(Neeraj Ghaywan's film Homebound has been shortlisted for the 98th Academy Awards in the Best International Feature Film Category. It is now among 15 films eligible for final Oscar nominations. This article has been republished in light of the announcement. It was originally published on 30 September 2025.)
There is an India from below—an India that could have been something else, but it isn't.
On one extreme is a minority, hyper-visible India, largely urban. On the other is a majority, life-crushing, poverty-ridden India, largely rural, and on the peripheries of urban.
The former is a mix of westernised “cosmopolitan culture” and narrow, exclusivist, nostalgic upper-caste past, driven by consumerism. It redefines itself endlessly both as a victor and a victim—and is projected as the normative citizen of India. The latter group is seen as a subject of policies and governance, cash transfers and “freebies”, to be rescued from their misery only enough to vote again for the same during the next elections.
However, there is another India in between, popular yet invisible, youthful yet sapped out of its energies, hopeful for a better life yet slapped with State apathy, indignities, and limited opportunities. If not for a Grade 4 sarkari naukri, they would become wage labourers in construction, services, and manufacturing in distant lands. It is this India from below that Neeraj Ghaywan explores in Homebound.
He does not document them with singular tropes of helplessness that would evoke sympathy or collapse them into large unmarked categories of unemployed and migrant workers seen as statistics in government accounting and media reporting.