Sometimes an image can convey what a thousand words can’t. The release of director Neeraj Ghaywan’s latest movie, Homebound (2025), has been creating waves for a searing depiction of what happened to migrant workers during the lockdown. It is based on The New York Times piece titled ‘A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway’ by journalist Basharat Peer. It’s a rare gem churned out by Bollywood in recent times, which has the potential to steer the discourse around India’s aspirational youth towards the reality of inequality that stares them in the face. Homebound is a story about two friends, Shoaib and Chandan, a Muslim and a Dalit, respectively, who dream of living a life of dignity by clearing the constabulary exams. Through the movie, we get to undertake a journey that starts with this dream and ends with them working in a textile mill far away from home.

The movie begins with the nervous energy of two excited youths and their aspirations of becoming constables. ‘Salute karenge, izzat milegi (People will salute us, we will get respect),’ they exclaim. Nobody will then dare to humiliate them if they join the police. It’s an aspiration fuelled by the frustration that has built up due to the micro-aggressions they face in their everyday life. When Chandan goes to the police station to inquire about the exam results, he faces a hostile police officer who tries to investigate his caste and openly expresses his disgust for reservations. There is a lot of tension in the scene. Chandan braces himself to utter a lie, that he is a kayastha, one of the more privileged castes – a lie that he hopes will momentarily shield him from the menacing scrutiny of the authority figure seated in front of him. He even fills up application forms under the general category in fear that if he gets recruited under the Scheduled Caste (SC) category, his caste identity might continue to stick to him in the new job, and he will be forced to sweep the floors. Meanwhile, Shoaib faces a different kind of othering. When Shoaib, Chandan, and a group of other young boys from their locality are all playing cricket, a fight ensues between Shoaib and another player over a runout. The fight escalates into a physical tussle and ends with the latter yelling at Shoaib to go play with his ‘own’ people. In another instance, when he takes up a job as an office peon, an employee in that office tries to make life difficult for him for no good reason, but just driven by blind hatred for ‘the other’. It starts with veiled hostility, like asking him to stop serving him water, and asking for extra documents for identity verification. All these seemingly tiny acts of aggression keep building up and eventually reach a crescendo when he is blatantly mocked and accused of supporting the Pakistani team during the viewing of an India-Pakistan cricket match at an office party. Shoaib then acts out and quits his job, shocking his bosses, who fail to recognise the bullying that was going on and who instead trivialise his suffering by saying it was all done in jest.

Hostilities aside, they also have to contend with the material realities of poverty, like leaking roofs, and a father who is in urgent need of a knee replacement surgery but doesn’t have the money for it. Amidst such material deprivations, even the fact that they were given the option to study for a government job exam seems like a big privilege, something pointed out by Chandan’s sister, who is not accorded that same privilege and has to instead slog to earn a daily living and support the family. After the exam, they had been reluctant to take up anything else in the meantime, thinking the results were just around the corner. But one year had passed since the exams. Every time they tried to find out about the results, they were only met with callous excuses from government officials. After the excruciatingly long wait, during which they had to endure taunts of family members about staying jobless and whiling away time, results do arrive. Chandan manages to clear the exam, while Shoaib is devastated to see his name missing from the list of successful candidates. But even for Chandan, the joy is short-lived as he receives news of a stay order on the recruitment. Facing one setback after another, their struggle is reminiscent of the famous dialogue ‘Yeh dukh kahein khatam nhi hota (Why doesn’t this sorrow end?)’ from Ghaywan’s other movie Masaan. Failed by the system but compelled to improve their family’s material condition, they finally decide to take matters into their own hand and join a textile mill far from home.

Before watching the movie, I had a brief idea of what the movie was about, that it was based on two friends, who are both migrant workers. So, when I entered the theatre and saw the scene where a swarm of students are waiting at the railway station, including the protagonists, I was a little surprised and thought to myself – okay, so this is a student’s journey from an aspirant to a mill worker. The first frame of the movie, instead of having migrant workers, had two bright young men, with dreams of becoming police constables and a nervous excitement, taking a train trip to their exam centre. Being a researcher in the domain of education, I was immediately hooked.

