To understand why Homebound matters, you have to understand what Modi’s India has actually built over the past decade. It is a project, systematic and documented, of Hindu nationalist consolidation. Communal violence against Muslim communities has risen and been met with political silence or quiet approval. Legislation like the Citizenship Amendment Act created pathways to citizenship for persecuted minorities from neighboring countries but explicitly excluded Muslims, a carve-out so pointed it could only be read as a statement of intent. Bulldozers have been deployed to demolish Muslim homes and businesses in what human rights organizations call collective punishment without trial. And through all of it, Bollywood, the cultural institution that reaches more Indians than any newspaper, has largely looked the other way or actively participated in the narrative being constructed.
The films that dominate Indian cinema today follow a recognizable formula. Hindu heroes, usually soldiers, police officers, or vigilantes, defending a pure and threatened nation against enemies that are almost always coded as Muslim or Pakistani. These are not fringe films. They are blockbusters, defining what mainstream India watches on a Friday night. They have been remarkably effective at normalizing a version of India where Muslim citizens are at best suspicious and at worst existential threats to the nation’s soul.
Homebound is a direct contradiction of all of that. It began not in a studio but in a crisis that Modi’s government created. When the overnight lockdown was announced in March 2020 with almost no warning, an estimated 80 million migrant workers across India suddenly had no work, no money, and no way to get home. They walked. They hitched rides in searing heat. They died on the roads. Economist Jayati Ghosh, who researched India’s COVID response, compared it to the Dust Bowl exodus of 1930s America, except in reverse, 80 million people not fleeing their villages but trying desperately to return to them. The lockdown that stranded them was announced without warning or plan. It is one of the most consequential and least discussed governance failures of Modi’s tenure.
Mohammad Saiyub and Amrit Kumar were among those stranded. They had grown up together, worked together in Mumbai’s garment factories, and when the lockdown hit, they tried to get home together. They paid the equivalent of $53 for a ride on a truck packed with other desperate workers. When Kumar developed a fever, the driver made him get off, afraid of COVID. Saiyub helped his friend down. Then the driver told him to get back on and leave his friend behind. Saiyub refused. They sat by the roadside in the heat, waiting for help. Someone took a photograph. An ambulance eventually came. Amrit Kumar did not survive. Saiyub brought his body home. “My blood is Kumar’s and Kumar’s blood is mine,” Saiyub said later. “We were friends like that.”
That photograph, and the New York Times essay written about it in 2020, eventually reached director Neeraj Ghaywan. He spent years quietly making Homebound, keeping Martin Scorsese’s involvement as executive producer completely secret, assigning him a code name so the crew could work without interference. The film was built in the shadows of an industry that had little appetite for what it was saying.
What it is saying, without apology, is that the story Modi has been telling India about itself is false. That a Muslim man and a Hindu Dalit, two people the nationalist project treats as either enemies or invisible, loved each other completely. That when the system abandoned them both equally, they chose loyalty over survival. That the lines Modi has spent ten years cementing into walls are, at a human level, a fiction.
Homebound made it to the Oscars. Amrit Kumar’s mother works construction sites for a few dollars a day and could not bring herself to watch the film her son’s death inspired. The gap between those two facts, one of global recognition and one of absolute abandonment, is a precise and devastating portrait of what Modi’s India has actually built.
Sources: NPR, The Wire India, The New York Times, BBC
