At the heart of Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound is the image of one young man carrying another. Early in the film, we see the piggyback as a moment of laughter and joy. By the end of the film, it’s a desperate attempt to defy death.
The man shouldering the burden is Shoaib (Ishaan Khatter). He is carrying his childhood friend, Chandan (Vishal Jethwa). Both are attempting to traverse the last few hundred miles to their village in the midst of the COVID pandemic. One is Muslim, the other Dalit. Both have spent their lives fighting bigotry and poverty, only to be further marginalized by disease and a lockdown. Chandan is sick but Shoaib doesn’t give up on him. He hauls him up on his back and keeps walking. It’s a powerful, searing symbol of humanity.
Homebound
The Bottom Line
A powerful and empathetic tearjerker.
Release date: Friday, Sep. 26
Cast: Ishaan Khatter, Vishal Jethwa, Janhvi Kapoor
Director: Neeraj Ghaywan
Screenwriters: Neeraj Ghaywan, Basharat Peer, Sumit Roy
1 hour 57 minutes
Executive produced by Martin Scorsese, Homebound is based on an op-ed written by Basharat Peer in The New York Times, titled “A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway.” From that 2020 article, Ghaywan has built out a narrative that hurls us, with both urgency and restraint, into the fault lines of India.
The film begins with both boys attempting to join the police force. Their reasoning is that once you’re wearing a uniform, faith and caste no longer matter. But it is an uphill battle, because there are approximately 714 candidates for each seat. Chandan doesn’t want to be identified as someone from an oppressed caste. Shoaib eventually gets a job where he is valued for his street smarts but also routinely reminded that he doesn’t belong. Eventually, both end up in Surat, in state of Gujarat. But when the pandemic hits, work is shut down, and they must find a way back across thousands of miles to their village.
Since his award-winning 2015 debut Masaan, Ghaywan has become Hindi cinema’s foremost chronicler of marginalized men and women. His stories — consider his short films Juice (2017) and Geeli Pucchi (2021) — aren’t didactic or shrill. With control and craft, Ghaywan reveals the cruelty built into our social fabric and asks us to consider what part we play, consciously or unconsciously, in furthering it.
Homebound continues this theme. Shoaib and Chandan are reminded again and again that they are, by virtue of their births, perceived as lesser. There is a gut-wrenching sequence in which Chandan’s mother (a superb Shalini Vatsa), who works in a village school, is forbidden from cooking for the children because of her caste. When the protesting parents are reminded that what they are doing is unconstitutional, a father angrily replies, “You can keep your constitution.”
The noisy aggression cuts to silence. The woman is sitting alone looking at a photograph of the great B. R. Ambedkar, who was the chief architect of the Indian constitution. Adopted in 1949, the document explicitly promises “justice, social, economic and political” as a core guiding principle. And yet, more than 70 years later, discrimination remains deep and abiding.
The precision, beauty and emotion in the film is built on strong writing (the screenplay is by Ghaywan and the story is by Peer, Ghaywan and Sumit Roy) and superb performances. Khatter and Jethwa shed their Bollywood baggage, as does costar Janhvi Kapoor as Chandan’s love interest, demonstrating authenticity and the ability to deliver complex emotion. Khatter, who started his career with Majid Majidi’s 2017 film Beyond the Clouds, is especially brilliant in his returns to his roots.
Homebound is the story of ordinary people who find the courage and compassion to resist systemic cruelty. On the long road home, Shoaib and Chandan come to a tiny village. Shoaib begs for water but is met with hostility. Men, standing on a terrace, start to throw stones to drive them out — they are afraid that these two bring disease. But a woman, her face covered by her ghoonghat (veil), defies them. She brings out a bucket, pours water into their cupped hands and quenches their thirst.
Which took me back to the end of Raj Kapoor’s superb 1956 film Jagte Raho (Stay Awake), in which he plays a poor man who wanders into an apartment building looking for water but spends the night hiding and running because they take him for a thief. When morning comes, he hears a bhajan (religious song) and follows the sound, which leads him to Nargis, resplendent in white. She comes forth with a pot and pours water for him. These small acts of kindness, these films seem to say, can save the world.
Be warned that Homebound is a three-hankie weeper. There is a scene between Shoaib and Chandan’s mother that destroyed me. This is the best Hindi film of the year so far. Don’t miss it.
