Homebound: Hindu-Muslim Friendship in the Time of COVID, Government Apathy, Animosity and Casteism (Review 803)

Release date:	September 26, 2025
Director:	Neeraj Ghaywan
Cast:	Vishal Jethwa, Ishaan Khatter, Janhvi Kapoor, Shalini Vatsa, Harshika Parmar
Language:	Hindi

 

I kept pinching myself while watching Homebound, to be sure I was awake. Was this a dream? Did this film actually come from the Hindi industry that has spent recent decades largely ignoring caste oppression, and the past 11 years pandering to majoritarian forces?  

 

Writer-director Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound is the story of two impoverished young men from a north Indian village – one Muslim, one Dalit – who hope that a job in the police force will give them the social standing and respect that has so far eluded them. An unexpected rivalry, further financial pressures and the COVID-19 pandemic each add new chapters to their life-long friendship.   

  

Ghaywan is an uncommon presence in contemporary Hindi filmdom, since his understanding of caste has been a hallmark of his slim but impactful body of work, starting with his debut feature, Masaan (Crematorium), that won two awards at the Cannes film festival in 2015. What makes Homebound unusual in this context is that it is produced by Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions, a company reputed for glossy films about wealthy Indians. (Dharma also produced Shazia Iqbal’s Dhadak 2, which too is an out-and-out anti-caste film – another surprise from the Hindi industry this year.)

 

Homebound was subjected to several cuts by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), which is currently on a warpath against cinema that acknowledges caste atrocities, as I’ve learnt during my reporting on the subject in the past two years. Having said that, given the harassment that many other Indian producers have faced at the CBFC in this decade, it is a relief that this film escaped with edits that have not ruined the experience of viewing it.

  

Homebound dwells at length on another topic for which another Hindi filmmaker, Anubhav Sinha, was penalised: Sinha’s Bheed was chopped beyond recognition by the CBFC in a bid to pare down its portrayal of government apathy during the pandemic. Homebound has survived despite this being one of its central themes. 

 

To describe Homebound as brave is, therefore, an understatement. Making it even more noteworthy is its empathy towards Muslims in a decade in which Hindi cinema has unabashedly demonised the community, going so far as to distort history to make Muslim individuals the villains of episodes in which they were, in truth, the heroes. Exhibit A: Kesari released in 2019.   

  

Ghaywan’s film was premiered at Cannes this summer, and won the International People’s Choice Award second runner-up spot at the Toronto International Film Festival. It is also India’s entry for the Best International Feature Oscar race, an arena in which it has got itself a starting-point advantage in the form of Hollywood A-lister and international film legend Martin Scorsese, who is an Executive Producer. 

 

Courage is no guarantee of cinematic quality. Homebound is effective and captivating because its political awareness is woven into an intelligently crafted screenplay, and brought to life by the scintillating performances of its young leads.   

 

Vishal Jethwa plays Chandan Kumar, who hesitates to use the surname that would disclose his Dalit identity to those around him, and does not apply for jobs in the reserved category, as is his right, for fear of being ostracised. Ishaan Khatter is Mohammad Shoaib, a hard-working youngster who remains determined and driven despite facing constant suspicion and Islamophobic jibes.

 

Shoaib is filled with a simmering rage at these injustices. Chandan is more hesitant about asserting himself, except when the need arises to defend his friend. When it comes to himself, he requires a nudge from Shoaib to claim what is due to him from the society that conspires to keep him and his people down.

 

Jethwa was chilling as a rapist-killer in 2019’s Mardaani 2 headlined by Rani Mukerji. His unfaltering turn as the immensely likeable Chandan is evidence of remarkable versatility. Ghaywan has not blackfaced him for the role, making this casting choice – of a light-skinned, light-eyed actor – a rebellion against the stereotyping of the physical appearance of Dalits on the Indian screen. 

 

Khatter stood out even when saddled with jaded writing in the streaming shows A Suitable Boy (2020) and The Royals (2025). He’s a natural before the camera, and buries himself completely here in Shoaib’s personality and milieu. 

