Homebound Movie Review: Solidarity in Suppression

The journey of Neeraj Ghaywan’s second feature film, Homebound, can be traced back to an eloquent but uncredited photograph on social media—of a young man cradling another, sprawled on the ground next to the highway, two of the many migrant workers forced to walk all the way back home on the sudden declaration of lockdown during the first wave of COVID in 2020.

Director: Neeraj Ghaywan

Cast: Ishaan Khatter, Janhvi Kapoor and Vishal Jethwa

It piqued the interest of journalist Basharat Peer, working with The New York Times back then, to trace them and tell the story lurking silently in their picture. The resultant opinion page piece on the misfortune of Mohammad Saiyub, and his childhood friend Amrit Kumar, titled “Taking Amrit Home” is the wellspring for Homebound that competes in the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes Film Festival this year.

Ghaywan and his story and script consultant Sumit Roy build the screenplay around this simple friendship—with Mohammad Saiyub becoming Mohammad Shoaib Ali (Ishaan Khatter) and Amrit Kumar named Chandan Kumar (Vishal Jethwa). Ghaywan and Roy fictionalise things to include their backstories and introduce a range of characters, situations, families and relationships—all to thoughtfully bring the predicaments of the marginalised and the minorities to centre. 

The film takes us through the ups and downs of the Shoaib-Chandan friendship as they chase their modest, shared dream of becoming constables in the police, believing that the uniform will be their insurance and assurance against the everyday humiliation they are subjected to for the religion and caste they have been born into. In between their interminable struggles they also steal some moments of relief in a game of cricket and bike rides to a sense of release and freedom.

Ghaywan is unwavering in chronicling the prejudices and, in the process, checks several pertinent boxes. Right from the very first scene—with Shoaib and Chandan on their way to give the police recruitment exam—Ghaywan is acutely focused in bringing out the layer upon layer of oppression and the many issues that we, the people are confronted with—unemployment, struggles of the young in landing the few jobs available—and the injustices, hatred, bigotry and discrimination that are intrinsic in the urban-rural divides and the segregations of class, caste, religion and gender. Divisions that are omnipresent, play out in cricket grounds, schools, universities and workplaces. All this unfolds against the backdrop of fractures and fault lines in our social fabric. Even the pandemic, the great equaliser in death, eventually did come down the harshest on the poor and the migrants.

Homebound is about solidarities of the suppressed. Ghaywan brings it out implicitly in the beginning when Shoaib and Chandan introduce themselves to their fellow passenger and new found friend Sudha Bharti (Jahnvi Kapoor). A slight nod of understanding from her on hearing the surname from a hesitant Chandan and you know they are tacit allies because of the subjugation they have experienced in common.

Shoaib and Chandan might be childhood friends but at variance in their response to disempowerment. The former is confrontational and aggressive, the latter, despite the deep indignation, is also reconciled, bristling but contained. The legacy of persecution can often render you fearful and timid. An affliction called "paidayashi sharam" (inherited shame), as the film puts it.

Ghaywan doesn’t see the disenfranchised dalit community as a monolith. There are debates and dissensions within and a pecking order at that. While the impoverished Chandan, who doesn’t even have a concrete house to live in, seeks empowerment through his job, the relatively better off Sudha, with her father working in the government, believes in education as a way to dignity and social inclusion. Quite like her icon Dr B.R. Ambedkar and his call to “educate, agitate, and organize”. Only when you are educated will the entitled position their kursi (chair) next to yours, or else you will forever be confined to sitting on the floor, she tells Chandan.

Then there is yet another unstated hierarchy in which women come last. Chandan is questioned on it, both by the self-aware Sudha (on why women can’t travel alone) as well as his often disregarded sister Vaidehi (Harshika Parmar) who bluntly tells him: “Sirf tumko chun-ne ka adhikar mila hai”. In their dalit family of four only he has had the right to choose. His mother Phool (Shalini Vats) is the one who, despite her love for him, constantly makes him face the reality—of her cracked, sickle-like heels and the cream that she can’t afford to apply on them. Props to Ghaywan for platforming the gender question with three strong female voices, with minds of their own, in a story that’s otherwise all about the two boys.

Ghaywan’s classic, straightforward narrative is consciously shorn of artful flourishes but replete with emotions. There are innumerable moments that make you well up, leave you with a lump in the throat or terribly riled and enraged. It is reminiscent of the humanist, reformist mainstream Hindi cinema of the ’50s in its messaging and the often on-the-nose statement-making but the tone, in tune with the contemporary times, gets more bleak, despairing and angry. It reflects in the dialogue (Ghaywan, Varun Grover and Shriidhar Dubey) that uses prose creatively even in the expression of blatant bigotry.

There is an authenticity to Homebound that goes beyond the writing and the language. It’s in the realness of the spaces—railway stations, mills and construction sites (production designer Khyatee Mohan Kanchan, art director Vatsal Dhamani, set decorator Mrugakshi Nadkarni), in the working class attire (costume designer Rohit Chaturvedi), in the vivid way that the world of Shoaib and Chandan is framed by cinematographer Pratik Shah or the rhythm with which the narrative moves (editor Nitin Baid) and the sparse but resonant use of music (composers Naren Chandavarkar and Benedict Taylor), marked by both a sense of loss melancholy and continuity.

It shines through in the performances from the great ensemble (casting director Jogi Mallang). Vishal Jethwa is effective in bringing out Chandan’s inner conflicts and contradictions. Ishaan Khatter stands out for his expression of the nostalgia and a sense of home he feels for the country—a sentiment which is unfortunately being overrun by the coiled rage against the persistent Islamophobia and the refusal to be acknowledged as a human being but only as the representative of a religion. Shalini Vats is excellent as Chandan’s mother Phool, stoic but defiant and demanding when it comes to her constitutional rights.

Ghaywan holds an unpleasant mirror up to the society. As a character castigates the entitled people in the film: “Aise hi naya samaaj banayenge aap log!” (Is this how you’ll build a new society?). By continuing with the bigotry? Or as Shoaib puts it, if the educated can’t talk about change, there’s very little hope. Homebound gives voice to the voiceless but more significantly implicates and indicts the powerful and the privileged for the status quo. It's a film powered by vital, essential urgency of the times, and for the times.