Walking Home with Broken Promises: Reading Homebound (2025)

Homebound (2025): Hope, Belonging, and the Betrayal of State Promises

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1. From Essay to Film: Fact, Fiction, and Transformation

Basharat Peer’s New York Times essay narrates the real-life story of Amrit Kumar and Mohammad Saiyub, migrant textile workers trapped in India’s informal economy. Their lives are defined by low wages, job insecurity, and constant displacement. Their deaths during the COVID-19 lockdown expose a system that renders its poorest workers invisible and expendable.

Homebound adapts this narrative by fictionalizing the protagonists as Chandan and Shoaib—young men aspiring to become police constables. This creative shift is significant. While the essay focuses on survival within an exploitative labor system, the film reframes the story around ambition, hope, and trust in state institutions. Becoming a police officer symbolizes dignity, stability, and inclusion within the nation-state.

This transformation deepens the tragedy. Chandan and Shoaib are not outsiders resisting the system; they are believers in it. Their deaths reveal the emptiness of institutional promises and expose how the state fails even those who seek legitimacy through its structures. Unlike the essay’s emphasis on invisibility, Homebound highlights betrayal—showing how hope itself becomes a source of suffering.

2. Scorsese’s Influence and Global Cinematic Language

Martin Scorsese’s role as Executive Producer is not merely symbolic. His influence is evident in the film’s restrained realism, moral seriousness, and focus on individuals caught within impersonal systems. Homebound avoids melodrama, relying instead on long takes, muted performances, and a measured pace.

The film’s quiet tone, minimalistic camera movement, and deliberate silences align with Scorsese’s belief that emotional power emerges from realism rather than spectacle. This discipline distinguishes Homebound from mainstream Indian cinema, which often relies on heightened drama and musical excess.

Scorsese’s involvement also positions the film within a global arthouse framework, making it legible to international audiences unfamiliar with India’s migrant crisis. While this global aesthetic may feel emotionally distant to some Indian viewers, it ultimately strengthens the film’s realism and allows it to function as both a locally grounded and universally resonant narrative.

PART II: Narrative Structure and Thematic Concerns

3. The Uniform as Symbol: Hope and Betrayal

In the early sections of Homebound, the police uniform functions as a powerful symbol of aspiration. For Chandan and Shoaib, it represents dignity, respect, stability, and belonging—everything denied to them by poverty and marginalization. The uniform promises visibility within a system that otherwise ignores them.

As the narrative progresses, this symbol collapses. The film exposes the myth of meritocracy within government recruitment. Equal exams do not produce equal outcomes when preparation depends on money, education, and social capital. With thousands competing for a handful of posts, hard work alone proves insufficient.

The uniform thus becomes a symbol of betrayal. The tragedy lies not only in their failure to obtain it, but in the emotional cost of believing in a system that ultimately abandons them. Hope, once empowering, becomes devastating.

4. Intersectionality: Caste and Religion in Everyday Life

Rather than dramatizing discrimination through overt conflict, Homebound adopts a subtle, observational approach that reveals how caste and religious hierarchies operate quietly in daily life.

Case A: Chandan and the ‘General’ Category

Chandan’s decision to apply under the ‘General’ category instead of using caste-based reservation reflects the stigma attached to caste identity. Although reservations are constitutionally designed to address historical injustice, social attitudes often portray them as signs of inferiority. Chandan’s self-erasure highlights the psychological cost of caste discrimination, where dignity is preserved not through assertion but through silence.

Case B: Shoaib and the Refused Water Bottle

A brief moment in which a co-worker refuses water from Shoaib becomes one of the film’s most powerful scenes. There is no dialogue or confrontation—only an unspoken boundary. This “quiet cruelty” illustrates how religious othering operates through micro-exclusions that normalize exclusion without spectacle.

Together, these moments show how caste and religion intersect to intensify vulnerability. Structural violence in Homebound does not announce itself loudly; it works through habit, avoidance, and denial.

5. The Pandemic as Revelation, Not Disruption

The COVID-19 lockdown functions as a turning point, but not as a narrative shortcut. Instead, it exposes inequalities that already exist. The dreams and insecurities introduced earlier are pushed into crisis, revealing how fragile the protagonists’ lives truly are.

As the film shifts from aspiration to survival, the state disappears precisely when it is most needed. Food, transport, and safety become privileges rather than rights. The pandemic does not create injustice; it magnifies it. In this sense, Homebound presents the lockdown as a moral test that institutions fail spectacularly.

PART III: Characterization and Performance

6. The Body as Archive of Oppression

Vishal Jethwa’s portrayal of Chandan relies heavily on physicality. In the presence of authority figures, his body shrinks—lowered eyes, slumped shoulders, minimal movement. This embodied hesitation reflects how caste discrimination becomes internalized over time.