 

The actors’ chemistry underpins Homebound’s emotional resonance. Despite its grim preoccupations, the screenplay finds space for fun, laughter and relaxation, allowing the actors to generate such warmth towards each other that I found myself willing Shoaib and Chandan to remain friends forever when tension erupts between them. Even in those moments, the writing and acting gently foreground their vulnerability and desperation, thus allowing them to retain audience sympathy. 

 

Many of the conversations in the film are profoundly political, but they are never expository, strained or sermonic.

 

These men feel real, so do their surroundings. The expressive background score by Naren Chandavarkar and Benedict Taylor rises and falls in step with Nitin Baid’s carefully calibrated editing that imbues the events unfolding on screen with the rhythm of lived realities.

 

While the representation of anti-Muslim prejudice and casteism are intrinsic to Homebound, Shoaib and Chandan are written as being not overly conscious of their differing identities except to the extent that each is protective of the other when the environment turns hostile, mirroring genuine friendships in the real world.  

 

Homebound stands by the marginalised without pedestalising them, as films sometimes do when they are created by those who do not realise that positive stereotyping too is a form of othering. For one, it points to gender discrimination in Chandan’s family. It also underlines the heterogeneity among Dalits through the medium of Chandan’s girlfriend, Sudha Bharti played by Janhvi Kapoor, whose better economic circumstances cause her to briefly take a blinkered view of his struggles. 

 

Sudha is a small player in the story, belying Kapoor’s presence in the film’s marketing – but if you ignore the impression created by the promotions, that’s really not a flaw. Small is not trivial. In a sense, she is B.R. Ambedkar’s voice in Homebound, exhorting a fellow Dalit to get an education that she views as a means to securing her and his rightful place in society. She also challenges Chandan in little ways to introspect about his patriarchal attitudes. 

 

So though Homebound is focused on two men, it is not men-centric in the way conventional commercial Indian cinema is. Chandan’s mother and sister, played by Shalini Vatsa and Harshika Parmar – both stand-out members of the solid supporting cast – are pivotal to the plot, and are given well-defined arcs despite their limited screen time.  

 

For the most part, Homebound is a nuanced chronicle of abiding friendship in dire situations, social prejudice, callousness towards the poorest among us, claims of victimhood by those whose communities have a track record of being oppressors, and the continuing victimisation of historically oppressed social groups. The film strays from its subtlety only a couple of times, to emphasise a point already conveyed with clarity. But this is a minor complaint about an otherwise consistently mature narrative.  

 

Shoaib and Chandan’s saga is inspired by journalist Basharat Peer’s news feature titled “Taking Amrit Home” published in The New York Times (it is available online under the headline “A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway”). Peer’s article emerged from his search for two men from Uttar Pradesh, Mohammad Saiyub and Amrit Kumar, after a photograph of Saiyub cradling Amrit in his lap on the margins of a highway went viral on social media, at a time when migrant workers in Indian cities had been forced to walk hundreds of kilometers back to their villages after the Central government abruptly imposed a nationwide lockdown in May 2020 without making adequate arrangements for the poor. The film is a fictionalised account of these young men’s lives, with the story credited to Peer, Ghaywan and Sumit Roy, a screenplay by Ghaywan, and dialogues by Ghaywan, Varun Grover and Shreedhar Dubey.

 

“Interfaith friendships in India are not as uncommon as the regnant political discourse might suggest,” Peer wrote simply in his NYT profile of Saiyub and Amrit. Homebound revisits this aspect of Indian life that has been fading away from the Hindi screen in recent years, in addition to confronting the caste system. 

 

Homebound is shorn of Amar Akbar Anthony-style melodrama and overt messaging that once characterised Hindi film portrayals of communal harmony. Like that picture of Saiyub and Amrit on social media, Shoaib and Chandan’s devotion to each other speaks for itself, serving as an urgent reminder of the amity that survives among us against all odds.

