“Identity Isn’t What They Box Us Into”: The Resilient Heart of Homebound

Once in a while, a film reminds you of our collective humanity, forcing us to enquire about the world and the life we live, shaking us awake. Homebound (2025), directed by Neeraj Ghaywan, is one such film. It is a delicately carved story about a friendship between two friends, Shoaib (played byn Ishaan Khatter) and Chandan (Vishal Jethwa), a Muslim and a Dalit boy who dream of becoming police officers, a position that would offer them respect and dignity in a society intent on denying it. The friends see each other through poverty and everyday humiliation, but the common thread of their care and love for each other and a shared solidarity always tie them together.

Poster of Homebound | Photo Credit: @DharmaMovies on X

Most Bollywood films that deal with entrance examinations tend to peddle the dream of upward mobility, where the protagonist breaks out of their poverty by simply working hard and hustling (think of 12th Fail or Super 30). Homebound, instead, places the marginalised individual in a way that they are given the agency to fight against and reject their marginalisation. 

Shoaib and Chandan, seeking a life of respect and dignity, are met with microaggressions and outward humiliation, where language and action are molded by the oppressor to alienate and dehumanize. For example, an India-Pakistan cricket match turns into a test of patriotism for Shoaib, where his drunk office colleagues joke about his nationality. At another instance, Chandan is asked in detail about his caste and Gotra (clan) when he tries to conceal his identity in front of a middle-aged official, when he goes to enquire about police recruitment results. 

Throughout the film, Chandan struggles to show his identity as a Dalit. He often introduces himself as Chandan Kumar, and chooses the “General” category in the examination and college form he fills out. Adding “Kumar” to his name serves as a way to shed a lower-caste name and adopt a more generic title to avoid discrimination and gain social mobility. In a society where your surname determines the caste and, in turn, the respect you will be given, this concealment acts as a defence mechanism.

The Politics of Water 

The film, in covert ways, draws attention to the access, denial and ignorance of the relation between water and caste practices. The struggle for access to water has been an important phenomenon in the anti-caste movement, most importantly the Mahad Satyagraha led by B.R. Ambedkar in 1927. “Less than a century ago, the distribution of water in India was status-based. Access to water was segregated and unequal between families and communities. The private rights to secure supplies were guarded in the name of ritual purity,” writes Tirthankar Roy. This sensibility comes from Ghaywan’s understanding of the relationship between caste and water. 

At the beginning of the film, Chandan is afraid of asking a stranger for water because of the possibility of being denied due to his “untouchability.” This stranger later becomes his girlfriend— Sudha, a middle-class Dalit-Buddhist girl (played by Jahnavi Kapoor), aspiring to be a police officer like Chandan.  In another instance, a white-collar employee at Shoaib’s office asks him specifically not to fill his bottle. Untouchability and notions of purity— all based on the varna system— bleed into all these social interactions.

Chandan and Shoaib often meet and spend time at a river in their village, where they feel free to dream and talk about their problems. Here, at a moment where Chandan feels particularly defeated, he says in exasperation,“No matter what we achieve, we’ll always be reduced to a checkbox on a form, and that’s the bloody truth.” 

“Identity isn’t what they box us into. It’s what we build for ourselves,” replies Shoaib. 

In the later half of the film, access to water plays a central role – Chandan and Shoaib walk through deserted roads in scorching heat. Chandan is affected by dehydration. At a key moment, when Chandan and Shoaib finally find a hand pump in a village, no water comes out of it. Some residents of the village notice that Chandan and Shoaib are outsiders and fear that they will infect the villagers with COVID-19. As Chandan stands listlessly and Shoaib pleads for water under a barrage of stones thrown at him, an old woman from the village approaches them slowly, covering her face, with a jug of water in her hand. In that quiet moment filled only with the sounds of water droplets, her kindness is a reminder that at that moment, Chandan’s caste, Shoaib’s religion, or their potential infection do not matter. 

The Violence of Ignorance

Families from marginalized communities and aspiring youth of villages often aim to clear competitive exams, but our systems fail them through various means of ignorance, particularly through delay in recruitment or lapses in the reservation policy. In the film, this silent act of ignorance pushes Shoaib and Chandan to seek other means of employment. Chandan, despite having cleared the exam’s written and physical components, grows tired of waiting for his joining letter. To Chandan and Shoaib, a police vardi (uniform) was not just a job, but a means to climb up the social ladder. A job or a college admission can mean the world to a family or a community that has been systematically placed out of educational and administrative institutions. 

In the film, long bureaucratic delays in the recruitment letter for Chandan force him to migrate to Surat for a job in a cloth mill. Shoaib leaves his job at the office after multiple instances of discrimination and follows Chandan’s path.

