colonized India.

Most importantly, the postcolonial states were linked to the previous colonial administrations legal and economic systems which restricted the independent actions. This restriction permitted the nonstop regulatory of many states in the period after independence. The declaration of the backlash of the native or the nativists deeds were comprehensible, but it created problems as there was no single national pre-colonial tradition which could represent the ethnicities diversity and differences which could create the modernity of the post-colonial state. The fundamental question to the cultural impact of colonization is where is one’s place? The concept of place surrounds the horizon of identity, which has become as the concept of debate in the post-colonial experience. The reputation of one’s place has become the business for forming the cultural identity and a resonance in the experience of colonialism.

In this aspect, a new era has been formed by the unsettled and the post migratory literature has been considered as the literary subgenre of postcolonial writing. This new subgenre of post colonial writing is defined as the one which explains the undertaking of a list of items that discusses either stopping oneself from an unparalleled quest of overseas defensive acquisitions or exhibiting the congruence by cross-cultural tract grounded in compatibilities. The post-migratory literature represents a process in which integration, national identities, participation and equality of opportunity are being negotiated again in order to change the original agreed terms and adjusted in a post-migrant state, in which after migration has happened and has been recognized by the government, academia and the public as inevitable.

The prefix post does not point out the end of migration but it brings out the social intervention process that occurred in the phase after migration has occurred. This perspective of the post-migratory literature shows an enormous hankering to place the new aspects ofness in correspondence where the global and local amalgamate congruously. It is hard to define again national literature and to seek out their belonging by acquiring the deconstructionist approach which, necessitate the making of culture beyond the every entity has set an attribute that are necessary to its identity and function in terms of gender, race and a social group that has a common national or cultural tradition.

Academic debates on the politics of national insertion and identity in the area of cultural and postcolonial studies is Homi Bhabha’s production of theories about “Unhomely”, which brings out the conceptualization of postcolonial migration, which is basically envisaged upon “a process of displacement and disjunction that does not totalize” (5). To express about the whole prominence in order to change the structure of the border between home and the world, Unhomeliness conjecture of Homi Bhabha thus defined in consistent with the post-migratory condition which is comparably, “inherent in that rite of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiation” (9).

Abdul R. Jan Mohamed’s classification according to general type of the “specular border intellectual” (97) and the “syncretic border intellectual” (97) is admissible here. According to Abdul R. Jan Mohamed’s definition, the perspective of the post-migratory literature should correspond to the double vision of syncretic border intellectuals who find themselves caught between two cultures and yet are they able to merge the elements of those two cultures in order to articulate new forms and experience. In other words, the post-migratory writers neglect their relationship to the nations of the marginal which represents that of their birth, the history that comes before and frighten to control them, and the centred western literature into which they struggle to write themselves.

In the US academy there is a tendency which is growing in order to classify contemporary fiction based on the categories of exile and migrancy that is either “home” or “diasporic” (Lau 237). The multicultural profile is an advantage which is enjoyed by the “diasporic” and “immigrant” writers. Such classification is based on the physical features of an area of several plots of presentation, communication, conversion, or the linguistic categorization of divergent strata of the fluency in more than one language. In the action of establishing something as a convention the new writings in English is yet restricted by the traditional mode of behaviour of the national, the geographic and the lingual.

In contrast, Carine Mardorossian’s concept of “migrant literature” (97) is speculated upon a counter-conventional branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature paradigm of migrancy which is believed to enclose all new writings, from both the western conurbation and the postcolonial margin and also by the immigrant and non-immigrant writers, that focus on the urge for alternatives in the modernity in the context of the new world order. In disparity to a literature, “migrant literature” (97) seeks to interrupt the relating logic of modernization and tradition, community and host country and it is rooted in a worldly perspective.

The idea of home is defined again and again in other words as a social actuality that is designed to speak authoritatively. The mantle category of “migrant literature” recognizes new writings as logical and it is essentially concerned with the initial stage of a process and borderline existences, both the home and abroad. Its representation of meaning is linked with an aesthetic programme that might be equally shared by all types of writers. But it is no longer cramped to the emigrants experience or the social context of the writers or their publication and translation environment.

