Homebound: Friendship, Humiliation, and Politics of Belonging

When the Hindi film Homebound opens with two young men preparing for competitive examinations, it appears, at first glance, like a familiar story of aspiration. Chandan Kumar (Vishal Jethwa), a Dalit youth, and Mohammed Shoaib Ali (Ishaan Khatter), a Muslim youth, sit together, study together, and dream together. Their friendship is not ornamental; it is forged through shared precarity. In India, dreams themselves are unevenly distributed.

Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound, India’s official entry for the 98th Academy Awards (Oscar) for Best International Feature Film, does not romanticise this friendship. It places it within a society where dignity is rationed and humiliation is routine. The film recognises a quiet truth: when institutions repeatedly fail the marginalised, friendship becomes one of the few remaining shelters.

Homebound is rooted in reality. The film is inspired by journalist Basharat Peer’s New York Times opinion piece, “A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway” (also referred to as “Taking Amrit Home” in popular circulation). The article chronicled a devastating episode during the Covid-19 lockdown, when migrant workers, abandoned by the State, were left to walk endless highways in search of survival, dignity, and home. The film becomes not just a story of two individuals, but a record of how structural violence operates during moments of national crisis.

Identity as Destiny: How Society Teaches Humiliation

Chandan and Shoaib are humiliated because their bodies are already marked. This becomes evident in a small but telling scene set during a casual gully cricket match among friends. Even in this informal, everyday space, equality collapses. Shoaib is mocked for his religion; Chandan is reminded of his caste. What should have been leisure becomes instruction. The gully functions as a classroom where Indian society rehearses hierarchy early and casually.

Homebound reminds us that humiliation does not always arrive through formal institutions; it works in each and every field. The film extends caste humiliation into the domain of labour through Chandan’s mother, who works as a cook in a school but is prevented from cooking because of her caste. This scene echoes countless daily incidents across India, particularly within midday meal schemes, where Dalit women have been humiliated or removed after dominant-caste objections. The film captures this violence, showing how untouchability survives through the language of cleanliness of Savarna Psyche. Here, the Dalit woman’s body is allowed to labour but denied dignity.

The Violence of a Name

Caste reveals itself most nakedly in a quiet scene at a recruitment office. When Chandan goes to inquire about his exam result, the officer asks for his full name. The question is not bureaucratic; it is evaluative. Once the last name is spoken, the shift is immediate. The aspirant becomes a caste.

Later, Chandan tells Sudha (Janhvi Kapoor), another Dalit character, with restrained despair: “Kash humara naam Shukla ya Gupta hota.” (Wish my surname was Shukla or Gupta). This line carries generations of exclusion.

In India, surnames do not merely identify, they classify. For Dalits, a surname becomes part of humiliation, whereas the surname of the privileged caste becomes a matter of prestige, of pride, which is flaunted continuously. Surnames create humiliation from childhood classrooms to government offices, from job forms to social interactions. Caste does not end with education; it intensifies within institutions. 

Read Also: Caste in Indian Cinema, 1930s to 2016

 Shoaib’s Muslim identity is repeatedly framed as a threat. He is invited to watch an India-Pakistan match, only for the invitation to turn into an interrogation. His joy is suspect. His loyalty is conditional, where his citizenship is constantly tested, where patriotism must be performed, and where belonging is never assured. His humiliation echoes the anxieties unleashed by CAA–NRC (Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens) where Muslim existence itself becomes evidence to be verified.

Migrant Lives and State Abandonment

Set during the Covid-19 lockdown, Homebound documents the failure of the system. The film captures the agony of migrant workers, who predominantly come from Dalit, Adivasi, and minority communities, forced to walk hundreds of kilometres on highways. The pandemic did not create this vulnerability; it exposed it. The sudden lockdown, announced without preparation, turned marginalised lives into collateral damage. Homebound refuses to treat this as a tragedy alone; it frames it as political neglect.

Hindi cinema has long struggled to engage with caste honestly. When it does, the gaze is often Savarna (upper caste); Dalits appear as victims, and redemption arrives through Savarna intervention. From Bimal Roy’s film Sujata to Anubha Sinha’s Article 15, the saviour remains Savarna. Ghaywan disrupts this grammar. As a Dalit filmmaker, he tells the story from within the margins, without seeking moral approval.

Read Also: Caste in Indian Cinema, Satyajit Ray to Mari Selvaraj

While Tamil cinema through Pa. Ranjith, Mari Selvaraj, and Nagraj Manjule have consistently challenged caste hierarchies, Hindi cinema remains hesitant, if not resistant. Homebound insists that caste is not a “social issue” to be resolved but a lived reality to be confronted.

Ghaywan’s process reveals why the film feels grounded. He asked the actors to read B R Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste. He made them live in villages inhabited by the marginalised communities. He encouraged them to question their own privileges. This ethical commitment is visible on screen. Homebound does not explain caste, it shows how it works.

From Masaan to Homebound, Ghaywan has traced India’s hidden hierarchies with consistency. The film also punctures the belief that authority guarantees dignity. Real-life cases like that of IPS officer Y. Puran Kumar, who died because of institutional failure following caste-based harassment that underscores a brutal truth, how caste brutally functions within Institutions. 

Baba Saheb in Wallet, Hope on Highway 

The most powerful image in Homebound arrives near the end. As Chandan lies dying on a highway, his head resting on Shoaib’s lap, Shoaib discovers a small photograph of Baba Saheb (Ambedkar) in Chandan’s wallet, along with a job application where the Scheduled Caste checkbox is ticked, showing assertiveness. This moment carries the film’s moral core. Baba Saheb here is not a symbol; he is sustenance. For the marginalised, he represents hope, dignity, self-respect, and recognition.

Homebound’s selection as India’s official Oscar entry and its standing ovation at Cannes are not victories of spectacle. They are moments of recognition. The world is beginning to listen to stories society has long marginalised.

This film reminds us that in a society ordered by caste and exclusion, the journey home is never just about distance. It is determined by identity, interrupted by humiliation, and burdened by entrenched social hierarchies. For some, safety and recognition are postponed by circumstance; for others, these are actively obstructed by design.

By telling this story without dilution, Homebound becomes a space of truth. It refuses resolution and demands recognition. In a caste-ordered society that erases Dalit and marginalised voices or permits them to speak only through others, that recognition unsettles the foundations of injustice.

The writer is an Ambedkarite activist and a PhD scholar at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, pursuing his research at the Centre for Dalit and Minorities Studies. The views are personal.