 

Running time:

122 minutes in theatre listings

 

Poster courtesy: IMDB 

 

This is a long version of an article published in The Economic Times on September 27, 2025 under the headline "Chronicle of a Friendship in Dire Times"

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/et-commentary/homebound-chronicle-of-a-friendship-in-dire-times/articleshow/124185023.cms

 

CAMPAIGN TO COMMUNALISE DISCUSSIONS ON HINDI CINEMA / FILM FATALE: COLUMN PUBLISHED IN THE HINDU BUSINESSLINE

THERE ARE NO “HINDU ACTORS” & “MUSLIM ACTORS”, PLEASE!

The past three years have witnessed a blatant effort by communal forces to infiltrate viewer and reviewer responses to Hindi films

By Anna MM Vetticad

“Is not this same white missionary beach that gave 4 stars to raees, a movie on an anti-national Moslem terr0rist? Any Hindu actor’s movie, this hater tries to pull it down!” (sic)

This comment was one of many that appeared below my review of the Hindi film Jolly LLB 2, starring Akshay Kumar, published on Firstpost this month. If it weren’t so venomous, it would be funny. A friend with a vivid imagination says “missionary beach” conjures up visions of hanky panky in the sand — an experience I cannot claim to have had. Just as I did not give Raees a four-star review, I rated it 2.5 stars. Whatever. The truth, as you know, is irrelevant to propagandists. They prefer what Donald Trump’s aide Kellyanne Conway describes as “alternative facts”.


So what’s new? After all, falsehoods and personal attacks against critics in the virtual world are as old as the day websites first opened their comments sections to the public. The preceding paragraphs signal a relatively recent trend in online animosity though, evidenced by the pigeon-holing of Kumar.

 “Hindu actor” — what does that even mean? A man may simultaneously be Hindu and an actor, but to place the two words side by side is as reductive and demeaning to his craft as tags like “woman journalist”, “gay filmmaker”, “Dalit writer” and “black singer” when used outside discussions on discrimination.

If you have been around long enough, this labelling may remind you of Hrithik Roshan’s smashing debut in 2000, which led to some distasteful right-wing cheer at the arrival of a “Hindu superstar”. The dominance of the three Khans in the Hindi film industry had been a sore point with the Hindu Right for a while, but the political atmosphere was different back then, and the attempt to celebrate an actor’s religious identity remained on the margins of our collective existence.

That began to change with the BJP and Narendra Modi’s general election victory in 2014. The subsequent flow of the ruling party’s Internet battalions into the film criticism space turned into a flood in 2015, when Aamir Khan and Shah Rukh Khan both publicly condemned religious intolerance. Since then, these trolls have unrelentingly exhorted viewers to boycott — and critics to slam — films starring “Muslim actors” Aamir and Shah Rukh, and to back “Hindu actors” Ajay Devgn, Hrithik Roshan and Kumar.

How can we know that these are BJP supporters, you ask? Because their vocabulary and behaviour patterns have consistently mirrored BJP trolls, and mimicked the party and government’s reaction to these stars. For instance, online workers goaded “nationalists” to boycott Snapdeal, since Aamir was its brand ambassador, and Dilwale, since it starred Shah Rukh, even as the sarkar engineered the termination of Aamir’s association with the Incredible India campaign and bullied Snapdeal into leaving him.

Meanwhile, these trolls have largely spared the other Khan, Salman. BJP insiders admit that this is one of Salman’s many rewards for his proximity to the PM and silence on the government’s shenanigans.

The repulsive communal profiling of Hindi film stars peaked this January
 when the SRK-starrer Raees
 clashed in theatres with Kaabil featuring Roshan. Online troops demanded that “nationalists” should skip Raees and make Kaabil a hit, while BJP national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya batted for Kaabil with
 this obtuse tweet he claimed
 was about demonetisation: “The #Raees who are not for the coun
try are of no use. We should all 
stand with a #Kaabil (worthy) patriot.”

As I write this column, I call up fellow critics to ask what they make of this ugly scenario. Raja Sen, whose reviews began appearing on Rediff in 2004, tells me, “The Hindu-Muslim divide among fan responses existed earlier too, but it was only one of many polarities including regionalism which one encountered as a journalist online. Now though, religion dominates responses to reviews. It is often clear that these people are not even paying attention to what you have written and that they are not necessarily film fans or mobs hired by some star’s PR, but may well be members of Chairman Modi’s orange army.”