Rebecca Walkowitz states that “Not every book that travels is produced by a writer who travels” (532). In that same aspect the category of ‘post-migratory literature’ is imagining a possibility that is characterized by a movement across the postcolonial aspects. Instead of being unchanged or being necessary to its identity the post-migratory literature is rooted in stable renegotiations and in constructing it again. Post-migratory literature is described as a type of postcolonial literature which elaborates in detail about the condition of migrancy by demolishing the binaries of home and the world and joining the world to the postcolonial .The ‘post’ in post-migratory represents the emerging voices of the pecking order of binaristic essentialism. The wistful discourse in reply to the post 9/11 eliminates the dissimilarity and the state of being in diverse content. Post-migratory literature furnishes the models of hybridization and discourse. In the words of Elleke Boehmer:

Such “post-migratory” “post-postcolonial” writing as “post-migratory” black writer Caryl Phillips terms it, explores not only leave taking and departure, watchwords of the migrant condition, but also the regeneration of communities and experiences in the new country. (250)

The process of creating a new contact zone is enclosed by the historical settings. The post-migratory writings portray the character that sustains the aspects of tradition, cultural heritage and their postcolonial backgrounds in their newly acquired homelands. The bilateralism of the postcolonial is proposed as the most important feature of the post-migratory literature which brings out the theme of both its form and content. This aspect shows that the post-migratory literature is different from the migrant literature which ‘’remains collusive with and an expression of the neo-colonial world” (Boehmer 238).

Mohsin Hamid, Kamila Shamsie and Aamer Hussein were the writers who are especially suited to be the representatives of the post migratory literature with correspondence to the real and fictional worlds. Hamid was born in Lahore, Pakistan. He attended Princeton University and Harvard Law School and because of that he returned to America. He separates his time between Pakistan and abroad, he lives his life in between Lahore, New York, London and Mediterranean countries such as Italy and Greece. In this same aspect, Pakistan-born Shamsie has an MFA, which she received from the University of Massachusetts. Both Hamid and Shamsie stands as the representatives for a group of Pakistani writers in English who “neither have hyphenated identities nor can be considered Pakistani exiles, but write in luminal positions between West and East” (Chambers 124).

The unhomely identities and the post-migratory imaginary are the important concept which serves as the ground of influence for the culture. They are specifically equal to the encounter of the diasporas in Pakistan which excels as the substitution of the name of an attribute to the South Asian diaspora in general. The most remarkable consequence of the migrant process was the multiplication of the space which is the initial stage of the process of an extensive South Asian identity and its result in the incorporation with the transnational discernment from one of the substantial diasporas. The Reluctant Fundamentalist stands as an example for a transnational discernment which consists of South Asian and the indistinguishable third world post-migratory which exists only in the mind.

The chronicle means of migrancy in The Reluctant Fundamentalist bears the sense of post-migratory which is primarily rooted in the perception of survival and in shaping differently. In another aspect, the migrant do not bear the concept of homeland as the origin place as well as the place of exit which consists of certain type of people as diasporic. In contrast, the homeland serves as the Utopian destination for the South Asian diasporic writers. For them the homeland is constructed as diasporic in their minds and as a secular cultural procedure than a place.

Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, unlike the migrant literature of the 1980’s and 1990’s, is speculated on the constant language which is spoken by the people in a particular part of a country and the interchange in the construction of the post colonial and the post-migratory identity. The developing shift of the Pakistani protagonist, Changez spans across the over large area of geographical and cultural expansion of New York, New Jersey, Lahore, Rhodes, Manila and Valaparaiso. However massive the expansion is steered the steersman’s focus is strongly bounded in his homeland. Through his deep thoughtful soliloquy which is addressed to a silent US person who involves in a conversation, Changez connects a strong juxtaposition between Manhattan and Lahore’s older districts in the beginning of the novel. Both the urban places favour the ramblers and monumental to Urdu, which is spoken by the cab drivers in New York and also the Pakistanis in Lahore. Thereafter, for Changez moving to New York seems like coming home.

