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.
Rather, he engages with the expressive and imaginative tales of friendships, desperation, hope, conflict, grief, distance, and loss, and humanises them.
Chandan and Shoaib: Beyond Binaries
Inspired by journalist Basharat Peer’s 2020 The New York Times article, “A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway”, which tells the story of two friends and their journey during the pandemic, Neeraj's Homebound delves into their backstory.
Homebound is woven through a Dalit and a Muslim protagonists in rural North India—Chandan (Vishal Jehtwa) and Shoaib (Ishaan Khatter). In contemporary India, one is marked with stigma and humiliation (historical continuity), while the other is marked with hate and suspicion. This condition, accentuated by economic deprivations, makes things worse.
Chandan and Shoaib, through their friendship, attempt to survive and dare to hope. The film breaks away from the Hindu versus Muslim binary, and nostalgic high-culture solidarity among elites of these groups—familiar themes in understanding religious encounters.
Both protagonists' worlds, rather than being divided through religious identities and a climate of polarisation surrounding them, are united in their suffering, banters, hopes, shared material realities, and being excluded and demarcated. They don’t have a “high culture” and a “high past” to bond over.
Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Spirit
Chandan is more a Dalit than a Hindu. At the same time, they are not preachy or caricatures of their identities—something Neeraj wisely avoids. Such a portrayal would have only appealed to a small, ideologically vocal educated section.
Instead, Chandan and Shoaib are regular young men, like a drop in the sea of aspirants preparing for competitive exams, but their ordinary world with small hopes is marked by an extraordinary friendship and relentless spirit to stand for each other.
Shoaib wants to treat his ailing father; Chandan wants to build a concrete roof for his mother. From Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand, West Bengal, to Assam, these are the dreams of millions of working class Dalit Bahujan and Muslim youths who can be seen working hard to get into a government job or travelling in general compartments to big cities for odd jobs once they realise the scope for any future through education is closed.
In these journeys back in their home place and to distant lands, all that they have is the company of their friends with whom they share their joy and sorrow, and with whom they feel visible and human, instead of cheap labour that can be discarded and mistreated. If one zooms out of the film, it is this large canvas that Neeraj portrays on screen with great sensitivity and details.
Navigating the Weight of Identities
Yet, Neeraj is particular when it comes to showing events of discrimination and how the characters navigate their inhibitions and fears when they are about to be, and are, confronted for their caste and religious markers.
This takes place in both subtle and expressive ways. In fact, those who discriminate against them are invariably explicit. In the opening scene, among the swarms of police aspirants, Chandan takes water offered by a certain Sudha (Janhvi Kapoor), but only when he learns her full name is Sudha Bharati, he has a sense of relief and glitter in his eyes.
Chandan consciously refuses to identify with the SC category in all of his application forms. He finds it safer to tick as 'General'. He believes it's his way of claiming dignity and self-respect by refusing reservation and becoming “meritorious.”
In one of the scenes, Shoaib is elated to be invited to a farmhouse of his boss for the India-Pakistan cricket final. But his office superiors spare no time in taunting and questioning his affinity for India. Shoaib, without a secured position in the company or social background, cannot talk back. He can only respond by resigning.
In the film, Brahmins are at odds with each other. Two of Shoaib’s Brahmins superiors have stark opinions about him. One offers help, and the other marks him out as related to Pakistan. In another instance, the upper-caste parents in a school, where Chandan’s mother cooks, want her ousted and don’t want their children to eat of her hands. A Mishra teacher who enjoys her food cannot help.
Love, Ambedkarite Symbolism, and Agency
Shoaib and Chandan exchange their names and affiliations, sometimes playfully, otherwise rebelliously. It is also easier for them maybe because they share the same social space and are integral part of each other’s lives.
