Together and Apart

NEERAJ GHAYWAN DOES not make easy films. From Masaan to Geeli Pucchi, his cinema has consistently carried a quiet ferocity— peeling back the layers of caste, class and gender with a precision that rarely shouts but always wounds. With Homebound (2025), Ghaywan has gone for the jugular. The film, which premiered at Cannes to a nine-minute standing ovation and is now India’s official entry to the Oscars, is not just a story of two friends navigating aspiration and despair. It is a portrait of India itself—fractured, unequal, resilient, and ultimately brutal.

 At its centre are Shoaib (Ishaan Khatter) and Chandan (Vishal Jethwa), two boys from the same soil but different fault lines: one Muslim, the other Dalit. Their shared dream is to wear khakhi. For them, the uniform is redemption, a shield against daily humiliations, a ticket to dignity in a world that routinely denies it.

But Ghaywan is too honest to hand us a feel-good tale of “against all odds”. Instead, he gives us a slow disintegration. The cracks in their bond emerge not with cinematic fireworks but with small betray­als of silence. By the time the Covid-19 lockdown storms into the narrative, the question is not whether their friendship will survive, but whether anything human can.

Mainstream Indian cinema has always been allergic to caste and religion—except when it sanitises them into parables of harmony or demonises them into villains. Homebound refuses that comfort. It insists on showing us the margins in their raw­ness. The boys’ friendship is not a utopian brotherhood. It is shaped and strained by identity. Their disenfranchisement overlaps and compounds.

This is the real genius of Homebound. It does not offer binaries of good and evil, nor the crutch of cathartic triumph. The antag­onists here are the institutions we revere: the state, the bureaucracy, the system itself. For all its heaviness, Homebound is punctu­ated by fleeting tenderness: the boys on a motorcycle, laughter over cricket, a meal shared in the dim light of a single bulb. These moments glow precisely because they are fragile. We know they will not last. Ghaywan allows us to taste hope, only to remind us that systems have a way of crushing even the purest of bonds. It is this oscillation between camaraderie and cor­rosion that makes the film heartbreaking and politically explosive. Their friendship is not merely personal; it is political. It em­bodies the possibility of solidarity across caste and religion, but also the inevitability of fracture when the state presses down.

The decision to set the final act during the lockdown is both artistic and moral. We all remember the images of migrant workers trudging home, their dignity stripped to the bone. Ghaywan revisits that trauma, but through the eyes of Shoaib and Chandan, it becomes allegory. The exodus mirrors the collapse of their friendship: both are symptoms of a state that abandoned its most vulnerable.

Homebound is not just a film about two friends. It is a reminder that in today’s India, even friendship must clear the checkpoints of caste, religion, and the state. And its tragedy not what it shows us on screen—it is that we recognise every frame from the world outside the theatre.