How close is Homebound to the true story of Amrit Kumar and Mohammad Saiyub?
Writer-director Neeraj Ghaywan appears to have tweaked certain truths from the original opinion piece penned by noted journalist Basharat Peer.
By Mayur Lookhar
India’s official representation at the Oscars often sparks debate, especially when a Bollywood film is selected. For the second consecutive year, the Film Federation of India jury has chosen a Bollywood film as the country’s entry. This time, it is writer-director Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound, which was surprisingly nominated just a day before its theatrical release. The film has traveled to Cannes and other international film festivals. Subsequently, Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions came on board as a presenter, and eventually, the film became a Dharma production.
Just like its limited theatrical release, the press screening was also perhaps for a select few. Nevertheless, the film earned widespread critical acclaim, with many calling it worthy of being India’s official entry to the Oscars. We recently watched the film on Netflix and came across Basharat Peer’s much-talked-about opinion piece, ‘A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway’. This article was published in The New York Times on July 31, 2020 and this is what inspired Neeraj Ghaywan to make Homebound.
Peer’s article covered the story of Amrit Kumar and Mohammad Saiyub, two young migrant workers from Surat, Gujarat who scrambled to get home to their Devari village in Uttar Pradesh during the Covid-19 lockdown period in 2020. Their story was one of friendship and camaraderie between a Dalit and a Muslim, two poor men who migrated to Surat to earn a livelihood and support their families. Both sent most of their monthly wages (15-20K) back home, Kumar to help build a better house, and Saiyub to cover his father’s medical care. Fate dealt a cruel blow when Kumar fell ill during the journey. Fearing he might have COVID-19, other passengers forced them off the truck. The two friends walked on, with Saiyub largely carrying his best friend. Sadly, completely dehydrated, Kumar was unable to go further and was left stranded on the Kolaras highway in Madhya Pradesh. Medical help eventually arrived, and Kumar was admitted to Shivpuri hospital, but he passed away on the night of May 15.
While narrating the tragic story of Kumar, Basharat Peer also turned this opinion piece into an endless rant against the current Indian government, not shying away from mentioning rising Hindutva, the Babri Masjid demolition, and religious intolerance. We have no political affinity, and the current socio-political environment speaks for itself, but for all the fears of Hindu nationalism, Peer himself overlooked that Amrit Kumar and Mohammad Saiyub’s friendship counters all divisive narratives.
It’s bizarre how Peer, a journalist, concluded that the lockdown was imposed early when India had only a few hundred Covid cases. This was a global pandemic, and with India’s population of 1.4 billion, no government would have risked delaying the lockdown further. The Kumbh Mela festivities in January and February had already worried the medical fraternity, and any further delay would have led to catastrophe. It wasn’t the lockdown itself, but rather how industries and factory owners reacted to the situation. The sight of countless migrant workers scrambling to get home to their villages was an eye-opener into how many factories treated their workers. While Peer digresses into the socio-political side, he ought to be given credit for reporting the facts pertaining to Kumar and Saiyub. But what about the film?
We have immense respect for Neeraj Ghaywan as a storyteller, but it appears that he, too, has taken creative liberties that digress from certain key truths. Bollywood naturally creates a fictionalized account of true events or a person’s life. Amrit Kumar becomes Chandan Kumar (Vishal Jethwa), while Mohammad Saiyub becomes Mohammed Shoaib Ali (Ishaan Khatter). Ghaywan steers clear of naming any real territory, showing Chandan and Shoaib as two aspirational young men from the fictional Chirag Pradesh. Well, to their poor families, they are the chirag, the light that carries the family forward.
Drama is needed to amplify a story, but not at the cost of digressing from the truth. Take endless creative liberties when telling fictional tales, but when claiming that your film is inspired by or based on true events, the least a filmmaker can do is avoid changing the very pillars on which the story hinges. And here, Ghaywan is guilty of tweaking Amrit Kumar and Mohammad Saiyub’s story to perhaps advance his own set of socio-political beliefs.
There are a few key discrepancies between Peer’s article and Ghaywan’s story. First, Amrit Kumar didn’t die on the highway, but Chandan Kumar did. Also, contrary to the film where Chandan and Shoaib were left stranded, Amrit Kumar and Saiyub were helped by a local politician who arranged an ambulance. Kumar was rushed to a local hospital, where he died two days later. While Peer didn’t disclose the politician who came to the aid of Amrit and Saiyub, it was Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s BJP government that had come to power less than two months earlier. Perhaps the most glaring discrepancy is how Ghaywan showed his Mohammad Shoaib Ali as someone ridiculed at work and often taunted by a Hindu colleague. Shoaib worked as a peon in a water purifier company, but Mohammad Saiyub and Amrit Kumar were working in different textile units in Surat. In his own words, as stated in the article, Saiyub clearly said that nobody bothered him, he simply did his job and got paid for it. Yet Ghaywan chose to paint Shoaib as a victim of prejudice.
Creative liberties are needed, but what do you make of the ones that Ghaywan took as mentioned above? Films like The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story are slammed for selective facts and distorting history, and they are rightly called propaganda. So, if digressing from the truth or telling half truth amounts to propaganda, hasn’t Homebound done the same?
Despite these discrepancies, Homebound is still a quality film marked by its fine writing, especially impactful dialogues by Varun Grover and Sreedhar Dubey. Vishal Jethwa and Ishaan Khatter are sincere in their efforts but we were moved by Shalini Vatsa, who played Chandan’s mother. Jahnvi Kapoor, too, impressed in her cameo role as Sudha Bharti, Chandan’s girl friend.
One can understand why the FFI chose Homebound for the Oscars. This is exactly the kind of story that caters to Western tastes and perhaps their Indian stereotypes. Not for a moment are we discounting the tragic story of Amrit Kumar or suggesting that caste-class divides don’t exist in Indian society. Homebound, though, exposes the elitist mentality that cared less for the poor during a national and global health crisis.
Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions aligning with Homebound naturally helps build hype around the film. Though this film didn’t take birth in a Dharma creative lab, rest assured that the legacy studio will leave no stone unturned in promoting it internationally. The momentum grew even more with legendary Hollywood filmmaker Martin Scorsese joining the Homebound team as an executive producer. Neeraj Ghaywan even recorded a conversation with him. While Scorsese is admired globally, particularly in India, it’s worth noting that over all these decades, he has won just one Oscar.
Can Homebound end India’s long Oscar drought? Only time will tell. We close this opinion piece with the hope that, Oscar or not, Ghaywan and his producers have compensated the family of the late Amrit Kumar, and Mohammad Saiyub for making a film inspired by their friendship and tragedy. If not, then how different is Bollywood from those cold, heartless factory owners who abandoned migrant workers during the pandemic?
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