Neeraj Ghaywan's Homebound: A Nation Unmade, A Bond Unbroken

Ghaywan’s Homebound archives a country suffering from an amnesia of feeling; the filmmaker reiterates what we have become only to recall who we are, and can be.

Ishita+Sengupta

Sep 27, 2025

Promo poster for Homebound.

IN NEERAJ GHAYWAN'S Homebound an essay is breathed into existence. For The New York Times in 2020, journalist Basharat Peer had reported on the COVID-19-infected period in India through the account of two friends’ struggle to reach home. Titled Taking Amrit Home, the piece elaborated on the government-sanctioned lockdown when migrant workers, stranded due to the indefinite closure of urban workspaces and transportation, were forced to walk back to their villages. Mohammad Saiyub and Amrit Kumar, the men in Peer’s article, were part of the exodus, and while Ghaywan’s film — based on the text — tracks what becomes of the two men, it unfolds as a more lucid adaptation of the unbecoming of a country.

India, with its culture and religious multiplicity, elides easy markers. But for over a decade now, a coercive government has been streamlining the heterogeneity of the nation into majoritarian homogeneity. The apathy found fresh evidence in the pandemic when preventive decisions, such as the lockdown, proved to be selective. What was supposed to insulate everyone unravelled as an ill-planned move that robbed the livelihood of the poor and pushed them to the brink of uncertainty. According to reports more than 10 million workers walked hundreds of kilometres to their rural hometowns and were subjected to police brutality and social stigma. The plight found visual documentation; one such was a picture of a man holding another on his lap. Peer’s essay sprang from it and filled in the context: they were friends and, at the time of image-making, lay fatigued, walking from Surat to Devari, a village in Uttar Pradesh. Ghaywan, in his rendering, honours the curiosity but also decenters the image to make space for subtext.

Homebound opens with hope. Sitting on top of a vehicle, two men are studying in torchlight. They have an exam to take and expectations tied to it. Mohammed Shoaib Ali (Ishaan Khatter) and Chandan Kumar (Vishal Jethwa), sons of gig labourers, are friends. They are also citizens of a country that refuses to treat them as equals. Shoaib is a Muslim and Chandan a Dalit — the caste and religious denominators in India, which are minorities by default and marginalised by intent. The job of a police constable, the position they had applied for, holds out a fairness denied to them. As Shoaib explains to his friend, “When you wear that uniform, your faith and caste no longer matter.”

Yet, Ghaywan’s sophomore feature film (a decade since Masaan) resists arriving at impartiality, even if that includes justice. Instead, it progresses in attunement to stratified ostracism. One senses the jibes when the camera was not looking. In one scene, Shoaib meets a senior (Muslim) police officer to gather some help for the job, and he is advised to relocate to Dubai to avoid daily humiliation. Later, when Chandan queries about the delayed recruitment results to another officer, a more loaded question arrives from the other end: “What is your category?” The young man shifts in his seat and croaks, “general”.

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In the presence of the camera, taunts fly. With an ill father at home, Shoaib joins a marketing company as a peon and is tasked with housekeeping. But when an executive hears his name, he is gently forbidden from filling his bottle. In the same breath, the man asks for more identity documents about Shoaib and his family. Chandan, too, is mistreated. His mother (the incredible Shalini Vatsa) is hired to cook for students in a school, but the parents reject her presence. A lower-caste woman feeding their kids is unacceptable.

Although every frame of Homebound is informed by systematic oppression, it refuses to conflate persecution. This awareness elevates an already terrific film and offers a fuller acknowledgement of the protagonists. Take, for instance, the thoughtful inclusion of the female characters in the narrative. There is Vaishali (Harshika Parmar), Chandan’s sister, whose fate is dictated by caste and gender. Unlike her brother, she did not have access to higher education and had to shoulder responsibilities at home from an early age. The other is Sudha Bharti (Janhvi Kapoor), a sheltered Dalit girl who harbours bigger academic dreams than Chandan. She does so because, being financially more agile, she can. The men, too, are fighting different battles — one is challenging suspicion and the other, prejudice — while the battleground is the same.

At a time when most Hindi films are either politically toothless or compliant, Homebound’s distinct version of the endurance demanded of a Muslim man and a Dalit man living in India today makes it a critical document of our times. But even with such an uncompromised lens, the film avoids inhabiting the identity of the persecuted. This feels like a miracle because Ghaywan does not temper reality in lieu of accessible rage. Instead, he insists that reality is, and can be, many things. The filmmaker (he shares writing credits with Sumit Roy and Peer) depicts the many ways in which the characters are perceived while zooming in and underlining their personhood.

Imbued by proximity, Homebound becomes an affecting tale of friendship that beats with compassion. The men in the story are not beholden to the cornering labels of identity but set free to be who they are: young boys wanting to just be. Resultantly, the fleeting instances of heroism (Shoaib selling the water filters from his office without informing anyone, losing his cool at an office party or Chandan standing up for his mother) are designed as reactions and not actions. One of the most moving moments, however, is more regular: Chandan “stealing” biryani from Shoaib’s house on Eid as the latter and his family arrive late from praying.

The filmmaking responds to this political- personal interplay. Shot by Pratik Shah, accused of sexual misconduct post the film’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2025, Homebound chases light and leans on the faces of the two men; later, two tremendous aerial shots underline their dehumanisation in the crowd. The dialogues, by Varun Grover, Shreedhar Dubey and Ghaywan, follow suit. Shoaib and Chandan use cricket analogies when talking to each other. When one wants to quit from taking an exam, the other snaps, “You want to leave the stadium without playing the match?” The sport finds a more concrete footing in the plot as things unfurl — the recurrence speaking of the secular roots of the game and its current legacy of fanning communal suspicion.

Ghaywan remains so committed to the broader lives of the characters that Peer’s text sneaks up on us. In the retelling, it arrives later and is the most damning proof of the indifference built during the runtime. But the filmmaker also amplifies the compassion accorded by the journalist, artfully reshaping a national disaster into a personal crisis and statistics into human ties. The image of a man holding his tired friend surfaces and, in the filmmaker’s hands, his injured eyes burn through the screen.

If Homebound culminates as an achievement, then the performances contribute to it. The three actors at the centre — Kapoor has a lesser role and shows promise of a great crier — are uniformly potent. Jethwa, as Chandan is persuasive and achieves multitudes with little. His dented body language and use of eyes offer a backstory to the character that extends beyond the frames. It is Khatter, however, who is stupendous. As Shoaib, the actor finally comes to his own and lays bare the extent of his potential. It is a career-defining turn, but also a turn that defines the film. Carrying a bruised face, he outlines the invisible injuries accrued by Shoaib, and although he gets one of the few showy scenes in the film, staged during an India-Pakistan match, Khatter shines in the silences. There is a crushing moment when he reassures Chandan’s mother that he will take care of her son. Perhaps it is the weight the line carries in retrospect, but the precision of his look broke me.

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