‘Homebound’ review: Two friends and a country full of obstacles

What’s in a name? Everything, suggests Homebound, if you live in India. “When you’re in uniform, no one reads the badge,” Shoaib (Ishaan Khatter) tells Chandan (Vishal Jethwa) in Hindi. The English subtitle, a little over-eager, provides the subtext, rendering this as: “Your faith and caste no longer matter.” But, of course, they do, and names are the first battlement to be protected and attacked. Inquiring about the results of his police recruitment exam, Chandan offers only his first name when asked, and his surname as the caste-neutral Kumar when pressed. His slight hesitancy is enough to tip off the clerk he’s talking to, who immediately switches from offering sympathy to mocking the boy about reservations.

When Sudha (Janhvi Kapoor) meets Chandan for the first time, she too asks for his full name. Her motive is different: she’s Dalit, maybe senses he is too, but these things can’t be assumed. Religion poses a whole other problem—unlike caste names, there’s no scope for doubt here. Chandan gives his name as Hasan Ali to show solidarity with his friend when Shoaib is fending off a xenophobic cop. Later, he tells Shoaib to say he’s ‘Avdhesh’, one of the names used for Lord Ram. A final change: Uttar Pradesh becomes ‘Chirag Pradesh’, as it did in Santosh (2024), another film about caste and religion in modern India.

Santosh showed that the shared dream of Shoaib and Chandan—a job as a police constable—doesn’t magically alter one’s status. Yet, to even reach the point where one can have this realisation proves incredibly difficult for the two friends. Chandan is the son of wage labourers; his parents and sister work so he can go to college. Shoaib's father, a farmer, needs knee surgery they can't afford. It's a hard existence, though the boys remain optimistic. Chandan even embarks on a halting romance with Sudha, who, unlike him, refuses to hide her caste.

The friends' social station pegs them back, and each is further hampered by belonging to an actively oppressed group. This allows the film to function as a moral reckoning for today’s India, chronicling a wide variety of religious and caste injustices. A flare-up on the cricket field leads to Shoaib being told to stick with ‘his own people’; Ghaywan and co-writers Varun Grover, Shreedhar Dubey and Sumit Roy show in a later incident, again involving cricket, that this taunt remains the same in more educated circles. The sudden spread of Covid, and the wild rumours about the Tablighi Jamaat, again put a target on Shoaib’s back. Chandan, meanwhile, faces the grinding indignities of caste oppression. He applies in the general category without his caste name, but society assumes he’s advancing because of reservations. Sudha knows the only way out is through. “They’ll make you sit on the floor while they’re at the table with forks and spoons,” she warns him. “I’m going to bring my own chair.”

Homebound, if anything, might be a little too diligent in its chronicling of injustice. This isn’t a harsh film, but the way one piece of bad luck follows another makes it relentlessly sad. The writing states things a little too plainly at times (“No matter what we achieve, we're ultimately reduced to a checkbox on a government form”). The second cricket incident is heavy-handed—it’s not enough to have an Indian player named Ahmed drop a catch, the kebabs also have to be Lahori to complete Shoaib’s humiliation.

This occasional stiffness is balanced by Ghaywan’s thoughtful directorial touches. It’s there in the insistence on the dignity of work, whether it's selling water purifiers or working in a textile mill or carving a coffin. Or in the casting of Aamir Aziz, whose poetry marked the tumultuous phase between the CAA-NRC protests and the pandemic lockdowns. Or the way Shoaib and Chandan naturally end up at the riverside, letting off steam, making plans—and how they finally run out of hope only when water dries up.

Homebound is based on a New York Times article by Basharat Peer, about two friends who undertook a journey from Surat, where they migrated for work, to their village over a thousand kilometres away in UP, after the government ordered a lockdown. As we get further away from the Covid years, it’s important to remember how millions of people, suddenly rendered unemployed and homeless, had no option but to walk hundreds of kilometres to their towns and villages. Ghaywan honours this experience by focusing on the minutiae rather than the larger narrative—no speculation about the virus, few signs of an official machinery to deal with it, just a strange foreign word, ‘corona’, and desolation.

Sudha is a necessary contrast to Chandan, yet a fleeting presence, Kapoor too clearly a guest star despite a modest performance in the key of the film. Jethwa, chilling in Mardaani 2 (2019), is transformed here as the sweet, ambitious Chandan. But it’s Khatter who shines. There’s always been a sense that he's someone who could do great things if the right role came along. Shoaib allows Khatter to be his charming self, but also be enterprising, jealous, broken and determined as the friends take turns overtaking each other, neither making it far enough to leave the other behind.

So much of Homebound is about inhumanity that the few instances of kindness stick out. There’s a scene where the two friends, exhausted and parched, stagger into a strange village. Locals shout at them and throw stones, but then an old lady approaches and pours them water. As she leaves, the camera shows her unslippered feet—an echo of a story about Chandan’s grandmother, who'd walk the fields barefoot because it connected her to the earth. It’s a beautiful scene, though my favourite moment comes a little earlier. A simple shot: the sun almost set, Shoaib and Chandan sitting on top of a truck, gazing at the road ahead with something like hope, their thoughts escaping home.