Homebound: The film pushes many buttons, and that keeps it from greatness

The film Homebound is India’s candidate for this year’s best international feature Oscar.  Its pedigree includes our Karan Johar and Hollywood’s Martin Scorsese.  It has warmed the hearts of movie aficionados.  And rightly so, because as leading critic Shubhra Gupta puts it, “if you have to see one film which talks of all these elephants [of centuries of systemic discrimination, and disenfranchisement] that have gone missing from so many rooms over so many unconscionable years, make it this one”.

 

In the summer of 2020, at the height of the Covid lockdown, this paper ran a series of articles called Pandemic Perusals in its book review space.  Rita Bhandari Sambrani wrote about John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (June 3, 2020), an eminent contender for the Great American Novel.  She placed it in the context of our own pandemic and lockdown-induced marches of the similarly fated migrant workers and added, “We await someone to create our own version of The Grapes of Wrath, ca 2020.”  Many readers acclaimed that remark (as also the column).

 

Basharat Peer, the much-awarded journalist, author, screenplay-writer (jointly with Vishal Bhardwaj for the luminescent Haider), was a New York Times staff editor in opinion in 2020.  He came across an anonymous photograph of two youths he described thus: “On a clearing of baked earth, a lithe, athletic man holds his friend in his lap.  A red bag and a half empty bottle of water are at his side.  The first man is leaning over his friend like a canopy, his face is anxious and his eyes searching his friend’s face for signs of life.”  The first young man is Mohammad Saiyub, and the second, seemingly unconscious, is Amrit Kumar, both from the village Deori in Uttar Pradesh.  They were on their way home from Surat, having been locked out of work and thrown out of their homebound truck because Amrit had been coughing.  Peer followed their story and wrote a harrowing piece in NYT, “Taking Amrit Home” (July 31).  He said those pandemic marches reminded him “more of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and the farmers of Oklahoma leaving the Dust Bowl”.

 

Johar’s Dharma Productions bought the rights of the story and Neeraj Ghaywan, whose debut film Masan was widely praised, wrote the story with Peer.  That comprised mainly fictionalised backstories of the two protagonists.  Shoaib and Chandan are poor Muslim and Dalit young men, full of life and hope for a future with money and respect.  Unlike their real-life counterparts who are unexceptional, they have some charms: Shoaib turns out to possess ace selling skills for water purifiers made by the company that employs him as a peon.  Chandan enrols in a college, never reveals his Dalit identity, even when reservations are available.  He falls for an attractive Sudha, also a Dalit but from a relatively affluent background.  How can you not find these characters winsome, even when the established actors portraying them appear scruffy and their families look convincingly downtrodden?  The film becomes their overwhelming tragedy.

 

But Steinbeck speaks of a tragedy not of individuals, however charming they may be, but of an entire multitude.  All the Oakies are destitute and face a collective despair, much larger than that of any one or several persons.  Tom Joad, who revolts against the system and leaves his family for their own security, is heroic, but the real centrepieces of attention are all those nameless, mute, harried, sufferers who trudged through dust and misery only to find no rainbow at the end of their trek.  Much the same was the fate of the millions of refugees who crossed the frontier during the 1947 subcontinental partition by any means available, including corpse-laden trains.  These are tragedies of vast multitudes, nameless and mute, and of epic proportions.  Steinbeck depicts it through a literary masterwork, but even simple, faded, sepia photographs of those eras brought home their shattering impact.

 

We don’t remember Henry Fonda from the cinematic The Grapes of Wrath, nor Om Puri from Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas (both excellent performances) but are awed by the films themselves.  In Homebound, we are nudged into remembering Ishaan Khattar and Vishal Jethwa. The very resort to pushing all possible buttons of class, religion, caste, and gender inequalities and oppression, makes Homebound a very good film, but keeps it from being a classic or our own grapes of wrath.

 

The author is a Baroda-based economist