Vishal Jethwa and Ishaan Khatter in a scene from Homebound. The Indian film took home the TIFF People's Choice International runner-up award at this year's film festival.Supplied
A sense of genuine inquiry and curiosity was essential for celebrated director and screenwriter Neeraj Ghaywan when making Homebound. Otherwise, he had no right to tell this story that represents millions of people whose lives are usually ignored, he says.
As a self-acknowledged Dalit filmmaker – “Dalit” is the preferred term for people historically called untouchable or outcastes in India’s stringent social hierarchy – Ghaywan is a rarity in Indian cinema, and somewhat of an outsider, despite all the critical acclaim he has accrued.
So when he co-wrote the film, he drew on memories and the emotional baggage he’s been unwittingly carrying around since childhood. But to prepare stars Vishal Jethwa, Ishaan Khatter and Janhvi Kapoor for their roles, Ghaywan gave them a reading list.
“The first was Annihilation of Caste,” says Ghaywan, 45, referring to the seminal text by Bhimrao Ambedkar, a famous Dalit Indian political leader, jurist and social reformer who played a pivotal part in writing the Indian constitution after the country’s independence from colonial rule, including the constitutional abolition of untouchability.
It was fitting that Ghaywan suggested his actors turn to reading material, since the movie itself is based on a piece of writing: It is a fictionalized account of a New York Times opinion article by Basharat Peer. It told the story of two friends, Mohammad Saiyub, 22, and Amrit Kumar, 24, who had left homes in rural India to work in factories in a nearby city, and the journey they tried to make back when the Indian government announced massive COVID-19 lockdowns in March, 2020. Ghaywan heard about the article through Somen Mishra, a producer with Dharma Productions, the Bollywood production powerhouse that eventually made the film.
Ishaan Khatter in a scene from Homebound.Supplied
“When I read the story, I think something broke inside of me, but also at the same time triggered a huge reaction to what all [a film] could entail,” Ghaywan says, while sitting in a hotel conference room for press interviews during the Toronto International Film Festival. “It took me to a quote by Rilke. ‘Let everything happen to you, beauty and terror. No feeling is final.’ Somehow that became the theme of the film, and I started building up around it.”
Like his feature debut, Masaan (2015), which had screened at TIFF after winning two prizes at Cannes and going on to become an indie darling, Homebound centres its story on Dalit lives, weaving in other stories of disenfranchisement. After premiering at Cannes this year, Homebound won the second runner-up prize for International People’s Choice Award at TIFF before being nominated as India’s entry to the Oscars for best international feature film. It opened in theatres Sept. 26.
Homebound follows two young men from a northern Indian village, Chandan (Jethwa), a Dalit, and Shoaib (Khatter), a Muslim. The best friends dream of working for the Indian police, as a government job would provide them status as well as financial security. Chandan wants to help with his family’s dream to make a concrete house. Shoaib wants to pay for his father’s medical treatment. But they are two among 2.5 million aspirants for 3,500 openings, in a country where affirmative action has become even more contentious with rising rates of unemployment and poverty.
When sitting for the entrance exam, the duo meet Sudha (Kapoor), who thinks education is the only way out of their predicament. A tentative romance blossoms between Chandan and Sudha, but her ambitions are bigger than his pragmatism. Cracks also emerge between Chandan and Shoaib, as they struggle with mounting pressures and persistent humiliations, eventually leaving home. In the end, a long and treacherous journey back challenges their brotherhood yet again.
Janhvi Kapoor in a scene from Homebound.Supplied
Hauntingly moving, Homebound benefits from Ghaywan’s passion for minute details, besides his willingness to delve into his own life growing up in a patriarchal household in Hyderabad. Chandan is more privileged than his sister, for example, and carries a chip on his shoulder about his caste.
“I called out my own house where I was given special treatment, and also the shame that I carried, and how I have been hiding, for 35 years, my identity. To put my own shame out there was cathartic,” Ghaywan says. Moreover, he wanted to humanize marginalized communities, whether from a racial, religious or sexual minority, or migrants, who are usually discussed in terms of statistics. It’s become an urban folklore that feels like “hollow sympathy which lacks accountability,” he says. “You might talk at some party, and say, ‘Oh, look how they are suffering, poor things.’ And that’s it. But where is accountability?
“The idea is to humanize the statistics we report about. What if we pick two people out of those migrants we speak about? Where did they arrive [from]? What were their dreams? What dreams did they let go of? What were their homes like? What did they eat? What did they love? What did they leave behind? … So these were the questions; that was the inquiry to lean into.”
The point of casting Khatter, Kapoor and Jethwa, who are the current talk of India’s Tinseltown, was to try to reach out to the millions of people who follow them. Although the young actors’ lives are miles away from the characters they portray, they committed to the process. To prepare Khatter, who has worked with the likes of Majid Majidi and Mira Nair, besides his appearance on the Netflix series The Perfect Couple, and Jethwa, who has appeared in several commercial Indian films and TV series, Ghaywan spent three months with the duo travelling through Indian villages, and understanding the precarity and joys of life there.
Vishal Jethwa in a scene from Homebound.Supplied
Jethwa says that he hadn’t previously interacted with Khatter, outside of some congratulatory DMs on Instagram for past work.
“The first thing for Ishaan and me was to start seeing each other as Chandan and Shoaib,” Jethwa says. “[Ghaywan] told us … to meet each other, understand each other’s personal lives, our insecurities, so that [we] will get to know each other. Only then will it reflect on the screen.”
Khatter describes Ghaywan as “a rare director who does a lot of prep for you. He’d spent three years [writing] this film by the time we were cast. … He’ll give you literature to read, make you understand the historical relevance of the things we’re trying to say.
“He really makes the set feel like a place where you can go and be vulnerable as an actor. He started with us by saying, ‘Go be vulnerable with each other,’ and then eventually created an environment where I think all of us felt like we could be our best vulnerable selves.”
As for Kapoor, Sudha offered an opportunity to address “not just the shackles of the caste system but also the male gaze towards women,” she says. The first day on the set, Khatter told her she had a tough job because her character represented Ghaywan’s position. After all, Ghaywan saw Sudha as the moral fulcrum of the story, whose smaller role nevertheless acts as a catalyst for Chandan and Shoaib.
“I always kind of knew that, but I’ve never played a character with so much agency,” Kapoor says. “There was always a fear of being too preachy or too educational, or like she is giving sermons to Chandan. That was something we were always cognizant about, to make sure it felt like it was coming from a more personal space. … I am just very thankful that through the journey of this film, I learned so much about so many aspects of our society, and about myself.”