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A few years ago, during a long conversation about his novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid told me that the idea of art as artifice - "as a frame that is playful and stylised" - was important to him. The book is about a Pakistani man named Changez who goes to the US to study in Princeton, gets a job with a valuation firm, feels empowered by the American ideals of opportunity and equality - but finds himself becoming more defensive about his cultural identity in a divided, post-9/11 world. Importantly, this story is told in an abstract way: it takes the form of a long monologue addressed by Changez - now back in Pakistan - to an unnamed and voiceless American tourist, who becomes a stand-in for the reader. Changez's tone is exaggeratedly courtly ("Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America") with a possible undercurrent of threat, so that the reader can't quite tell what his intentions are, and what the eventual result of this meeting might be.
Actually, the meeting need not even be taken at face value; it could simply be a storytelling device akin to the use of a sutradhaar or a katha-vaachak. "The effect I was reaching for," Hamid told me, "is that you're in a theatre and there's one actor on the stage taking you through the play." Watching a film in a large darkened room is an unnatural experience by its very construct, he pointed out. "Similarly, in a book, you can have an intermediary who allows you as a reader to move from your own world into the world of the narrative."
It is ironical that Hamid used a cinematic analogy to discuss the "unreality" of his narrative structure, for Mira Nair's new movie version of The Reluctant Fundamentalist has made the story less circular, and more like a conventional narrative. For Hamid, the very nature of his dramatic monologue implied a bias: the reader only hears the Pakistani side, the American never speaks. But Nair clearly wanted a more balanced approach, and her key change is to provide a context to the meeting between Changez and the American, doing away with the latter's formlessness and giving him a distinct identity, voice and purpose. This inevitably also meant expanding the bits of the story set in Pakistan.
Does it work? Yes and no. The film, which is often a self-conscious attempt to bridge the gap between civilisations in our troubled times, has many beautiful things in it. I particularly liked the use of music, which incorporates Sufi motifs with western ones (the end-credits composition by Peter Gabriel is very effective) and laterally comments on the action: a line from the great poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, translated as "I don't want this Kingdom, Lord / All I want is a grain of respect" plays over a scene where Changez decides to relinquish his US job and return home. But transferring an allegorical novel to a visual medium - and thereby literalising it - can be a tricky business. Theoretically it should be possible to watch the film on its own terms, as an independent creation - but this is not always easy, given the more obvious symbolism in Hamid's story (the main female character is named Erica, a clear stand-in for America, which Changez is unable to truly possess or take stock of). Such devices are tied to the abstractness of the novel and can seem heavy-handed in a realist film.
In any case, this is an interesting test case in the adaptation process and in an understanding of the differences between literature and cinema. A new book, The Reluctant Fundamentalist: From Book to Film, contains short accounts of the film's making through the eyes of Nair and crew members, including screenwriter Ami Boghani, production designer Michael Carlin and editor Shimit Amin. But some of the most entertaining footnotes come from Hamid himself, as he reflects on the differences between novel-writing and filmmaking. "For me a day's work is like entering a quiet, sheltered, unhurried cocoon," he notes, "For a director it's like talking on three different cellphones while riding a unicycle on the wing of an airplane in heavy turbulence."
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer
