Walking Without a Country: Homebound (2025) and the Collapse of Citizenship in Pandemic India

This essay is written as part of a film screening assignment conducted by Prof. Dilip Barad sir on Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound (2025). The film confronts the Indian migrant crisis during the COVID-19 lockdown, not as a momentary disaster, but as a structural exposure of how dignity, citizenship, and state responsibility collapse when the poor are no longer useful.

Film Information

• Title: Homebound
• Release Year: 2025
• Director: Neeraj Ghaywan
• Languages: Hindi, Bhojpuri, Awadhi
• Genre: Social Realism / Survival Drama

Principal Cast

• Vishal Jethwa as Chandan- a Dalit youth aspiring to join the police force
• Ishaan Khatter as Shoaib- a Muslim police aspirant
• Janhvi Kapoor as Sudha Bharti- an Anganwadi worker positioned at the margins of state welfare

Production Credits

• Executive Producer: Martin Scorsese
• Producer: Karan Johar (Dharma Productions)
• Screenplay: Neeraj Ghaywan, adapted from Basharat Peer’s essay “A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway” (2020)
• Cinematography: Pratik Shah
• Music: Naren Chandavarkar & Benedict Taylor
• Editing: Nitin Baid

Logline

Homebound follows two aspiring police constables from marginalized communities whose pursuit of institutional dignity and social mobility is abruptly derailed by the sudden announcement of a national COVID-19 lockdown. Forced to undertake a perilous journey on foot, their aspiration-driven narrative collapses into a stark struggle for biological survival, exposing the fragility of citizenship when the state withdraws its protective presence.

Introduction

Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound (2025) is not merely a film about the COVID-19 migrant crisis; it is a profound meditation on dignity, ambition, and systemic apathy in contemporary India. Adapted from Basharat Peer’s 2020 New York Times essay “A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway”, the film fictionalizes real lives to expose how caste, religion, and state institutions structure who is allowed to dream and who is allowed to survive. This blog critically examines Homebound through adaptation studies, narrative analysis, performance, cinematic language, ethics, and political economy, following the academic worksheet framework.

PART I: PRE-SCREENING CONTEXT & ADAPTATION

1. From Reportage to Fiction: Reconfiguring the Protagonists

Main Point: The transformation of Amrit Kumar and Mohammad Saiyub (informal textile workers) into Chandan and Shoaib (aspiring police constables) marks a crucial ideological shift in the adaptation.

In Basharat Peer’s reportage, the protagonists are positioned as informal labourers, whose vulnerability arises primarily from economic precarity and exclusion from formal state structures. In contrast, Neeraj Ghaywan’s cinematic adaptation reimagines them as aspiring agents of the state, fundamentally altering the narrative’s political orientation. This shift reframes the tragedy: the men are no longer external to the system, but invested believers in its promises.

Their desire to wear the police uniform functions as a potent symbol of institutional dignity, embodying the hope that legality, merit, and state authority can neutralise entrenched caste and religious marginalisation. The protagonists’ ambition thus becomes a faith in procedural justice and social mobility.

The resulting irony is devastating. Their trust in the state ultimately becomes the mechanism of betrayal. While Peer’s essay primarily laments abandonment and neglect, the film advances a sharper critique of false inclusion the illusion of belonging offered by institutions that are structurally incapable of delivering equality. In this context, ambition itself is revealed as a disciplinary trap, rather than a route to emancipation.

Summary: By transforming the protagonists’ social position, the adaptation deepens its political critique, exposing how institutional aspiration can function as a mode of entrapment for marginalised citizens.

2. Production Context: Scorsese’s Mentorship and Global Realism

Main Point: Martin Scorsese’s involvement as Executive Producer reinforces the film’s commitment to a global realist aesthetic.

The film’s restrained editing, observational camerawork, and rejection of melodrama reflect a realist mode aligned with Scorsese’s advocacy for ethical spectatorship—a cinematic approach that resists emotional manipulation and prioritises moral attentiveness. Formal choices such as extended long takes, minimal background score, and the non-sensational depiction of suffering situate Homebound within an international art-house realist tradition.

These aesthetic strategies render the film legible and credible within global festival circuits such as Cannes and TIFF, where realism is often equated with seriousness and political authenticity. However, this same aesthetic discipline also produces a cultural tension.

While Western audiences frequently interpret Homebound as a universal humanist social tragedy, domestic audiences, shaped by traditions of emotional excess, narrative closure, and cinematic escapism, may experience the film as bleak, slow, or emotionally inaccessible.

Summary: The film’s contrasting reception reveals how global realism, while enabling international acclaim, simultaneously exposes divergent cultural expectations regarding realism, affect, and cinematic pleasure.

PART II: NARRATIVE STRUCTURE & THEMATIC STUDY

3. The Politics of the Uniform

Main Point: The police uniform operates as a symbol of social mobility, moral legitimacy, and institutional belonging.

For Chandan and Shoaib, the police uniform represents far more than employment; it functions as a protective shield against humiliation and social vulnerability. To wear the uniform is to be seen as lawful, respectable, and authoritative an identity presumed to transcend caste-based stigma and religious suspicion. The uniform promises entry into the moral centre of the nation-state.

However, the film deliberately undercuts this promise through the stark statistic: 2.5 million applicants competing for 3,500 positions. This numerical imbalance exposes the myth of meritocracy, revealing how the language of equal opportunity masks profound structural inequality. Competition is framed as fair, yet access remains radically unequal.

In this context, ambition is no longer empowering but becomes a form of managed hope, carefully sustained to maintain belief in the system while ensuring minimal actual mobility. The uniform thus emerges as a disciplinary symbol one that produces aspiration without guaranteeing dignity.

Summary: The uniform signifies institutional dignity that is endlessly promised yet structurally denied, revealing how aspiration itself becomes a mechanism of control.

4. Intersectionality: Caste and Religion as Quiet Violence

Main Point: The film foregrounds micro-aggressions and everyday exclusions rather than overt spectacle to depict systemic oppression.

Case A: Caste and Internalised Erasure

Chandan’s decision to apply under the ‘General’ category, rather than claim caste-based reservation, is a moment of profound internalised caste shame. The act is subtle, bureaucratic, and silent yet deeply violent. By erasing his caste identity, Chandan attempts to appear more “deserving,” revealing how dominant notions of merit require self-negation from marginalised subjects.

This moment exposes how caste oppression often operates not through explicit discrimination but through psychological discipline, compelling individuals to disown their identity in pursuit of legitimacy.

Case B: Religion and Everyday Exclusion

Shoaib’s denial of a water bottle is similarly understated yet devastating. No verbal abuse is articulated, no confrontation staged. Instead, exclusion operates through silence and refusal, transforming a basic human necessity into a site of discrimination. The cruelty lies precisely in its ordinariness.

By refusing spectacle, the film shows how religious marginalisation functions through normalized social practices, rendering exclusion socially acceptable and therefore invisible.

Summary: Homebound demonstrates how systemic oppression is reproduced through ordinary interactions, where violence is quiet, routinised, and socially sanctioned.

5. The Pandemic as Narrative Exposure

Main Point: COVID-19 operates not as a narrative rupture but as an accelerator of pre-existing injustice.

The film’s tonal shift from an ambition-driven social drama to a survival narrative does not introduce new forms of suffering but intensifies those already embedded within the social order. The pandemic strips away institutional performance, revealing state neglect, disposable lives, and infrastructural violence that had long remained obscured.

Crucially, the lockdown does not create inequality; it merely removes the illusion of normalcy that sustained belief in state protection and social fairness. The road, the hunger, and the exhaustion are not aberrations but logical outcomes of systemic indifference.

By refusing to frame the pandemic as an exceptional catastrophe, Homebound positions it as a diagnostic event a moment that renders invisible structures brutally visible.

Summary: The pandemic functions as a social X-ray, exposing the skeletal framework of inequality that ordinarily remains hidden beneath everyday routines.

PART III: CHARACTER & PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS

6. Somatic Performance: Chandan’s Shrinking Body

Main Point: Vishal Jethwa’s performance mobilises the body as a site of caste memory and trauma.

Rather than relying on dialogue, Vishal Jethwa communicates Chandan’s caste vulnerability through somatic expression. In moments when Chandan is asked to state his full name, his body responds instinctively: the shoulders collapse inward, the gaze lowers, and the voice loses volume. This physical contraction is not merely individual nervousness but a deeply historical reflex.