A key moment occurs when Chandan is asked his full name. His hesitation, tightened jaw, and retreating posture reveal an anticipation of judgment. Caste is never spoken, yet it governs the interaction entirely. Jethwa’s performance demonstrates how oppression resides in the body, and how survival often demands invisibility.

7. Shoaib and the Pain of Belonging

Ishaan Khatter’s Shoaib contrasts sharply with Chandan. He carries restless energy and restrained anger. His decision to stay in India rather than migrate to Dubai reflects a deep emotional investment in the idea of home and national belonging.

Shoaib recognizes the system’s injustice yet continues to believe in its promise. This contradiction defines his tragedy. The film suggests that for minority citizens, belonging is both deeply desired and persistently denied. Home becomes a site of pain, but leaving it feels like erasure.

8. Gender and Privilege: A Limited Lens

Sudha Bharti, played by Janhvi Kapoor, represents class privilege and relative safety. Educated and confident, she navigates the same competitive space without facing comparable risks. Through her, the film highlights how ambition becomes safer with social support.

However, Sudha remains underdeveloped. She functions more as a contrast than a fully realized character. While her presence adds thematic balance, the film misses an opportunity to explore gender alongside caste and religion in greater depth.

PART IV: Cinematic Language

9. Visual Aesthetics of Disappearance

Cinematographer Pratik Shah uses muted, dusty, and grey tones to convey exhaustion and emotional erosion. Wide shots place Chandan and Shoaib against vast, empty highways, rendering them small and disposable.

Highways—symbols of progress—become hostile landscapes. The road exists, but not for those forced to walk it. Close-ups of feet, sweat, dust, and labored breathing emphasize pain over heroism. Walking becomes repetitive and degrading, suggesting the slow erosion of dignity.

10. Sound, Silence, and Witnessing

The background score is minimal and restrained, allowing silence to dominate. Natural sounds—footsteps, wind, traffic—fill the absence of music. This sonic emptiness mirrors the absence of institutional care.

When music appears, it offers no emotional release. Instead, it reinforces exhaustion and despair. By refusing melodrama, Homebound forces viewers to endure discomfort rather than escape it. Sound becomes a tool of witnessing rather than manipulation.

PART V: Ethics, Censorship, and Industry Politics

11. Censorship and the Fear of Meaning

The CBFC’s demand for multiple cuts, including muting seemingly harmless words, reveals discomfort with symbolic realism. Ordinary language becomes threatening when it gestures toward caste, class, or religious identity.

The censorship reflects an anxiety not about explicit criticism, but about implication. Homebound is troubling precisely because it observes rather than accuses. Ishaan Khatter’s remarks on “double standards” expose how commercially driven films escape scrutiny while socially grounded cinema faces control.

12. Ethical Questions of Adaptation

Controversies surrounding plagiarism and the lack of consent from Amrit Kumar’s family raise serious ethical concerns. When films draw from real suffering, legal compliance is insufficient; moral responsibility is essential.

Without transparency or involvement of those whose lives inspire the story, adaptations risk reproducing the same inequalities they critique. Ethical storytelling depends not only on intention, but on process, accountability, and respect.

13. Art, Commerce, and Marginal Cinema

Karan Johar’s comment about the film’s lack of profitability highlights the tension between artistic integrity and market logic. Despite international acclaim, Homebound failed commercially, reflecting a post-pandemic audience preference for spectacle and escapism.

Serious social cinema increasingly survives on festival circuits and streaming platforms. The film’s journey raises a crucial question: if market forces silence uncomfortable truths, who will tell these stories?

Final Reflections

Homebound is a morally unsettling film that interrogates dignity, justice, and belonging. It traces a painful journey from ambition to abandonment, revealing how institutional hope is manufactured and then withdrawn. This trajectory is not merely emotional—it is deeply political.

The film’s greatest strength lies in the harmony between form and content. Performances, visual emptiness, bodily exhaustion, and deliberate silence work together to render systemic neglect visible. Homebound does not aestheticize suffering; it demands that viewers witness it.

The controversies surrounding censorship, adaptation ethics, and commercial failure mirror the very systems the film critiques. In refusing easy answers or comforting resolutions, Homebound leaves its audience disturbed and reflective. Its value lies not in box-office success, but in its capacity to haunt, challenge, and endure.

Here is Presentation of Homebound Movie

 

Reference

Homebound. Directed by Neeraj Ghaywan, performances by Ishaan Khatter, Vishal Jethwa, and Janhvi Kapoor, Dharma Productions, 2025.