Neeraj also moves away from the usual trope of a Savarna girl-Dalit boy dichotomy and offers a very necessary respite in exploring love interests of Dalit protagonists. Sudha empowers Chandan towards the pursuit of education while enabling him to come to terms with his identity. Her character does not digress towards a parallel story line in the film. Instead, she plays an anchor for Neeraj’s ideological messaging and use of Ambedkarite iconography. Kudos to him for once again showing an Ambedkarite-Buddhist wedding on a big screen.
The young Dalit women characters are of different kinds. Sudha could get higher education, but Chandan’s sister feels that she has sacrificed her wishes for her brother to get educated.
Dreams on Foot
The bureaucratic apathy of the first half morphs in the second half into behemoth overwhelming apathy the State has towards its people, the working class, as witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Migrant labourers braving police brutality, a scary pandemic, life uncertainty, and job insecurity, walked thousands of kilometres towards their home, on their feet. Neeraj chooses the friendship of Shoaib and Chandan as a microcosm.
In the midst of their journey from Surat to back home, Chandan gets severely ill, suffering from hallucinations to the brink of death, with Shoaib desperately trying to bring Chandan back to life. In a particular scene, Shoaib points out Chandan's desires merely to keep him awake, which are nothing more than a concrete home, a constable job, and being with Sudha, yet that feels like a world of fantasy in the lives of millions of young migrant workers.
Chandan breathes his last in Shoaib’s arms in the middle of an empty highway, to no avail. Without dignity in life, only Chandan’s lifeless body gets a lift back home (homebound, perhaps?) in an ambulance and receives proper final rites.
Shoaib, relentless in his love and respect for Chandan, in one of the last scenes, decorates Chandan’s now-ready home for housewarming.
If we look back and imagine this phase, the friendship between Shoaib and Chandan takes a profoundly evocative meaning in response to the Indian society and the State. This was a period when Dalit workers without any regard to their lives were demanded to ensure proper burial and cremation of COVID-affected patients when families would leave them and Muslims were suspected of spreading the virus in Delhi.
Chandan and Shoaib were not among them—and they might or might not have known of this. They were left on their own far off among million other migrant workers. Yet, amid such a catastrophe, they didn’t leave each other. They stayed together till the end, distanced from both the society as well as the State.
Cinematic Brilliance
At times, socially aware films risk compromising cinematic quality for messaging—and the content can take precedence over craft and characters. But Homebound does well on both the fronts.
The film has excellent cinematography, with many favourites to choose from: the sunset shot of Chandan’s mother contemplating on the doorstep after his demise; a bird’s eye view of evading migrants crawling through the city under yellow street lights; and an aerial shot of Shoaib carrying Chandan through barren land with only a trailing shadow.
The ending shot comes when you’re least expecting it, making it especially daunting because you too want a closure or a semblance of win for at least Shoaib, who is sitting idly on riverside, at the same spot where Chandan and Shoaib would gather to fight or celebrate. This time around, there’s no Chandan, only a white bird once held by him.
For a film based in fictional Chirag Pradesh, there would be a plenty of scope for explicit socio-political commentary and indulgence, but again, the brilliance of film lies in not foreshadowing the events, or capitalising on emotional weakness of the audience. It rather captivates you through mundanity and struggle, hurt and passion, without letting you go off at any point.
The film doesn’t force-fit its politics, nor make over-the-top references to familiar resemblances. Even the scene of a growing public trial against Muslims in the pandemic is only playing on the television. The film lets you see, feel, and choose your side of politics for yourself.
It helps that the cast is studded with emotive actors and their brilliant performances. The two leads, Ishaan and Vishal, grow on you, each offering a memorable performance, leaving you wishing for more of life, love, camaraderie, but also rebellion and hope.
Janhvi Kapoor’s cameo fits the role as an ambitious, passionate woman with urban undertones, who wants to lead a change by inspiring others. It is only poetic that a story written by Basharat Peer gets directed by Neeraj Ghaywan.
(Sumit Samos is a researcher and anti-caste activist and his research interests are Dalit Christians, cosmopolitan elites, student politics, and society and culture in Odisha. Susmit Panzade is an academic editor and independent researcher. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)