The modern magnificence US is balanced by the relater’s elucidation of Pakistan’s former grandeur. Mohsin considers Lahore as an iconic historical representation of Pakistan:

I said I was from Lahore, ancient capital of the Punjab, home to nearly as many people as New York, layered like a sedimentary plain with the accreted history of invaders. (7)

In Chile, Valparaiso helps Changez to achieve a kind of irreversible disappointment sometime before the novel’s open ending. Furthermore, to Changez alienating sense of 9/11, Changez uncovers that Valparaiso is in the state of decline because of the outlying location it came to have due to American involvement and in the erection of the Panama Canal. This further reminds him about the Lahore’s erstwhile desire to impressiveness. In Valparaiso, Changez handles to construct a post-migratory identity and a transnational subtlety which comprises of all non western countries like Vietnam, Korea, Taiwan, Iraq, the Middle East and Afghanistan, which is typical to US harassment and intervention. Among the third world countries the border-crossing of the post-migratory narratives has been transformed and alternatively a positive mission generates cultural dialogue between the western and non-western cultures. The meeting of Changez and Erica brings out the entire narrative in a wider sense.

Without affecting the predicament, Changez sustains a friendly partnership with Erica, and the ending of her name sounds like America: “I had returned to Pakistan, but my inhabitation of your country had not entirely ceased. I remained emotionally entwined with Erica,” (172). The interpretation of post-migratory identity which he acquires at the end is grounded on the interracial association with Erica; this brings forth Changez’s plural identity as an unceasing process that equates the need of the local. The ending of the novel revolves around the protagonist’s world, which clearly portrays the Muslim values, and the US post 9/11 world, which shows the Muslims as probable terrorists. The protagonist’s story in The Reluctant Fundamentalist is viewed as the possible helpful bureau of the migrant’s experience.

In Hamid’s novel a glimpse of prospective transnational discernment and exchange is specially engraved in the space of post 9/11 New York. The novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a story which revolves all around and ends in the same place, where it began and it throws light on the importance of border crossing and migrancy. Changez struggles hard to maintain unity within his tribe and that of the other, namely Americans, who plentifully exhibits how the migrancy can operate as a constructive scheme of amendment and the action of making the contact zone movable and get constructed within the post-migratory literature.

A flat world could only form a concept or idea, not experienced, because the unfocussed boundaries between the west and its others might persuade unsparing threats and bleak state of converging. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is present in this form of narrative design which controls and merges with the construction of postcolonial resistance and breaking their connection. In the novel the Americans way of life is made as a problem requiring a solution which is grounded in unification as well as separation. Lured by the dream of American education, Changez considers the life at Princeton as the real life because he spent his days with the majestic professors and the philosophic students. For him Princeton not only provided the knowledge of education but also economic and political ideas.

The modified assessment and challenging systems represent the political power of US approach and efficiency, where as the worldwide financial sourcing of international scholar like Changez, who represents the US educations financial system. He expresses his disapproval by remarking that: “America had universities with individual endowments greater than our national budget for education” (34). Changez considers that Underwood Samson and Company represents the economy of the imperial power relations and he feels that he was alienated from the combative employees in New Jersey, the Filipino driver in Manila and lastly from Juan-Bautista in Valparaiso for his own active part in corporate dream.

The end of the novel revolves on the protagonist’s great realization with regard to the damages of the investors ill treatment and the action of treating the nature as a mere commodity preferably than the racists intolerance against the Muslims sparked in the stir of 9/11. The Reluctant Fundamentalist does not discover “the experience of alienation and estrangement to a particular historical trigger” (Morey 139). In this novel, Hamid tries to link the political and economic with the cultural by competing with western provisional erection of the third world province and wilt. In Chile, the protagonist uncovers the cruelty of the world wide dissimilar dispensation of power because of the help of Juan-Bautista, the chief of the publishing company to be considered as important by Underwood Samson. Juan-Bautista shows the Pablo Neruda’s house for Changez, which is an illusion that falls in line with Changez’s opposition. Juan-Bautista flourishes in clear and easy way about the actual realtion between the realm and its janissaries.

