As a young man Zohran Mamdani hated seeing his filmmaker mother Mira Nair leave for months at a time to go make movies. The only child was very close with his mother, and he coveted their time together.
But he was OK with her absence for one project — The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which the Indian-American filmmaker shot when Mamdani was a 20-year-old sophomore at Bowdoin.
“Usually he doesn’t like me being away — he won’t encourage me to go do that romcom,” the Monsoon Wedding director recalled when I talked to her in 2013 at the Riverside Drive apartment where she and her husband Mahmood raised their son. “But this one he said ‘Mamma you can make.” She called Zohran “my oxygen, my fuel” in directing the film.
What does the The Reluctant Fundamentalist say and why was it so formative? The movie (forget the title, which can give a different impression) seeks a balance between honoring the understandable American reactions of anger and grief to 9/11 and its aftermath while also platforming a more global perspective where those events played very differently. And it turns out to been important to a young Mamdani, offering a kind of hidden key to what shaped his ideology.
Based on Mohsin Hamid’s novel, the movie has Riz Ahmed playing a Pakistani immigrant to the U.S. who succeeds on Wall Street but then is targeted and arrested after 9/11 despite clearly having done nothing wrong. He then returns to his home country where he is eventually suspected by the CIA of kidnapping an American tourist — an act whose truth the movie leaves ambiguous. The bulk of the film has Ahmed’s character and the character of Liev Schreiber’s journalist-CIA officer hashing out topics like the roots of bias and the reasons for fundamentalism. The film is provocative, if gently so, in suggesting to consider how a radical was made, and that mistreatment and bias in the West can be a contributing factor.
THR’s review said that Nair “is extremely careful not to demonize the American or the Pakistani but rather to suggest how much they have in common” but also noted how it “painfully confronts the great cultural divide in people’s thinking created by the tragedy of 9/11” and was “a serious-minded film whose politics demand soul-searching and attention.” (Nair in our interview said she wanted to “understand how there were complicated feelings around 9/11. The shock, the horror, the unbelievable audacity of it. But also that….people had reactions that were not always one way or another.”)
Nair didn’t elaborate on what specifically about the film resonated at the time with her young son. But his interest in seeing his mother platform a Muslim immigrant of color from the Global South misunderstood by a Western power offers a glimpse at what both the young Mamdani cared about and was exposed to by a mother who felt that America, for all its warmth, at times also could remain wary of people like them. It is a message he now offers on the campaign trail.
“As many Muslims in this country know, to exist in public is to have to deal with this kind of slander,” he recently said to NPR’s Morning Edition. “And it’s part of why so many have thought that the safest place to live in is the shadows.” He has said that, as the film did in its way, “my hope for this campaign is to bring the margins into the mainstream.”
Zohran Mamdani is trying to become the first Muslim and first South Asian mayor of New York City. Many people of both backgrounds see in the state Assemblyman’s candidacy (he is running on a platform of making New York a more affordable and livable city) a culmination of a dream that has seemed hopelessly out of reach, particularly in the fraught days after 9/11 when both groups were sometimes vilified.
After an innovative campaign, the presumptive Democratic nominee is now facing off against current Democratic mayor-turned-independent candidate Eric Adams as well as Republican Curtis Sliwa after appearing to beat favorite Andrew Cuomo in the primary last week. On Tuesday the official tally incorporating ranked-choice voting is expected to be released.
The candidate has come under criticism over the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which many Jews see as a call for the destruction of the state of Israel and a call to violence against them worldwide. Mamdani has over the course of the campaign declined to disavow it, telling NBC News on Sunday that, while “that’s not the language that I use,” he nonetheless did not believe “that the role of the mayor is to police speech.” Mamdani has been a vocal anti-Israel critic, co-founding the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Bowdoin and was also arrested at a pro-Palestinian rally in Brooklyn a week after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks but says that regardless of his views on Israel he wants to tell Jewish New Yorkers who are concerned with antisemitism “this is a real crisis that we have to tackle and one that I’m committed to doing.”
During our interview, Nair offered a glimpse into what the Mamdani-Nair family experienced in New York right after 9/11, when Mamdani was a boy at the impressionable age of nine who had arrived in New York with his parents from Uganda just a few years earlier. (Mamdani’s father Mahmood Mamdani is a prominent anthropologist with parental roots in the Indian province of Gujarat who was raised in Uganda.)
“We would all take walks every evening with my father- and mother-in-law [Mamdani’s grandparents, who lived with the family], and there was a feeling that we were being looked at askance,” Nair said, “that there was suddenly this home and amazing place that didn’t feel like home anymore.”
The experience is a common one for New Yorkers from South Asia growing up in the city at the time, and shaped friends of Mamdani’s in the entertainment business as well. Hari Kondabolu, an Indian standup comic from Queens who wrote for the FX show Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, describes a similar feeling. “After 9/11, like you start to question it like, is this our city too,” Kondabolu told WABC News. Kondabolu and Mamdani have been friends since they were students at Bowdoin.
Republicans have already turned Mamdani into a target. House Speaker Mike Johnson posted after Mamdani’s apparent primary win last week that “the victory of radical, self-avowed socialist Zohran Mamdani proves again, THIS is what the Democrats stand for today. This is complete and total insanity.”
The influence of Nair and The Reluctant Fundamentalist on the younger Mamdani can also be seen in regards to another global issue.
The candidate has harshly criticized Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu with nationalist leanings who has taken a hard-line on Pakistan. During the primary campaign Mamdani called the prime minister a “war criminal” for allegedly not doing enough to stop deadly anti-Muslim riots in the Indian province of Gujarat back in 2002, when Modi was governor there.
Nair in the 2013 interview was similarly critical of Indian nationalism and Indian-centrism, saying that the cultural attitudes toward Pakistan in her native country is what made her decide to direct The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
“The impetus for making the film came from visiting Pakistan in late 2004 and early 2005 and being very moved by my journey there,” said Nair, who previously took on Indian family dynamics in her 2006 picture The Namesake. “It was not at all the Pakistan one reads about in newspapers or that we as Indians are shown, or, really, forbidden to see.” Her father, she said, was raised in Lahore, which was part of British India before Partition, when it became part of Pakistan.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist is not the only film in which the young Mamdani saw elements that defined him. Mississippi Masala, Nair’s Denzel Washington-starring romantic drama about a Ugandan man and an Indian woman, is inspired by her own marriage to Mahmood and came out in theaters when Zohran Mandani was an infant and was a prominent work in their home when he was growing up, Nair said.
But it is Fundamentalist that may have landed hardest with him. Nair used words that described the film as a kind of Rorschach test that, 12 years later, might also be applied to her son’s candidacy.
“I made the film for this reason: dialogue,” she said. “People can love it or hate it but from the audiences I’ve seen it always engages people. It holds a mirror up to people and what they might think.”