Homebound, 2025, Producers: Karan Johar, Apoorva Mehta, Somen Mishra, and Adar Poonawalla, Executive Producer: Martin Scorsese, (based on a New York Times article by Basharat Peer from 2020), Dharma Productions, Director: Neeraj Ghaywan, Hindi, 2 hours, Released September 26, 2025, Netflix release November 2025.

The movie draws from the real-life story of Amrit Kumar and Mohammad Saiyub (named Chandan Kumar and Mohammed Shoaib Ali in the movie (portrayed by Vishal Jethwa and Ishaan Khatter, respectively). As migrant workers, they undertake the arduous journey from Surat to their village in eastern Uttar Pradesh, in May 2020, during the Covid-19 lockdown.

The movie portrays the aspirations of young people desperate to move beyond their day-to-day lived realities and the inevitable limitations that they are burdened with. The urgent need for employment opportunities for young people in the country, further aggravated by the lockdown, jumps out from the film. For the hundreds in the country who do get jobs, however exploitative, there are thousands who do not. In such situations, having friends who lift you up is one of the high points of the film. It also normalises male friendships, including touching and hugging. While women seem to be able to share their lives and have more emotional support, men are more often expected to be stoic and tough, with male friendships often tending towards toxic masculinity. This film shows vulnerability, sharing and caring between the young men who laugh, joke, lift each other up, carry each other (literally) and also express their deepest insecurities — sometimes with words, sometimes with silence, sometimes with rage. In India, frequent acts of mob violence, lynching and gang rapes are committed by groups of men enabling each other. This movie offers better examples of male bonding than aggression and toxicity.

There have been several reviews of the movie, mostly about how it visibilised the reality of caste and Islamophobia as it exists today. There are different kinds of movies on oppression and discrimination. Some place the viewer as an external, disengaged and distant observer who can shed tears about unfortunate acts of nature, humans or fate, but also go back and continue enabling or supporting the same practices of subjugation, discrimination, exploitation and aggression in their real lives.

Another kind of movie on oppression or discrimination hits the audience at the core of their existence, creating feelings of shame, guilt and horror because they, their own families and communities are presented as active participants and enablers of the problem. This kind of movie could lead to a visceral denial — that the movie is “exaggerated” and dramatises things that are not actually very serious or is something from the past. Homebound is a movie that evokes the first set of reactions. It can move to tears even those practising or enabling oppression and that is because the viewer is an observer, not really made aware that they are participants or enablers.

Some movies on caste have faced boycott and reprisals from oppressor caste groups because they show them in a bad light. This happened even with the biopic directed by Ananth Mahadevan on social reformers, Mahatma Jyotiba Phule and Savitribai Phule [1], with objections raised by brahmin associations forcing the Central Board of Film Certification to clamp down on terminology that “portrayed brahmins in a negative light” and “promotes casteism”. So, in a way, it is the community that benefits from casteism or communalism that also decides which movie or creative work is acceptable or not. Whether a director takes a hit or receives accolades also shows a mirror to whether the movie has superficially touched “emotions” or laid bare what one cannot bear to see about oneself. Movies which showcase victimhood are therefore more acceptable than those which throw the spotlight on the oppressors.

The viewer of this movie is called upon to sympathise with the oppressed, against overt acts of discrimination, while being allowed to ignore its structural nature. Those who are sensitive in private spaces, may not take a stance in a larger group or in the face of organisational or institutional barriers to equality, for fear of losing friendships or professional gains. Ordinary moments of potential camaraderie such as sharing a meal or watching a cricket match, become landmines that eventually close the door to some — “I invited her but she didn’t come” can be loaded with overt and covert exclusions. These professional spaces then automatically have less representation but the responsibility is placed on those excluded from the space. In reality, caste or communalism do not occur as a series of incidents but as structural barriers to dignified living, debilitating because of the multiple layers in which they are manifested.