The protagonist, Changez’s final decision to exit from the Underwood Samson and get back to Pakistan gives the impression of stereotype of postcolonial politics, which are in engrossment with “those whose knowledge and histories are not allowed to count” (Young 14). The novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is evaluated in terms of its economic, political and religious differences. The title of Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist reflects on the ideas of the economic and political policy of the first as well as the third world patriotism that keeps the protagonist and the other citizens in emotional conflict with themselves concerning their self-esteem. In this aspect a sarcastic tone is adopted in account to both the Underwood Samson’s tracking of profitable “fundamentals” and Changez’s aspiration to become “the dictator of an Islamic republic with nuclear capability” (29). Changez derived pleasure from another person’s misfortune in response to the sorrowful scene of the fall of the towers is simultaneously compared to a US citizen taking deriving pleasure in the laying waste of the structures of America’s enemies.

Post-migratory texts benefits from the refined acknowledgement of difference, deconstruction of sameness and the engrossment with transitional stage of a process. such cultures is build on in the novel either consciously or in unconscious state. Either requisite or insensate the ideology that all human beings belong to a single community is related with the course of migration, production and utilization into metropolitan centres; where as conscious ideology of human beings is rooted in dynamic reordering and restructuring of the world’s identity. The principle establishment of the identity in the novel is based on the understanding of subjectivity which is materialized with the images of narration and translation. Departing from novelistic conventions and traditional narrative techniques, the story is radical to the modern theories of identity.

The protagonist, Changez and Erica’s love story signifies in detail about the potential of another American narrative, one that might concede the inactive power of the third world’s postcoloniality. For Anna Hartnell, the description “apparently yearns for an ‘other’ America; one that, like Erica, occupies an ‘otherworldly’ space, but a space that might recognize Changez as a fellow bearer of a conflicted postcolonial legacy” (345). Erica is extracted from the external reality at first when she is introduced in the novel as a descriptive persona and she is more related to the art of photography and camera work in film making in terms of modern female relating the nature of icons such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Britney Spears.

The migrant characters are prohibited from the portrayal of US affability and in accessibility in the aftermath of 9/11. The recurrent theme such as movie watching and fiction writing are directed with regard to the segregation of foreigners living in black and white film about the Second World War on the one hand, and the misplaced episode of the migrants in the American writing on the other. The protagonist feels repudiate by both Erica and the USA at large. The post migratory attitude of Hamid is mirrored in the reverse direction through the voice of the protagonist, Changez in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The novel is a combination of western realism with the eastern mysticism and lyricism. The text of the novel adopts the postcolonial attitude which brings out its extension to local history and consciousness. Their historical reference which is forefront underlines the sense of the past magnificence of Pakistan and the regret for its recovery.

The medial importance of the categories of the postcolonial in post-migratory literature is that it offers a vast range of formal responses to the concern with establishing imagined connection between heritage and modernity, the past and the present. It proposes that these connections agree with the procedure of linking and delinking. The postcolonial category cannot be separated from the political and historical experience of various characters. Meanwhile, the strain on the category of migrancy remains sustainable and essential in the study of new postcolonial writing, when the postcolonial aspect is not taken into account, there raises a lack of process for the convolution and political uniqueness of post-migratory writing.

In this aspect the next chapter discusses in detail about how the Eastern and Western identity discord in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and it also elucidates about how the people who are considered as the migrants survive in the entirely alien culture face different cultural troubles, predicament as well as denial; threatening their identity. Therefore, Identity in this novel represents the cultural conflicts and the fact that cause change for the benefit of the sovereignty.