Manu Joseph: What 'Homebound' reveals about poverty and hope in modern India

The film, directed by Neeraj Ghaywan, and written by him with Shreedhar Dubey and Varun Grover, shows two young men trying to escape poverty through the processes that India tells its young will save them.

They decide to apply for a police job; they see great hordes who want the same thing. Still, it is a path, and the two friends feel that if they follow the process, there would be a reward at the end of it. So they endure it all and complete the application. Then they wait. Nothing happens.

Their lives are so delicate that just about any small mishap can ruin them.

As you watch the film, you wonder if there was any other way they could have been that would have made their lives safer and happier. Maybe if they chose not to have an ambition or to love or have a family, would they be happier? Is that even possible? What is this trap they are born into? How can poverty be so suffocating and miserable when for most of human existence we have lived in it?

Until recently, most people were poor. The history of the middle class is probably one of our shortest histories. The stories from the childhood of our parents would reveal a society that was poor or very close to it. In poverty is the heritage of us all.

So a question arises. Were people in olden times miserable, too? Because their lives were as deprived and fragile as the lives of the modern poor.

I was reading The Japanese Achievement by Hugh Cortazzi and came across a statement that around 1910 in Japan, “Standards of living remained low, and the life of the Japanese peasant was a hard one.”

Usually, when someone quotes a line from a book, it is remarkable in some way. I am aware I have quoted something banal. But somehow, the line made me wonder. Did the Japanese peasant, too, consider his life hard? If that was the nature of life all around, was it ‘hard’ or was it just life? When does a human life begin to appear ‘hard,’ especially to the very people who are enduring it?

I feel that the special tragedy of modern-day poverty is that many of us are not poor.

In olden times, when life was not expected to improve for most people, and the system never claimed that anyone could become a king or an aristocrat by clearing an exam, there were no aspirations. People simply got by. The very meaning of joy was probably different then.

Modern-day poverty is worse because it looks like bad luck, and hardship feels like hardship because there are rungs above filled with ordinary people that have a better life. In a poor country, there is something vulgar about our simple good fortunes. I don’t think all of vulgarity is bad; some of it is required, for that is what aspirations of the poor are made of. Still, it is not a pleasant thing.

In Homebound, the two young men follow a path that would take them to a slightly better life. The odds are against them, but they are sustained by hope. Hope is an odd thing. In retrospect, most of hope is a form of sorrow. But in the present, as it is experienced, hope is what helps people endure. Hope is also one of the obvious reasons why there is peace between the classes in one of the most unequal regions on earth. The system generates hope to keep most people preoccupied and tame.

In the film, when one of the boys realizes that his dream of becoming a constable may not become a reality, he takes a shot at college education for a degree, which is another strand of mainstream Indian hope. Eventually, he realizes that the odds are too stacked against him in formal education. It is a space where people like us hold all the cards. He decides to quit college and work in a factory to save his family from immediate ruin. He is finally happy, sort of.

All this is not where the soul of the story is, though. It always tries to draw attention to the fact that one of the young men is a Muslim and the other a Dalit. So, they are not only somewhat poor, they are poor in the worst way possible in India.

But, as an Indian, I could not be blind to an unlikely element that may not be evident to foreign viewers—the Dalit refuses to apply in the Scheduled Caste category because he fears it will worsen a bias against him. Intuitively, I find it hard to believe that a desperate Indian, given the option of a quota, would choose to doom himself by ticking ‘general category’ for pride, an emotion that usually comes from a position of affluence, from where art cinema is made.

But mostly the film comes from a real place. As a result it inadvertently shows, without trying at all, that most of the problems that these two young men face are not from ‘the elite,’ whom they never even meet. There is almost nobody in the entire film who is from even the upper middle class. Most of their impediments come from their own, their own communities or just one rung above.

But the persistent omen in the film is hope, its falseness and how it sustains two young men until the very end. The devious thing about hope is that even though most of the time it does not yield its promise, it is never a complete dud.

As in a bleeding mediocre marriage where there is just about enough to keep it going, hope throws a crumb now and then, as though it is a living creature that has found ways to survive as long as possible in the human heart.

The author is a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. His latest book is ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us.’