Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound (2025) is a reminder that ‘home’ in India is not always a place of refuge—it can be a site of exclusion and humiliation. The title plays on an uncomfortable duality: to be homebound is both to yearn for the comfort of belonging, only to be shackled by structures that deny basic dignity and humanity to those marked by caste or faith. For Shoaib and Chandan, two friends on the margins of India’s social fabric, the road home is not simply a physical return, but a confrontation with the forces that make them outsiders in their own land. Ghaywan uses this dual resonance to probe a larger question—what is home for Dalit, Muslim, and other marginalised communities in a country that too often reminds them they do not belong?
“We cannot begin a conversation about India without prominently engaging with the metaphors of caste, society and the intra-relations of culturally similar communities,” writes Dr. Suraj Yengde, a leading contemporary scholar on how casteism manifests in practice, in his 2019 book ‘Caste Matters’. And yet, caste remains conspicuously absent from much of Indian cinema, and especially mainstream Hindi-language cinema, which western audiences know as Bollywood. Having grown up on a staple diet of Hindi-language films, it breaks my heart to witness this sweeping erasure of caste, to the extent that even the mere mention of the ‘C’ word can draw the ire of the Central Board of Film Certification (the Indian film certification body responsible for censoring films as opposed to just certifying them).
There are notable examples of filmmakers from other regional industries—Nagraj Manjule’s Sairat (2016) in Marathi, and Pa. Ranjith’s Kaala (2018) and Mari Selvaraj’s Pariyerum Perumal (2018) in Tamil come to mind—employing a Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi (DBA) lens to explore how caste politics plays out in various parts of India today. However, when it comes to Hindi cinema, it is challenging to name recent examples. The few Hindi films that have tackled caste either employ the upper caste ‘Savarna’ saviour trope (see Anubhav Sinha’s Article 15 [2019]), or the caste angle is severely watered down (see Anurag Kashyap’s Mukkabaaz [2018]), failing to meaningfully engage with the complexities of how caste continues to pervade every interaction in Indian society.
Tamil-language filmmakers Pa. Ranjith and T.J. Gnanavel have also managed to work within the grammar of a ‘mass’ mainstream entertainer, using superstars such as Rajinikanth and Suriya, to tell caste-centred stories through movies such as Kaala (2018) and Jai Bhim (2021), respectively. Which mainstream Hindi-language superstar would be willing to potentially alienate their fanbase by taking such a risk in India’s current political climate?
This preface is important. You cannot evaluate Ghaywan’s sophomore feature Homebound, a story of two close friends Shoaib and Chandan trying to overcome a system that’s designed to oppress them at every turn—one from a Muslim and the other from a Dalit background—without acknowledging the broader cultural context and the scarcity of narratives that privilege Dalit, Muslim and other marginalised voices on screen. With Homebound, Ghaywan makes a return to the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, where his debut feature Masaan (2015), which also raised issues of caste identity, played a decade ago. Ghaywan has spoken in-depth about how he hid his caste location while shooting his debut feature in Varanasi for fear of a backlash from upper caste communities and his struggle to disclose his Dalit identity to some of his closest friends.
The journey that Shoaib and Chandan undergo in Homebound, reckoning with the internalised shame of being reminded of their identity at every step, is also Ghaywan’s, and finds resonance in how marginalised communities right across India carry the invisible burden of having to fight for basic rights and dignity in a social structure that exists to dehumanise them.
In the current cultural climate of India, where caste has all but disappeared from the big screen, especially for Hindi-language film audiences, the arrival of two Hindi films prominently centred around protagonists from Dalit backgrounds—Ghaywan’s Homebound and Shazia Iqbal’s Dhadak 2 (2025)—in the same year, feels like a watershed moment. The pathetic state of the industry is such that the mere arrival of these films, even in an altered and censored form, is a small victory.
