Organizing caste: Dalit precarity in homebound

Chandan: When I say my name, people look down on me. If I hide it, I look down on myself. If I only had an upper-caste surname! - Homebound directed by Neeraj Ghaywan (2025)

Homebound (2025), directed by Neeraj Ghaywan, is a Hindi-language film that follows Chandan Kumar, a young Dalit man, and his close friend, Mohammad Shoaib, a Muslim worker, as they aspire to secure a government job in the police force, navigating friendship, survival, and caste hierarchy. As they attempt to return home during a moment of crisis, the film traces how labor, mobility, and dignity remain unevenly distributed. Through Chandan’s experiences in particular, the film foregrounds how caste continues to shape access to opportunity, recognition, and belonging. In doing so, it reveals what may be understood as Dalit precarity—a condition in which uncertainty extends beyond economic insecurity to include dignity, legitimacy, and the anticipation of stigma in navigating work and social life.

Inspired by journalist Basharat Peer’s 2020 essay on migrant workers during India’s COVID-19 lockdown, Homebound moves beyond documentation to examine aspiration, humiliation, and dignity under caste inequality. Acclaimed at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and selected as India’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards, the film continues Neeraj Ghaywan’s engagement with caste, first explored in Masaan (2015). While Masaan focused on how inherited hierarchy shapes intimacy and aspiration, Homebound extends this inquiry to labor, migration, and survival within the lived realities of caste and Dalit precarity in contemporary India. Rather than portraying caste as a relic of the past, Homebound presents it as an enduring organizing force in contemporary India. Through Chandan’s experiences, the film challenges the assumption that caste discrimination has disappeared or been resolved through reservation policies. Instead, caste emerges as adaptive, subtle, and institutionally embedded.

Chandan’s aspiration to secure a government job is not framed merely as economic mobility but as a search for dignity and social legitimacy. In one key scene, while filling out a job application form, he hesitates before marking the category identifying him as Scheduled Caste. The hesitation reflects an awareness that caste disclosure may continue to shape how he is perceived even within state institutions. Government service appears to promise recognition beyond caste, yet the film suggests that formal employment does not necessarily dissolve stigma. As scholarship on caste has long argued, constitutional safeguards do not automatically eliminate social exclusion (Mendonca et al., 2024). Chandan’s hesitation reveals the distance between formal legality and lived social reality.

The film locates caste not in spectacular violence but in the mundane allocation of labor. In one instance, Chandan’s mother is appointed to cook meals for schoolchildren, but upper-caste parents object to their children consuming food prepared by a Dalit woman. At the same time, Chandan’s sister works in the same school, escorting children to the washrooms and cleaning them—forms of labor historically associated with caste-assigned occupations. These scenes show how occupational roles continue to be informally organized along caste lines, producing forms of Dalit precarity marked by humiliation, exclusion, and restricted mobility. Caste thus operates as a silent sorting mechanism, assigning bodies to hierarchically valued forms of work and rendering such divisions routine. Organizational scholarship has shown how structural inequalities are reproduced through everyday practices rather than explicit policy (Varman and Chakrabarti, 2004). Homebound visualizes precisely such reproduction.

Even symbolic forms of recognition in Homebound are shaped by caste. In a cricket match where Chandan’s performance secures victory, public praise is redirected to an upper-caste teammate, suggesting that merit and visibility remain socially mediated. Similar tensions emerge in Chandan’s discomfort whenever he is asked his full name. In the Indian context, surnames often reveal caste location, and his hesitation reflects an awareness that recognition and treatment may shift once his identity becomes known. Through such ordinary interactions, the film shows how caste persists not only through overt exclusion but also through anticipation, self-monitoring, and the management of stigma in everyday life. In doing so, Homebound contests contemporary claims that reservations have rendered caste irrelevant, suggesting that constitutional protections coexist with subtle yet enduring forms of social differentiation.

For organization studies, Homebound suggests that caste cannot be understood as external to work and organizations. Across the film, Chandan believes that securing a government job will allow him to be treated with dignity. Yet this hope is unsettled at a police recruitment office, where an officer mocks reserved-category candidates for receiving “easy entry.” The scene shows how stigma persists even within institutions organized around merit. Rather than disappearing within formal organizations, caste continues to shape evaluation and opportunity. As critical organization scholars argue, dominant frameworks of diversity and inclusion often overlook deeper structures of power (Adamson et al., 2021). Homebound illustrates how caste remains one such enduring structure of organizational life.

From a critical management studies perspective, Homebound raises important questions about how organization theory conceptualizes hierarchy and evaluation. Critical scholarship, particularly within Organization, has long argued that power structures extend beyond formal workplaces and shape broader social relations (Peticca-Harris et al., 2025). Across the film, Chandan carefully manages how he presents himself—hesitating to disclose his caste identity in job applications, measuring his words, and worrying how others may respond once his caste becomes known. His relationship with the reservation reflects a similar tension: while it provides access to opportunity, it also exposes him to being perceived as undeserving. Through these moments, Homebound shows that evaluation is not simply determined by performance but is mediated by inherited social hierarchies. The film thus shows how caste continues to shape organizational life before and beyond formal employment (Zulfiqar, 2019).

Caste unsettles universal assumptions about merit, professionalism, and neutrality. This is particularly visible in Chandan’s aspiration to join the police. While he sees state service as a path toward dignity, the film also shows his awareness that caste-based divisions of labor persist within such institutions, where Dalit personnel are often confined to cleaning, cooking, and other stigmatized work. Formal inclusion does not necessarily dissolve hierarchy but can reproduce it in new forms. Similar tensions emerge during migration and encounters with state authority, where identity must be carefully managed in response to anticipated humiliation or violence. The film thus shows how caste continues to shape how work, legitimacy, and belonging are negotiated in everyday life.

One of the film’s principal strengths lies in its refusal of spectacle. Caste discrimination emerges through pauses, unequal recognition, caste-coded labor, and anticipatory fear rather than overt confrontation. This subtle realism makes hierarchy contemporary rather than archaic. At the same time, the narrative privileges individual aspiration and intimate bonds over collective Dalit mobilization. While this strengthens the emotional narrative, it leaves collective forms of resistance to caste hierarchy relatively unexplored. The film illuminates endurance more than transformation.

Homebound invites organization scholars to reconsider how caste produces and sustains Dalit precarity within contemporary organizing. Rather than functioning solely as an identity marker, caste serves as a historically embedded structure that shapes Dalit lives and labor (Chrispal et al., 2021). In the film, precarity extends beyond economic insecurity to include recognition, legitimacy, and stigma. Across schools, recruitment processes, and everyday interactions, Dalit characters confront uncertainty about how their work and identity will be perceived and whether mobility will translate into dignity. Dalit precarity thus emerges not as episodic vulnerability but as a systemic condition produced through caste-based labor allocation, unequal evaluation, and recognition. In foregrounding these dynamics, Homebound suggests that caste is not external to organizing but constitutive of it. For organization theory, this requires engaging caste not as a contextual variable but as a foundational system shaping how work, recognition, and belonging are organized.

I write this review as a scholar located within the Indian context, aware that academic discourse itself is not insulated from the hierarchies it seeks to analyze.