Suparna Sharma, film critic for The Asian Age, offers this analysis: “Today’s online trolls attacking critics based entirely on the religion of certain stars are simply an extension of the ongoing campaign to communalise everything — the food we eat, the clothes we wear, how we vote, whether we stand for the national anthem or not... Unfortunately for them, and fortunately for us, box-office is secular. So while politicians and their Sanghi trolls can hound out, say, Pakistani actors from a film, they can’t really keep people out of theatres. I’d like to believe that critics, but more than them, audiences who queue up to buy tickets with their hard-earned money and commit two-three hours to a film, are above this sort of bunkum.”

Still, it is important to vocally condemn this well-strategised endeavour to infiltrate our reactions to cinema, because we cannot risk having well-meaning viewers and reviewers go the way of many political journalists, and subconsciously self-censor their public statements to avoid abuse. We live in a world where even shamshaan ghats (cremation grounds) and kabristaans (cemeteries) are being politicised. In this world, more than ever, it is important too to remind bigots that for a true cinephile, there are no “Hindu actors” and “Muslim actors”; there are only actors, characters, stories and films.

(This article was published in The Hindu Businessline’s BLink on February 25, 2017.)

Link to column published in The Hindu Businessline:

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/there-are-no-hindu-actors-and-muslim-actors-please/article9557459.ece

Previous instalment of Film Fatale: Ignoring the jana in Jana Gana Mana

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/ignoring-the-jana-in-jana-gana-mana/article9503111.ece

Photographs courtesy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raees_(film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangal_(film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolly_LLB_2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaabil

YASH CHOPRA OBITUARY / PUBLISHED IN FORBES

(This article by Anna MM Vetticad was first published in the November 23, 2012, issue of Forbes India magazine)

BEYOND WHITE CHIFFONS & PICTURE POSTCARD ROMANCES

There was more to Yash Chopra than saris fluttering in the breeze, Swiss mountains, tulip fields and pretty frames

By Anna MM Vetticad

“King of Romance (1932-2012)” says the Amul ad, quick to mark a milestone in Indian history yet again. The iconic Amul girl sits on the floor of a snow-laden forest, a guitar slung across her chest, her bright eyes resting on an elderly gentleman seated before her, while the copy reads: “Main har ek pal ka shayar hoon, har ek pal meri kahani hai”, a take on a song from Kabhi Kabhie, the memorable 1976 film about ill-fated lovers, directed by Yash Chopra.

No doubt there is great poignance in that visual, paying tribute as it does to one of Indian cinema’s greatest and most successful producer-directors on his demise. In a sense, it’s apt too: After all, Chopra was a master of weaving perfect frames, pretty visuals and lyrical songs into languid romances. But, in another sense, the picture is incomplete. For as much as he has been lauded in obituary after obituary as Hindi filmdom’s King of Romance, the title fails to do justice to his vastly varied filmography that frequently showcases a forward-thinking mind, whether his audiences were ready for it or not. Romance is not an easy genre, but if we insist on pinning a single label on this man, then in all fairness let it be King of Versatility.

To fully grasp this idea, rewind to 1959, the year Chopra made his directorial debut. Dhool Ka Phool – produced by his elder brother B.R. Chopra – revolves around a young Hindu couple. While the boy is coaxed into marriage with someone else by his father, the girl discovers that she is pregnant and gives birth to a baby who she abandons. The child is brought up by a kindly Muslim man whose good intentions can do little to protect the foundling, or himself, from social opprobrium. In an India too hypocritical even today to admit that pre-marital sexual intimacy is a reality, it takes little imagination to appreciate that Dhool Ka Phool made 53 years ago was a revolutionary film.