The film thus visualises what caste theory describes as embodied social conditioning a Dalit body trained over centuries to anticipate surveillance, judgment, and punishment. Authority does not need to speak; the body already knows how to behave. The camera’s attentiveness to these gestures transforms performance into political testimony.

By foregrounding bodily vulnerability, the film suggests that caste oppression operates not only through institutions but through internalised corporeal discipline. Trauma is stored not in memory alone, but in muscle, posture, and breath.

Summary: Chandan’s body functions as an archive of historical humiliation, where caste violence is inscribed somatically rather than narratively.

7. Shoaib and the Question of Home

Main Point: Shoaib’s restrained anger articulates the condition of minority alienation and conditional belonging.

Shoaib’s narrative trajectory is defined by a crucial choice: rejecting a secure job opportunity in Dubai in favour of a government post in India. This decision is driven by a desire for recognition and national belonging, rather than economic advancement alone. Shoaib seeks legitimacy within the Indian state, believing institutional service might secure his place within the national community.

However, the film steadily reveals the paradox of this aspiration. Shoaib remains persistently marked as the Other his religion rendering his belonging provisional and fragile. His anger never erupts into spectacle; instead, it simmers beneath the surface, expressed through controlled silence and restrained gestures. This emotional containment reflects the cost of conditional citizenship, where dissent risks further exclusion.

By denying Shoaib emotional release, the film exposes the psychological toll of being asked to constantly prove loyalty, patience, and restraint.

Summary: Homebound reframes home not as a physical location but as recognition and dignity, both of which remain inaccessible to Shoaib.

8. Sudha Bharti: Device or Counterpoint?

Main Point: Sudha Bharti operates as a figure of relative privilege, ethical witnessing, and narrative contrast.

Critics have often argued that Sudha functions primarily as a narrative device facilitating exposition, emotional grounding, or moral balance. However, a closer reading reveals her role as a structural counterpoint to Chandan and Shoaib. Sudha’s access to education, her relative institutional safety, and her position within a feminised care economy mark her as differently placed within the social hierarchy.

Importantly, Sudha does not possess the power to dismantle the system she witnesses. Her empathy is genuine, but it remains ethically limited by structural constraints. The film thus avoids positioning her as a saviour figure. Instead, she becomes a moral witness one who sees, records, and responds emotionally, without claiming authority over the narrative of suffering.

Through Sudha, the film invites reflection on the limits of liberal empathy and the responsibilities of those who are privileged enough to observe injustice without bearing its full weight.

Summary: Sudha is not a redeemer but a mirror to privilege, reflecting how empathy can coexist with structural powerlessness.

PART IV: CINEMATIC LANGUAGE

9. Visual Aesthetics: The Aesthetic of Exhaustion

Main Point: The film’s visual strategy is defined by a refusal of spectacle and an insistence on embodied fatigue.

Homebound adopts a visual grammar that systematically resists panoramic grandeur or emotionally cathartic imagery. Instead, the camera lingers on fragmented close-ups cracked feet, sweat-soaked skin, dust-clogged clothing breaking the human figure into exhausted parts rather than heroic wholes. This fragmentation transforms the migrant body into a series of moving remnants, marked by wear, repetition, and depletion.

The highway, traditionally a symbol of mobility and progress, is reimagined as endless, hostile, and indifferent. Its vastness offers no promise of arrival, only prolonged endurance. By denying visual relief or narrative acceleration, the film forces the spectator to confront the temporality of exhaustion, where movement does not signify freedom but survival.

This minimalist aesthetic refuses to convert suffering into visual pleasure. Instead of inviting empathy through spectacle, it demands durational attention, compelling viewers to inhabit the physical strain experienced by the characters.

Summary: Through visual minimalism and bodily fragmentation, the film produces an aesthetic of exhaustion, compelling the spectator to experience fatigue rather than merely observe it.

10. Soundscape: Silence as Ethics

Main Point: Silence, rather than music, functions as an ethical stance within the film’s sound design.

The sparse score by Naren Chandavarkar and Benedict Taylor deliberately avoids melodramatic cues that might guide or manipulate emotional response. Music appears minimally, often withdrawing entirely to allow ambient sounds footsteps, breath, wind, and distant traffic—to dominate the auditory field. This restraint prevents suffering from being framed as emotionally consumable.

