On the evening of 24 March 2020, the Government of India declared a nationwide lockdown for three weeks, restricting movement for all 1.38 billion Indians to prevent the spread of COVID-19. As shops, factories, mines, kilns, construction sites, and entire industries shut down across the country, migrant workers headed home in what has been described as the largest mass migration in the country since the Partition. Many died on the way. Amrit Kumar, a 24-year-old Dalit man, was one of them.

On May 15 of that year, Delhi-based Kashmiri journalist Basharat Peer came across a photograph of Amrit that had gone viral on social media — perhaps his last photograph. Amrit was lying on a dusty patch by the side of a highway on the outskirts of Kolaras, a small town in Madhya Pradesh. His hair was soaked and clung to his scalp, with a sparse stubble emphasising the deathly pallor of his face; his eyes remained closed, and his dark lips were slightly parted. His friend Mohammad Saiyub, 22 years old, held Amrit’s head in his lap, looking over him and searching for signs of life. It was a haunting image — a stark reminder of the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic in India.

Over the next several weeks, Peer — who was working as an Opinion Editor for The New York Times at the time — kept returning to that photograph of Amrit Kumar of Mohammad Saiyub. In his own words, “the photograph began assuming greater meanings” for him. Finally, on a June morning, Peer left New Delhi for Devari, Amrit and Saiyub’s village in Uttar Pradesh, and wrote a report about the two friends, which was published by The Times on 31 July 2020.

Peer’s reportage was the inspiration for filmmaker Neeraj Ghaywan’s second film ‘Homebound’ — India’s official entry for the Best International Feature Film category at the 2026 Academy Awards. Despite considerable departures from the real-life people and incidents that inspired it, the film remains true to the friendship between Amrit and Saiyub — Chandan (Vishal Jethwa) and Shoaib (Ishan Khattar) in the film.

In the hands of another filmmaker, the story of Chandan and Shoaib’s friendship would still have made for a tragic drama about the COVID-19 pandemic and the migrant workers’ exodus in India. But 'Homebound' rises a class above. Ghaywan uses the non-dominant identities of his protagonists to comment on how casteism and communalism dominate every aspect of life in India. From the endless wait for entry-level government jobs, casteist micro-aggressions and increased scrutiny at workplaces, to the everyday indignities faced by many Chandans, Shoaibs, and Sudhas across the country, Homebound speaks to this specific moment in India in a way few Indian films have spoken in recent years. It succeeds in being one of Indian cinema’s most searing portraits of friendship and inequality, perhaps precisely because it is not about any specific social issue. It is about Chandan and Shoaib, their lifelong friendship, and the love they have for each other and the people in their lives.

I watched Homebound in a theatre a few weeks ago, and as the end credits rolled, many of us sat quietly in the cold, air-conditioned auditorium, trying to hold back our tears. It cut through our caste and class complacency and made us flinch. There was something visceral about watching the film on the big screen — in the ways Jethwa plays Chandan, hesitating to reveal his surname and concealing his caste identity in the face of discrimination, or Khattar portrays inner turmoil with his entire physicality when Shoaib faces increased scrutiny and Islamophobia at his job. But isn’t that what artists are supposed to do?

Like James Baldwin once said, “The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see." With Homebound, Ghaywan does exactly that — he makes us uncomfortable about how much we take for granted, what we look away from, and what we choose not to see. In making us look at the lives of these two young men society would rather forget, Ghaywan reclaims the moral gaze of Indian cinema, which has been preoccupied with jingoistic and xenophobic rewriting of history in recent years.

'Homebound' is currently playing in theatres across the country.

Here’s more from Homegrown:

The Poetics Of Dalit Joy, Survival, & Resistance: In Conversation With Aleena

Dalit Dreamlands: How Manu Kaur Created A Multisensory Celebration Of Liberation

How A New Wave Of Dalit Filmmakers Are Reclaiming Space In Mainstream Cinema