In the years since, Hindi cinema has very occasionally revisited the theme. Each foray has emphasised exactly how progressive a thinker Chopra was all those years ago. More than four decades after Chopra’s film, Kundan Shah released the qualitatively average-in-comparison Kya Kehna, starring Preity Zinta as a college girl who gets pregnant after an affair. In 2000, the story was still uncommon enough for the subject to be described as “an uncomfortable issue” by reviewers.

Imagine then an India just 12 years after independence, when the young and idealistic Lahore-born, Mumbai-based Chopra dwelt on pre-marital sex, the social ostracism of unwed mothers and prejudices faced by children born out of marriage, while also throwing Hindu-Muslim animosity into the blend. When the wounds of Partition had yet to heal, imagine the impact on the Indian psyche, of a Muslim gentleman singing to a Hindu infant: Tu Hindu banega na Musalman banega, insaan ki aulad hai insaan banega.

But Chopra would not rest there. In 1961, he made Dharmputra – also produced by B.R. Chopra – in which he flung himself right into the fires of pre-Partition Hindu-Muslim tensions. Here, the child of an unmarried Muslim couple is taken in by a loving Hindu family but grows up to be a Muslim-hating bigot. Dharmputra was steeped in overt symbolism and subcontinental politics. A Hindu family and a Muslim family co-existing peacefully served as metaphors for the two nations that would subsequently be torn out of one, and the hope that India and Pakistan could look beyond their painful history.

To those tempted to dismiss these scenarios as simplistic, or as exaggerated and melodramatic, it would be appropriate to point out that the release of both films would be fraught with risks even in 2012, when religious “sentiments” are still so easily “hurt”.

As it happens, the situations in both films find echoes in real life. As recently as 2011, the press reported that a Hindu couple in Hyderabad trying to adopt an orphaned Muslim baby was being harassed by both communities. The Indian secular ideal of ‘Hindu Muslim Sikh Isaai, hum sab hain bhai bhai’ is not quite the rosy reality that we would like to believe. And Chopra chronicled this truth at a time when most Hindi films preferred to pretend otherwise.

Sadly, like so many of Chopra’s hard-hitting films of the pre-1975 era, Dhool Ka Phool and Dharmputra are often lost in the flutter of chiffon saris that came to characterise his later works. That the gloss of those post-1975 films curtained off the vision of so many film commentators is partly the fault of a widespread tendency to judge books by their pretty covers, to assume that what is pretty is not gritty. 

Chopra himself must take some of the blame though. Too many films released by his production house Yash Raj Films (YRF) in the first decade of this century tried to replicate the glitz that came so naturally to him, without the depth of writing that Chopra brought to most of his directorial ventures. Lustre bereft of logic – like an impoverished home with colour-coordinated walls and furnishings – did those films in, and Chopra cannot be absolved for such transgressions even if the reins of YRF were by then largely in the hands of his son Aditya. 

There are those who believe that Chopra’s most socially and politically conscious films were the ones produced by his equally illustrious sibling. Yet, this too is not entirely true. While he owes much to his brother, his success is also inextricably linked to the great lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi; to the scriptwriting team of Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar; to Amitabh Bachchan whose Angry Young Man status in Bollywood was further cemented – after Prakash Mehra’s Zanjeer – by Chopra’s 1975 film Deewaar (not produced by the elder Chopra); and to Shah Rukh Khan with whom the director found remarkable box-office success from the early 1990s. The Deewaar protagonist’s angst against the system, reflecting off-screen India’s disillusionment with the establishment that had failed to deliver on the promises of Independence, indicated Chopra’s ability to sense the mood of the nation. When a similar anger and violence became the norm in Hindi films, Chopra continued the trend with films like Trishul (1978) and Kala Patthar (1979) while also repeatedly breaking away with poetic odes to love.

It was with these romances that his penchant for stunning pictures came to the fore. But the enduring image of Rekha and Amitabh wandering through acres of tulips in Silsila should not take away from the courage Chopra showed in acknowledging marital infidelity in that film. It’s also a measure of how influential he had become that he was able to persuade Rekha, Amitabh and his wife Jaya Bachchan to play out on screen what many believe is the story of their own lives. Naysayers feel Chopra “chickened out” in Silsila’s final reels when the erring husband goes back to his pregnant wife, giving audiences a socially acceptable climax. The other way of looking at it though is that the film’s ending is a reflection of the most probable outcome of such a situation in middle- and upper-class real India.