Homebound is based on journalist Basharat Peer’s New York Times op-ed piece titled, ‘A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway,’ which outlines the inseparable bond between two migrant worker friends from Uttar Pradesh in North India, who rise beyond caste and religious fault lines, set against the backdrop of the deadly first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. New data reveals that India’s actual death toll during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic could be eight times higher than the government’s official numbers. A closer look at the numbers shows deep inequalities among the main victims based on gender, caste, and religion. In 2020, the life expectancy of an upper-caste Indian of the Hindu faith went down by 1.3 years. However, the story is markedly different when we examine the life expectancy data for marginalised communities. In the same year, the average lifespan for people from the ‘Scheduled Castes’ communities decreased by 2.7 years. Indian Muslims fared the worst—their life expectancy decreased by 5.4 years.
This highlights how adversely the pandemic impacted marginalised communities, and one cannot assess the impact of COVID-19 without considering the intersection of class, caste, and gender. Going through the figures also underlines why Ghaywan chose this particular story in framing his ‘pandemic’ film—focusing on two characters with backgrounds (Dalit and Muslim) that, as the research indicates, suffered the most.
The pandemic, however, is just one part of this multifaceted story. Ghaywan is interested in laying bare how discrimination has seeped into almost every aspect of Indian society, to the point that rising above daily micro-aggressions for marginalised communities seems like a distant dream. In an early scene, Shoaib (played by Ishaan Khatter) tells his childhood friend Chandan (a standout performance by Vishal Jethwa) that once they pass the police recruitment exam and can wear the uniform of a constable (a junior police officer), no one will dare question their faith or caste. There is a childlike naivety in Ishaan’s eyes in the early scenes, as he’s convinced that if they secure one of the 3,500 spots up for grabs among more than 2.5 million applicants, it will be the end of all their problems. Ah, to live in a world where things were that easy!
Ghaywan, who has also written the screenplay, is careful in colouring the lives of Shoaib and Chandan, ensuring that we, as the audience, get a clear sense of who these two friends are—their families, their dreams, and desires. Chandan lives in a kutcha house, hoping that the day he starts his police constable job, his family will be able to afford a proper house where the roof doesn’t fall apart every second day. His mother and father are daily wage labourers, while his sister, Vaishali (Harshika Parmar), also works to help pay the bills, having sacrificed her dreams of attending college.
Shoaib’s family has its own set of problems. Shoaib’s father is unable to work, relying on crutches to move around. Shoaib needs money to help get his father’s knees operated, but refuses to leave India for a mechanic’s job in Dubai despite being counselled by a senior family friend, ‘vahaan ye to koi nahin poochegaa ki aap sabzi bhi halaal kar ke khaate hain’ (at least in Dubai, no one will question whether you slaughter the vegetables before eating them too). This is a small but pivotal scene, showcasing how Indian Muslims face discrimination for their food and cultural practices. And this discrimination is relentless. When Shoaib gets a job in a sales organisation, he is asked by the Hindu HR employee to submit the ID documents, including getting a police verification of his entire family, implying that, as an Indian Muslim, his family is likely to be involved in criminal activities or living illegally in the country.
Homebound is as much a film about the two friends overcoming internal turmoil as it is about surmounting external barriers. Chandan is ashamed of publicly disclosing his caste location, admitting his fear at one point to Shoaib that even if he manages to become a police constable, he might be forced to sweep the floors by his fellow upper-caste colleagues. Shoaib is unsure whether staying back in India, a country that has reduced his entire existence to an identity marker, or leaving his elderly parents behind and moving to Dubai, is the right choice to make.
The dialogues by the writing team of Ghaywan, Varun Grover, and Shreedhar Dubey do a remarkable job of capturing the specificity of North India and adding touches that are specific to the vernacular of Uttar Pradesh. I laughed out loud (to the annoyance of other watchers) when Shoaib teases Chandan by calling him ‘pottyface’ (paikhaane jaisi shakal vaala insaan), and when Chandan banters with Shoaib by calling him lapad jhandu (there is no English equivalent of this word, but it can be loosely translated as ‘loser’). These are phrases I frequently heard while growing up in Lucknow. They have an element of playful leg-pulling, which is central to how male friendships develop and deepen over time.
While the friendship between the two men is the core of this film, my favourite moment is a scene-stealing turn by Harshika Parmar in a conversation between Chandan and his sister, where she laments the dual nature of oppression she faces, firstly as a woman, and secondly, because of her caste. She reminds Chandan that, as the male member of the family, he has certain freedoms and privileges that she was never afforded: “is parivaar mein chunne ka haq sirf tumhe mila hai Chandan” (you have the right to choose, Chandan). It’s a beautifully understated scene that highlights the self-awareness of the writing team in creating an authentic narrative that’s truly intersectional—the women are not an afterthought in this story.
