Dharma Productions' Neeraj Ghaywan-directed Homebound has landed in a soup. Again.
This time, the allegation is far more sinister. Author Puja Changoiwala has levelled serious allegations of plagiarism against the makers, ones that revive an old grouse: big bad Bollywood out to usurp writers' rights. However, stepping back from the legal dispute, if you analyse issues of intellectual property and creative expression, a far more complex reality emerges centred around the poignant question: in documenting and dramatising a shared national tragedy—in this case, the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown exodus of millions of migrant Indians—who truly owns the narrative?
To understand this, one must revisit what happened on the ground between March and May 2020.
The archive of collective trauma
On March 24, 2020, the Indian government announced one of the world’s most severe lockdowns with only four hours' notice. I supported the lockdown then, even writing articles about the same, but what emerged within days of the same is an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe that played out across highways, railway stations, and city streets: not in the fiction of novels or screenplays, but in lived reality.
Within days, comfortable India watched as dozens of millions, perhaps exponentially more Indians (there's no correct estimate of how many)—the backbone of India's urban economy—finding themselves without jobs, food, money or transport, tried to make their way to wherever they were originally from, often thousands of kilometres away.
Take only one scene – that of Anand Vihar ISBT station in Delhi, where thousands gathered by the minute to return home. This scene of police lathi-charges, hunger, exhaustion and the primal human need to survive, played across cities, towns and villages of the nation.
What was recorded was the death of thousands in accidents, through hunger and exhaustion, in relief trains, or illnesses other than Covid on the roads and in relief camps. There were deaths from starvation, heat strokes, of those hit by trains while walking or sleeping on tracks, and those collapsing mid-journey.
What wasn't noted anywhere was what they and those millions who survived went through. The hundreds of millions of incidents that the moment birthed were good enough to give birth to hundreds, if not thousands of stories, novels, films... indeed any art anyone sensitive enough creates.
These moments of grief, anguish and tragedy were not scripted moments. These were real people and real deaths.
The many voices of a single event
Now here is where the intellectual property question becomes complex. The 2020 migrant exodus, and all the pain and anguish that accompanied it, was not a fictional invention but a collective, well-documented and extensively reported historical event. Hundreds of journalists, photographers, researchers, academics, human rights organisations, and even the public covered it in real time, producing millions of pieces of reportage, photographs, research, and social media posts.
When journalist Basharat Peer published his New York Times article, A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway on July 31, 2020, he was not the first. An Indian Express piece came before it, and that itself was based on a social media post. The story was the same in all three: the tale of a real friendship between Mohammad Saiyub Siddiqui and Amrit Kumar, two childhood buddies whose journey home ended in tragedy when Amrit died of heatstroke. All these pieces could be called journalism—reportage of what actually happened.
When Puja Changoiwala was writing her 2021 novel Homebound, she too was drawing upon the same groundswell of collective reality. Her work was also rooted in the documented experiences of migrant workers during lockdown.
The specific scenes in her novel, which she alleges have been plagiarised in the film, and which I've seen in media reports so far, like that of rent disputes, police lathi-charges at railway stations, the adoption of false religious identities to evade persecution—these weren't inventions unique to her novel. They were documented patterns of the 2020 crisis, reported across India. So much so that some of them even make it to a screenplay I have written, a story of a Dalit migrant father-son duo, who try to make their way from a construction site in Mumbai to rural Bihar and face multiple atrocities along the way, including the ones mentioned in this paragraph: all based on fact, the fiction being significant parts of Act 1 and Act 3, and some in Act 2.
If the film ever gets made (anyone interested?) will Puja, or other writers, or even Neeraj and Karan Johar, or other writers and filmmakers who have also written and filmed the tragedy, file a case against me for plagiarism when I haven't either read Puja's book, or have yet to see the film I (I'm avoiding watching films or novels based on that time to avoid influence in my story).
The question that stems from Puja's claims is this: can one writer or journalist claim exclusive ownership of the narrative elements that describe the real events and lived experiences of millions?
Commons of historical experience
Puja has made—from what I have seen in reportage so far—four allegations. Let's take them one by one.
The rent-and-savings dilemma she referenced has been documented in multiple academic studies, which describe how migrant workers, living hand-to-mouth, faced impossible choices between paying rent, buying food, or attempting to journey home. This is not a narrative device unique to Changoiwala's novel, but the documented reality of millions.
Police lathi-charges at railway stations where migrants gathered were extensively documented by journalists, photographers and TV media, not to mention human rights workers. All these scenes played out at dozens, if not hundreds, of railway stations across the country, in varying proportions.
Numerous academic research studies, and even journalists' reports, talk of how migrant workers, particularly Muslims, faced communal discrimination and xenophobia, leading to self-preservation strategies like hiding their religious identities. The pattern was systemic, documented, and shared across millions of vulnerable people’s experiences, and cannot be considered the proprietary insight of any single novel, film, or article.
The same was the case with deaths from exhaustion and hunger, with multiple news agencies, both national and from abroad, reporting deaths from starvation, dehydration, heat exhaustion and accidents while walking home. No single author or filmmaker wrote or filmed those deaths into existence: they actually happened.
The author as a witness, not a creator
I do not intend to diminish Changoiala's work in the least. I haven't read it, but its synopsis suggests that her novel serves an important function: to bear witness to a real crisis and give literary form to collective suffering. However, I must also point out that bearing witness is different from creating from scratch. When an author writes about a historical event that thousands lived through, they are translating shared experience into art—not inventing it.
Again, I am not diminishing her talents. How she expresses that grief, and the creative liberties she takes with it, could be entirely unique to Puja, as they would be to Neeraj.
I'll give you one example. In my screenplay of the father-son duo traversing from Mumbai to Bihar, the father gets separated from his son—this isn't original. Still, he meets a widow and falls in lust with her, and forgets his separated son, a wife and a daughter waiting 1000 miles away. That bit, the irony and tragedy, is unique to my story; it is original, entirely my creation, and I could claim copyright if someone copied it.
The journey of thousands of miles, separation from a relative during the journey, and the generic nature of those are common to the event, but the lust for a woman in the middle of it and what he does about it are specific to my story, because, to my knowledge, no such incident has been reported.
Since I have not read the novel or seen the film, I cannot comment on whether the film captures the unique expressions from the book. If so, she definitely has a case and should get due redress. But if it's generic incidents she is seeking copyright on, that is patently wrong.
What the courts decide in this case and how they examine questions of copyright infringement and creative expression will set a precedent for the future. And if there is a ruling, it will be on the ownership of collective grief and its expression.
Both the novel and the film draw from a shared crisis neither created, but both witnessed. In that sense, the real question is not whose work is plagiarised, but whether either work adequately compensated and honoured the people whose actual suffering made their art possible.
But whatever the courts decide eventually, or what you or I feel, one thing should never be forgotten: History belongs to those who lived it first and art, no matter how great, is merely our attempt to remember and honour it. We must also remember that suffering cannot be copyrighted, no matter how much we claim ownership to its expression.