It’s a different sort of courage that we see in Chopra’s 1991 Sridevi-Anil Kapoor-starrer Lamhe, applauded by critics yet a box-office failure at home. Indian audiences, it was found, were uncomfortable with the story of a man falling in love with the daughter of a woman he had once been in love with. 

“Lamhe was ahead of its time,” a friend wrote on Facebook the other day. “Incest as a theme was not acceptable in the nineties.” But there was no incest in Lamhe. The girl that Kapoor’s character falls in love with a second time was not his child but the daughter of a woman he never married.

“Well yes, not in clinical terms,” my friend wrote back, “but the romance between a man and a girl his daughter’s age perhaps did not find many takers.” The box-office rejection of Lamhe is the clearest evidence of audience double standards in Chopra’s career. This was the 1990s, when Bachchan had already spent several years romancing heroines who were young enough to be his daughters in real life. The difference between Lamhe and Bachchan’s films was that the Big B was usually playing the part of a man much younger than his real age. Apparently, the pretence of no age gap between the hero and heroine was acceptable to viewers, but the fictional depiction of an age gap in Lamhe was intolerable.

In the 1960s, Chopra had earned success with the thriller Ittefaq. He returned to the genre in 1993 with the psychological drama Darr, turning Hindi film convention on its head when he made SRK’s anti-hero in effect the hero of the film. In the 19 years that followed, Chopra directed just three films: Dil To Pagal Hai (1997) starred reigning superstars SRK, Madhuri Dixit and Karisma Kapoor. 2004’s Veer-Zaara once again starred actors ruling Hindi filmdom at the time: SRK, Rani Mukerji and Preity Zinta. And Chopra’s swan song Jab Tak Hai Jaan (to be released on November 13) stars SRK, Katrina Kaif and Anushka Sharma.

Dil To Pagal Hai and Veer-Zaara were entertaining, eye-catching films that earned mega money at the box office, none of which comes easy to any filmmaker. Veer-Zaara also marked a return to Chopra’s pre-occupation with Hindu-Muslim ties, this time through a cross-border love story. However, the visual grandeur, casting and excessive sentimentality of these films have clouded much of the assessment of this great film-maker’s body of work and earned some criticism from even his admirers that he had become formulaic post-Darr.

It must also be pointed out that in Veer-Zaara, like other Hindi filmmakers before him who had dealt with inter-community romances, Chopra too played it safe by ensuring that the minority community member in the relationship was the girl who – as dictated by Indian social norms – could be brought over into the Hindu fold. It’s hard to tell whether there is an unspoken diktat on this matter from Indian audiences, but it’s disheartening that the man who made Dhool Ka Phool and Dharmputra would turn out to be a conformist, albeit in a well-meaning film.

Still, it’s crucial to emphasise that several films emerging from Chopra’s production house in the past decade have continued to raise significant points about the man-woman bond and inter-religious harmony. In Hum Tum, a woman is offended when her boyfriend apologises to her for their consensual pre-marital sexual encounter (such an apology would have been the order of the day in films of earlier decades). Fanaa mentions the unkept promise of a referendum made to the Kashmiri people. Sadly, the seriousness of these films is not widely acknowledged by the film-going community.

Even Chak De! India’s pathbreaking feminist tale of religious and gender prejudice in Indian sport could do little to erase the widely held impression continuing from the mid-1990s, that YRF was more about brilliant packaging than issues which resonate with India.

Indian cinema lost a colossus when Yash Chopra passed away on October 21, 2012. Good-looking stars, chiffons flying about in the wind, Swiss mountains and fields of flowers are no doubt a part of his legacy. Let’s not forget though that so too was that great mind much ahead of his time. 

(Anna MM Vetticad is on Twitter as @annavetticad)

Photograph courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yash_Chopra

Note: This photograph was not published in Forbes