PANCHAYAT is a throwback that looks ahead
Rural India takes centre-stage again in Season 2 of Panchayat, a series that follows the thread of comic absurdity to stitch up a progressive lens on village life.
Even as they speak the same language, are of similar age, and gobble down the same snack across the table in a little restaurant, there is a wide cultural gap between Abhishek—the chief protagonist of Prime Video’s web-series Panchayat— and Rinki, the daughter of Pradhan (chief) at the village where Abhishek has been stationed the Secretary of the Gram Panchayat (the village council). Abhishek is an urban outsider in Phulera—the fictional village in Uttar Pradesh where the series is set—while the village life is (almost) all that Rinki has known. Abhishek is a man, Rinki is a woman. Abhishek has a salaried job (even if the low salary frustrates him) and Rinki doesn’t work—her parents are more interested in setting her up for marriage.
Like every interaction they have in the series, the restaurant scene with Abhishek and Rinki, and Rinki’s friend Raveena, is both awkward and heart-warming. Abhishek and Rinki are two early twenty-somethings, who have a budding-but-distant interest for each other. They communicate in a tone of friendly formality. After they finish their samosas, Abhishek sets up to pay the 56-rupee bull. Rinki offers to pay it instead.
“Nahi, nahi,” Abhishek says in an absentminded, slightly-condescending tone. “Main deta hun. Tum dono kaun sa job karte ho?” I’ll pay, he says. You guys don’t have a job.
This somewhat-idyllic opening, however, is disrupted: a tractor rumbles through the thin streets, spreading noise pollution—and actual pollution. It’s a quick reminder that this isn’t exactly Mahatma Gandhi’s Panchayat Raj. It’s a sign of the incoming industrial age, ready to destroy any peace you think you might enjoy here.
Rinki’s face falls—and the viewer understands at this moment that Abhishek’s almost off-hand comment has brought to surface the social differences between them. A man from the city who works; women from the village who don’t.
Abhishek immediately tries to cover his tracks. “Arre, I mean, abhi nahi karte, par kar to sake to…” I mean, you don’t [work] yet, but you definitely can… later.
The little interaction is emblematic of a number of moments where Panchayat confronts head-on with the disjointed cracks within Indian social structure. No one is truly villainous in his moment: but even Abhishek—the hardly-heroic ‘hero’—can’t help but express his ignorance and deep-rooted patriarchy. Over and over again, the series exposes these frictions within society: sometimes they’re smoothed over; often, they make for absurd comedy.
Now in its second season, the comedy-drama—written by Chandan Kumar and directed by Deepak Kumar Mishra—made its debut to widespread critical acclaim in 2020 as the story of Abhishek Tripathi (Jitendra Kumar), an ambitious engineering graduate who finds himself in an unfamiliar rural setting, while his fellow graduates get placed in high-salaried jobs in metropolitan Indian cities and abroad. Abhishek is the filter through which the show’s audience—many of whom are also outsiders to the rural setting—get to experience the dramas of an Indian village life. But, instead of casting a conventional judgemental eye on the ‘simple’ life in Phulera, Panchayat’s protagonist—and hence, the audience—are invited to experience local complexities and characteristics from a wide prism, entering a pastoral world that is nevertheless taking incremental steps towards social change.
Compared to the recent explosion of expensive and well-produced OTT series proliferating the Indian market—from The Family Man and Pataal Lok to Sacred Games and Mirazapur—shows that feature a grand ambition of large-scale political intrigue, violence, action, and star actors, Panchayat has often been described as a throwback, a story that zags against the flow. The rural setting and micro-level narratives of Panchayat make it a rare wholesome show among its contemporary competitors, but one that also deals with its themes in a mature manner instead of delving in juvenile stereotypes. It’s free of cheapened sexuality, graphic violence and explicit language (well, mostly—except for one particularly foul-mouthed MLA).