A question we need to ask is whether the actual migrant workers, dalit and Muslim communities can identify with these stories and characters. Can their own stories ever be romanticised or beautified? Can there be aesthetics or beauty in poverty or inequality? In reality, movies have to make sordid stories palatable. Can the indignity of migrating workers and the everyday humiliations faced by dalit and Muslim communities ever be portrayed by two cute, likeable young actors? That both protagonists are largely good natured and calm places the burden on them to be “good” no matter what the society is.

The film glosses over the fact that dalit and Muslim communities are being made to turn against each other, benefitting the actual oppressors politically, socially, economically and culturally. Muslim youth and their families have expressed shock at finding their sons or themselves being brutally assaulted and humiliated by people they thought were friends. The very idea of friendship between communities is being put to the test in real life.

The interaction of Chandan, the dalit young man with his love interest who is clearly of the “creamy layer” is simplistic. The heroine herself apparently faces no discrimination and seems to have benefitted from reservation almost to the point of being insensitive. This can be used to argue against reservation for more than one generation, even though in reality caste manifests itself in many ways, overt and covert. The few individuals and families from dalit communities who move up the ladder (the so called “creamy layer”) are expected to give up resources and spaces, while those from the general category, with generations of privilege before them, face no such moral burden even though the data shows a disproportionate preponderance of privileged communities in most positions of power.

Casual, everyday Islamophobia has been captured well in Homebound. One of the two protagonists is able to walk out of a toxic work environment, but there are so many trapped in schools, colleges, workspaces, who cannot. These experiences can create an impotent rage which has not been adequately explored — how does it translate to who they associate with and relate to? Do they hide their identity or display it even more assertively? How do they respond towards authority? Can one eventually come out of these everyday humiliations blissfully unaffected and remain lovable and loving human beings? While the movie cannot be expected to cover everything, it is these experiences that lend authenticity to the narrative.

Bringing in the experience of Chandan’s mother as a cook in a government school, as also his sister as an anganwadi helper, highlights the dreary occupations that people from marginalised communities are engaged in. While his sister cleaning toilets doesn’t face any potential social boycotts, his mother’s cooking food at a government school is viewed as an affront in spite of the principal himself challenging caste-based discrimination. It points to how the people in charge of institutions are not really in charge when social pressures subsume laws and principles.

It is important to draw from the film how an illness, the loss of a job, a pandemic, a lockdown, even the loss of friendship can push families and individuals over the edge. Although possibly unintended, the film shows how expensive private healthcare can be devastating to families who have no social safety net. If Shoaib’s father had had access to good quality free healthcare, the expenditure would not have been so catastrophic. It is important for those watching the film to understand why free and quality healthcare should be non-negotiable in any country that aspires to be non-discriminatory and respectful of all human lives. A proud man who is forced to depend on his family because of his ill-health shows how far India is from ensuring dignity. An ambulance carrying a PPE kit-covered body home was the experience of thousands during the pandemic and lockdown. Often, discrimination extended even up to the burial ground, with bodies being directly burned or disposed of, often in undignified ways. Uttar Pradesh, incidentally, has been in the limelight for blatant caste and communal atrocities, particularly aggravated and normalised during Covid-19 [2]. One should also give some leeway to the film in these times of boycotts and unreasonable and irrational censoring. A film that has to give credit to a government or a prime minister, even as it explores the consequences of a poorly managed pandemic, will inevitably be targeted by that very same government. In different times, perhaps the film could have been made closer to the truth.

While a movie that creates sympathy for victims of caste, religious and other oppressions has its place, the lens needs to shift towards those who perpetrate these human rights violations and force them to look inwards.

Author: Sylvia Karpagam (corresponding author — [email protected]), Public health doctor and Researcher, Bengaluru, Karnataka, INDIA.

Conflict of Interest: The author is a Working Editor of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics.

Funding: None

To cite: Karpagam S. Homebound: Discrimination romanticised. Indian J Med Ethics. Published online first on July 18, 2026. DOI: 10.20529/IJME.2026.044

Submission received: October 30, 2025

Submission accepted: June 1, 2026

Manuscript Editor: Sanjay A Pai

Copyright and license
©Indian Journal of Medical Ethics 2026: Open Access and Distributed under the Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits only noncommercial and non-modified sharing in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.