Previously, for my thesis, when I had interviewed graduate students from a tribal community in Assam about their aspirations and educational journeys, two things stood out, which are also very successfully captured in the movie. One, how in this country, certain social identities always stick to you despite the struggle to get rid of them. And second, the immensely exalted importance that we give to education and examinations in this country. In the movie, we saw Chandan filling forms under the general category, hoping that it would free him from being associated with a particular caste identity. But whether it is his mother who faces the ire of upper-caste parents for cooking mid-day meals for their children or his own experience with an authority figure trying to scrutinise his caste, he realises it is better to confront his caste identity than to hide it. The same goes for Shoaib, who was constantly reminded of his religious identity, whether it was in his locality or at his workplace. With participants in my research too, I realised how the general discourse on reservations, experiences of linguistic hierarchy and people’s discomfort with changing the status quo force oneself to examine one’s identity and belongingness. Nobody wants the tag of being from a ‘backward’ community or of being a reserved category student, but it is a reality that, at some point, everybody from such communities must contend with. This becomes more pronounced in India because it is a big, populous country with an even bigger inequality problem. We are stuck with a system that has exams and cut-throat competition even for the most basic job role that might not even require specialised skills. So, any social justice scheme, like a reservation that aims to undo a historical wrong, is immediately seen as unfairly giving advantage to certain sections of society. Add casteism and religious othering into the mix, and the resentment is further aggravated when people from such communities are suddenly seen to be doing well for themselves. So, these identities will continue to stick till caste and casteism exist in India.

Amidst the limitations imposed by identity, education and examinations appear as harbingers of hope and manage to lodge themselves in people’s lives as the most powerful tool in their imaginations of a better future. That hope is soon followed by constant adjustments and recalibrations in light of material realities and systemic failures. Starting from the struggle to get to the exam centre, which hinged on a reliable public transport, to getting the results on time without any problems, uncertainties followed Chandan and Shoaib at every step. Unquestionably, that exam was extremely important to them. Their dignity and material betterment hinged on it. They carried their family’s hope. Throughout the film, while we see Chandan swallowing the guilt of seeing his mother’s cracked heels resulting from years of back-breaking labour and his sister working and unable to go for higher studies like he could, Shoaib too feels the guilt of seeing his father suffering from a bad knee with no money for surgery and of his adamant desire to stay close to ‘home’ while resisting pressure from his family to go work in Dubai. In their minds, once they clear the exam, all their existential anxieties would be resolved. So, they clung to that hope for some time. But unable to withstand the uncertainty any longer, they think of other things they can do in the meantime. Chandan decides to try out college while Shoaib goes on to work as an office peon. But when the money question looms heavily over them, and they repeatedly run into systemic failures like delayed or paused recruitments, they are then forced to confront a reality – that they must let go of their dreams. A shattering of dreams is followed by calibrated adjustments. They learn that they must not dream too big, that they should just keep their head down and earn some money. And that’s how they both end up as mill workers in a factory far away from home.

What this movie managed to do was highlight the systemic way in which India’s aspirational youth is let down. It could lay out the exact circumstances under which Chandan and Shoaib were compelled to make their choices, whether it is government apathy, everyday discrimination, or the burden of poverty. Structural issues like these do not always get talked about in everyday conversations, especially when it comes to their role in failing India’s aspirational youth. It’s a language that still eludes us as a society. One part of the problem is that individuals always like to think of themselves as being in control of things and as exercising free will, sometimes even in situations where they are not. In my interviews with students, they had never blamed anyone or anything for their choices, even when those choices put them in a materially more disadvantageous position. They gave perfectly good and reasonable explanations for the choices they made. But they failed to capture the failings of a system that oversells and underdelivers on its promise to marginalised communities. Life stories, especially when the reliance is on one’s own individual memory, sometimes fail to make these larger connections between a person’s choices and the larger sociological forces that shape his life. Homebound could, however, go beyond the story of two individual people and has done a marvellous job of capturing a sociological truth that will hopefully equip people with a more nuanced view of what ails India.

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Jayashree Doley is a PhD student at the Department of Education, University of Delhi, researching education among tribal communities.