Produced by The Viral Fever, who have carved a unique niche for themselves for curating and creating content targeted at young Indians straddling the experience of college and early placement life, Panchayat’s popularity lies in how it presents a world without the rapid distractions of the urban world; yet, it’s a world that is hardly simple in itself, where its characters are confronted with a myriad of nuances and complications.
Scenes like Abhishek and Rinki’s awkward interaction after the samosa further the ways in which the show tackles the soft clash of cultural differences. There are far more serious clashes elsewhere: including when the ‘Pradhan Pati’ (and Rinki’s father) Brij Bhushan Dubey, played by Raghubir Yadav, breaks stereotypes and refuses to force his daughter into an undesirable marriage match. Or when Abhishek receives wisdom on life and work from the most unlikely sources, including a naatch (dancer) girl and a drunken lorry driver.
The first season of Panchayat was a classic fish-out-the-water story, where a “big city” educated Indian turns back to the “grassroots” of rural India. Season 2 picks up soon after Season 1: Abhishek has received some distressing news considering his CAT exam. After being desperate to leave Phulera, he has to accept a longer stay in the village. But he also gets his first sight of Rinki seated atop the water tanker, leaving him with an inkling of hope for the future. A kindling romance is hinted, but the writers of Panchayat remain happy to resist a formulaic filmi love story here; instead, for most of Season 2, Abhishek and Rinki proceed in separate directions, with separate motivations, only rarely crossing paths on the way. More than an outright romance, their relationship is a shared, distance appreciation for each other. In another wink to throwback Indian film and television, Panchayat leans heavily into using the most obvious of musical cues to express sentiment—tunes that are silly, romantic, tragic, aspirational—leaving little room for emotional misinterpretation.
The very first visual of the new season begins the 1972 song “Hawa Ke Saath Saath”, with the camera zooming above and then close to Phulera, set to be in the Balia district in Uttar Pradesh (internet sleuths, however, have discovered that show was actually filmed in rural Madhya Pradesh). We, the viewers, are being encouraged to time travel, to imagine a time capsule of India before the rapid influx of modernity. The main credits feature women lining up to collect water from handpumps, lifting water in buckets out of wells, shepherds herding their flock, and drone shots that show a refreshing absence of humanity in large swathes of farmland.
Even as it finds humour in Indian village life, Panchayat is easily able to balance ‘both sides’ of the rural-urban border… until the border is blurred, until the border doesn’t exist at all. The village isn’t mocked, but it isn’t over-romanticized either. Everyone is the butt of the joke and everyone is a part of the joke.
This somewhat-idyllic opening, however, is disrupted: a tractor rumbles through the thin streets, spreading noise pollution—and actual pollution. It’s a quick reminder that this isn’t exactly Mahatma Gandhi’s Panchayat Raj. It’s a sign of the incoming industrial age, ready to destroy any peace you think you might enjoy here.
Panchayat’s strength lies in seamlessly weaving the urgent and the theoretical together, and extending the theoretical to show its immediate impact on the urgencies of everyday life. Thus, a simple negotiation about the price of soil becomes on commentary of communication between genders in conservative, rural settings, where women are rarely given the agency to discuss matters of money. An accusation about stolen slippers—caught on the village’s first CCTV cameras—becomes a larger debate about the abuse of power by the Panchayat heads. A request to fix the village roads instead exposes the protagonist to social humiliation, making him question his very place in this community.
For most of the series, however, Panchayat dives into even the heaviest topics with light humour, usually landing the focus of its frames on the comedy in the absurdity of village life. When the District Magistrate visits Phulera to confirm the village’s status of being free of open-defecation, a protesting citizen rushes to defecate in the open field. The driver of an anti-alcohol public announcement car arrives drunk to the scene himself—causing both physical and emotional strain for Abhishek. A wedding engagement is endangered over a stand-off about restaurant mix-ups; but even if the wedding is at risk, the chilly paneer must not be wasted.