The Story Behind Homebound

The most important part of Homebound is that it's rooted in these lived experiences, in social realism, something that Bollywood often misses due to its focus on blockbuster films that portray a life of glamour and privilege. Homebound’s story resonates with the masses because of the problems it deals with— entrance exams, employment, migration, COVID-19, casteism and Islamophobia. Drawing from feminist scholar Marilyn Loden "glass ceiling," Ravikant Kisana discusses the "glass floor" in his latest book, Meet the Savarnas. This refers to India’s caste-class system— the small group above the glass floor of privileged savarnas, and below are millions of masses “sweating, crying, pleading, clawing–sometimes angry, sometimes despondent, sometimes hopeful, but at all times in the basement.” In these ways, Homebound is a story from below the glass floor.

India went into a nationwide lockdown due to COVID-19 on March 22, 2020, leading to an abrupt shutdown of factories and workplaces, leaving millions of migrant workers with the loss of income, food shortages and uncertainty about their future. We watched from our television screens and mobile phones as thousands of workers walked back and cycled hundreds of kilometers to go back to their villages. Many were arrested for violating the lockdown, and many died due to exhaustion or accidents on the roads. 

In a horrifying incident in May 2020, 16 migrant workers sleeping on railway tracks near Aurangabad, Maharashtra, were killed by an empty goods train. The systems for ensuring public health and safety fell apart in front of our eyes. Systemic ignorance toward specific populations is a political act with violent consequences, actively engineered and sustained by institutional forces. This intentional "not knowing" is achieved through vague policy, poor implementation, and the suppression of discourse in key public spheres. It functions as an active tool of governance rather than a mere gap in knowledge.

Homebound was inspired by the story of Amrit and Saiyub, documented in journalist Basharat Peer’s essay “A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway” (previously titled “Taking Amrit Home”). His previous work, Curfewed Night, a memoir, also inspired the Vishal Bharadwaj film Haider (2014).

In mid-May 2020, Peer came across a photograph of Amrit and Saiyub, two migrant laborers making a trek back home, sitting on the side of a highway. The picture didn’t leave Peer’s mind: “I kept returning to the grainy photograph by an unidentified person. The friendship, the compassion, and the trust it captured moved me immensely. It was an embodiment of fundamental human decency. I called my editor in New York and told him, ‘I have to write about it myself.’”

In the essay, he writes eloquently about how he felt. “The photograph of Amrit and Saiyub came like a gentle rain from heaven on India’s hate-filled public sphere. The gift of friendship and trust it captured filled me with a certain sadness, as it felt so rare. I felt compelled to find out more about their lives and journeys.”

Many films depicting characters from marginalized communities show them as victims, worn down due to the discrimination they’ve faced. But Homebound’s Shoaib and Chandan continuously had the agency to deny disrespect and strive for dignity. Ghaywan’s socio-political sensitivity is reflected in every frame of the film. In an interview with The New Indian Express, Actor Vishal Jethwa revealed that Ghaywan encouraged the cast of the film to read Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s lauded essay, “Annihilation of Caste.”

Technical aspects like editing are treated with caution and detail. “Editing this film felt like shaping clay, constantly shaving off edges until you arrive at something precise. Even in the first thirty minutes, when not much is happening in terms of plot, the rhythm had to carry the audience forward,” says Nitin Baid, the editor of the film, in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar. Producer Somen Mishra further remembers the difficult decision of having to cut out the entire sub-plot of Shoaib’s love story, something that would have “deviated from the heart of the story.”

Many people described their experience of watching Homebound as “devastating,” leaving the theatres with tear-filled eyes. Countless tweets and Instagram stories chronicle audience experiences filled with tears, mourning, and self-reflection. In a department meeting, I confidently told the team that I’ll be writing this review, but it took me a long time to sit down and write. As I watched the credits roll, I remember my tears reaching my neck. I did not wish to speak or write about it for a while— the film reached a sensitive place in my heart, which does not happen often. The audience sat in silence for a while, like never before, processing the story slowly.

I found it immensely difficult to get myself to write about the film. The sepia tone of the film remains with me. When I remember it now, I find myself associating it with sand, mud, sunsets, food, paint, the colour of skin. Some of us are oppressors and some of us are oppressed, but can we still dare to dream in a world of our own making? When the masses below the glass floor aim to thrive, will we perform an act of ignorance— of atrocities, casteism, islamophobia, stigma— or hope to create space for them? Homebound’s resilience haunts me, even beautifully at times. It reminds me of friendship, love and the hope that we share, even in increasingly dark times.

A graffiti from an unknown location. It reads: A woman’s character, a Dalit’s merit and a Muslim’s patriotism are always questioned in this country. (Source: @KotwalMeena on X)

(Edited by Teista Dwivedi and Giya Sood.)