Ghaywan also takes particular care in showcasing a wedding scene that serves as a counterpoint to the lavish, upper-caste Savarna weddings which audiences have seen play out in Indian films time and time again. “The pluralistic imaginations of what weddings can be are increasingly being flattened into a savarna monoculture,” writes Professor Ravikant Kisana in his latest caste ethnography, ‘Meet the Savarnas: Indian Millennials Whose Mediocrity Broke Everything’. Among Ambedkarite Buddhist communities, the wedding is a symbolic assertion of community. It is not merely one family’s joy; rather, the spectacle of the wedding is seen as evidence of the entire community’s rise, notes Kisana. This assertion is reflected in Homebound, which frames the wedding sequence as a low-key affair and an opportunity for the community to celebrate happiness collectively.
I will continue to be haunted by one specific drone-like top shot by cinematographer Pratik Shah, which frames the masses of migrant workers crossing the vast expanse of land after the announcement of the first lockdown, akin to cockroaches trying to scurry away to safety when light shines on them in the dead of night. It’s a symbolic framing—highlighting the levels of disparity in how the pandemic was experienced by different communities in India. Those living in gated communities could seek help. But the migrant workers? Left to their own devices, with no one caring if they live or die.
The background score and music, composed by Naren Chandavarkar and Benedict Taylor, are employed judiciously, avoiding overuse to signpost and guide the audience’s emotions, as can often be the case with many Hindi films. The score rises and falls like a heartbeat in the final stretch of the film, as both Shoaib and Chandan fight to stay alive on the arduous journey back to their home village during the COVID-19 lockdown.
While Jethwa and Khatter carry the film on their able shoulders, with the film being a two-hander for the most part, the weak link in the acting department is Janhvi Kapoor, who plays Sudha Bharti, Chandan’s love interest. While I appreciate Janhvi’s attempt at ‘Acting’ (emphasis on the capital A), moving outside her comfort zone of urban roles to play a character from a marginalised background, her delivery and diction were so laughably fake—like someone from the city mimicking how they think people in the villages speak—that it brought me out of the world of the film every time she was on screen. The only good thing about her performance is that thankfully, she’s not present in too many scenes.
There are also points in the film where it gets needlessly didactic, as if the discrimination faced by the characters needs to be underlined and spelled out in capital letters. To me, this felt like a clash of sensibilities—between the production house Dharma’s larger-than-life, broad-stroke approach and the more understated realism evident in Neeraj’s body of work. It was particularly jarring when the film overplays its hand, and instead of employing ‘coded’ language that underpins much of the discrimination faced by Muslims and other marginalised communities, the tone becomes overt and in-your-face to the point that those moments feel part of a completely different film altogether, not in sync with the larger, more subdued syntax of the narrative.
Homebound may stumble at times into overstatement, but its significance lies beyond cinematic polish. In a landscape where Hindi cinema has long erased or diluted the voices of Dalits, Muslims, and other marginalised communities, Ghaywan insists on their centrality, weaving a story that is intimate, intersectional, and political. By reframing ‘home’ not as an unquestioned sanctuary but as a contested site of struggle, he forces viewers to reckon with the lived realities that India’s mainstream narratives still refuse to see. It is this refusal to look away, to bind his characters to both the hope and the harshness of home, that makes Homebound an important marker in Hindi cinema today.
Homebound played at the Melbourne International Film Festival. It will close the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne on 24 August.
Director: Neeraj Ghaywan
Screenplay: Neeraj Ghaywan
Dialogues: Neeraj Ghaywan, Varun Grover, Shreedhar Dubey
Cast: Ishaan Khatter, Vishal Jethwa, Janhvi Kapoor, Harshika Parmar
Cinematography: Pratik Shah
Producers: Dharma Productions, Karan Johar, Adar Poonawalla, Apoorva Mehta, Somen Mishra
Editor: Nitin Baid
Music: Naren Chandavarkar, Benedict Taylor
Production Design: Khyatee Kanchan
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