Through the vessel of Abhishek, there are also snippets of life lessons along the way, where the matters of the village not-so-subtly serve as metaphors for the larger conundrums of navigating through modern India. Early on in the season, as Abhishek stresses over his inability to make everyone happy in his position of leadership, Dubey advises him, “You are a government officer. Start practicing giving gol-mol answers [running people in circles]. Because when you go into the private sector after this, this will be very useful.” This is how leadership in India tends to work: a little compromise, a little white lie, a little stalling, a little beating around the bush.
The idea of leadership and rank also serves to extend much of the humour in the series, including explorations of inter-personal power dynamics: the more educated and “ranked” city boy Abhishek vs. the more influential and experienced Dubey; Dubey himself vs. his wife Manju Devi, the real Pradhan of the village; and anytime the seniors of Phulera in turn face their seniors, including the DM and the MLA.
Manju Devi is sparkled to life by the veteran actor Neena Gupta, one of the stand-out performers of the series. Like the first season, hers is a delicate balance between accepting the role of subservience at home versus taking a stand to make social change for her family and her community. Gupta maintains the two opposing forces with aplomb: at times patient and submissive; at times fierce and dominant. Like the first season, Manju again displays the immense strength that women can wield over a village community.
One of the delights of Season 2 is that most of the main characters, like Manju, have already been somewhat established (with the exception of Rinki). The viewer now isn’t visiting a new environment; rather, they are being encouraged to grow alongside familiar faces—just like Abhishek does. Around Abhishek, Dubey, Manju, Prahlad, Vikas, all continue to evolve, but he—like us—witnesses this growth in a more intimate and empathetic way. The ‘fish out the water’ gimmick is over: Abhishek is almost as much a part of Phulera’s ecosystem as the rest.
Towards the end of the season, Abhishek’s new perspectives are fully affirmed when he catches a glimpse of his old perspective. Siddhu, a friend from Abhishek’s college-days, decides on making an impromptu visit to Phulera. Siddhu is a “foreign return”, having experienced life and work in a developed nation, now back in India earning a salary of crores. Siddhu is friendly but somewhat-obnoxious tourist to the village, exoticizing the rural life against the tone of the rest of the show, taking selfies with a buffalo, reducing what is the day-to-day for Abhishek down to a “full vibe”.
In seeing a reflection of life could have been for him, Abhishek instead sees himself being othered from his friend. Their interactions are still warm and friendly, but Abhishek can hardly relate to his friend anymore. For better or worse, Phulera is now his home. There is no better pleasure for Abhishek than to steal some time with his friends—old and new—to sit under the shade of a tree, drinking cold beers on a warm afternoon.
Even as it finds humour in Indian village life, Panchayat is easily able to balance ‘both sides’ of the rural-urban border… until the border is blurred, until the border doesn’t exist at all. The village isn’t mocked, but it isn’t over-romanticized either. Everyone is the butt of the joke and everyone is a part of the joke. While Abhishek remains the primary stand-in to portray a village like Phulera from an outsider’s eyes, the larger cast of characters and their concerns ensures that the perspective remains firmly rooted in the rural.
It is particularly in this regard that Panchayat has often been compared to Malgudi Days, the landmark Doordarshan series from the mid-late 80s, based on books by R.K. Narayan. Malgudi Days excelled in giving a changing Indian audience a nostalgic reminder of pastoral life, of stories and characters that were already considered to be firmly in the past tense. By the time Panchayat rolled along—more than three decades later—India is a firmly different country altogether: the India represented in Malgudi Days hardly exists anymore. There is no looking back; Panchayat lands right on time, offering a brief glimpse of how the country can look ahead.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose creative work has appeared in Epiphany, Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, The Lantern Review, F(r)iction, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, Fifty Two, FirstPost, and more. Karan’s debut novel A Beautiful Decay will be published by the Aleph Book Company in 2022. You can find him on Twitter: @karanmadhok1 and Instagram: @karanmadhok.