In this soundscape, silence becomes a moral space. It refuses to aestheticise pain or convert trauma into sentiment. The absence of musical insistence places ethical responsibility on the viewer, who must confront suffering without interpretive comfort or emotional scripting.

By withholding sonic excess, the film aligns its auditory strategy with its visual minimalism, reinforcing a mode of ethical spectatorship in which tragedy is neither amplified nor performed for effect.

Summary: The film’s use of silence ensures that tragedy is witnessed rather than staged, preserving the dignity of suffering through sonic restraint.

PART V: CRITICAL DISCOURSE & ETHICS

11. Censorship and State Anxiety

Main Point: CBFC interventions reveal institutional anxiety toward politically unsettling realism.

The Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) cuts imposed on Homebound such as muting words like “Gyan” or excising references to hunger (for instance, the line mentioning “aloo gobhi”) signal a deep discomfort with cinematic narratives that render structural deprivation and social fracture visible. These alterations do not merely regulate language; they seek to neutralise political meaning.

Such censorship reflects a broader pattern in which realism is permitted only when it remains non-threatening. As noted by Ishaan Khatter’s public remarks on the industry’s double standards, films are encouraged to be “authentic” so long as they do not expose systemic failure or state neglect. Once realism begins to interrogate power, it becomes subject to regulation.

In this sense, censorship functions not as moral guardianship but as a form of narrative control, shaping what kinds of suffering can be represented and how openly social inequality may be acknowledged.

Summary: Censorship in Homebound operates as an instrument of state anxiety, attempting to discipline realism by containing its political charge.

12. Ethics of True-Story Adaptations

Main Point: Raising awareness does not absolve ethical responsibility.

As a film adapted from real events, Homebound inevitably raises questions about ownership of suffering and representational ethics. Allegations of plagiarism and reports that the victims’ families were unaware of the adaptation foreground a crucial ethical dilemma: who has the right to narrate trauma, and under what conditions?

While visibility can generate public awareness, it cannot substitute for consent, acknowledgement, and inclusion. Ethical storytelling requires more than empathetic intention; it demands accountability to those whose lives form the narrative foundation. Without such engagement, representation risks becoming appropriative, even when politically sympathetic.

The film thus occupies a morally complex space drawing attention to injustice while simultaneously exposing the limits of authorship in stories of marginalised pain.

Summary: Ethical adaptation requires participatory storytelling, where visibility is accompanied by consent and responsibility rather than symbolic recognition alone.

13. Art vs Commerce

Main Point: Politically serious cinema faces structural marginalisation in the post-pandemic market.

Despite its critical acclaim at Cannes and Oscar shortlisting, Homebound struggled to secure meaningful domestic visibility. Weak distribution strategies, limited screens, and a market environment shaped by post-pandemic audience fatigue contributed to its commercial underperformance.

The contemporary film economy increasingly prioritises escapism, spectacle, and emotional comfort, leaving little space for cinema that demands confrontation with social reality. In such a landscape, films grounded in grim realism are often framed as niche or inaccessible, regardless of their artistic or political significance.

This tension underscores a persistent divide between artistic legitimacy and commercial viability, where international recognition does not translate into local sustainability.

Summary: The film’s reception reveals a market logic that rewards distraction over discomfort, marginalising serious cinema even in moments of global acclaim.

Conclusion: The Journey Home as Denied Dignity

Homebound ultimately argues that dignity is not a reward for effort but a basic right repeatedly denied. The physical journey during lockdown mirrors a deeper existential one a failed attempt to belong within India’s social fabric. Chandan and Shoaib do not merely walk home; they walk toward a truth the nation refuses to face. The tragedy of Homebound lies not in death alone, but in a system that never truly allowed them to live with dignity.

References:

Barad, Dilip. (2026). Academic Worksheet on Homebound. 10.13140/RG.2.2.10952.99849. 

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

Peer, Basharat. "A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway." The New York Times Magazine, 25 May 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/opinion/sunday/India-migration-coronavirus.html.

"COVID-19 Lockdown in India." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lockdown_in_India. Accessed 6 Jan. 2026.

"Caste System in India." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India. Accessed 6 Jan. 2026.

"Italian Neorealism." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_neorealism. Accessed 6 Jan. 2026.

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