Abhishek Tripathi (Jitendra Kumar), a recent engineering graduate, has failed the ultimate test for which young Indians prepare their entire life: landing a high-paying job in a multinational firm. He only has one job offer at the moment, which requires him to be in Uttar Pradesh, in a village called Phulera, hundreds of miles away. The city slicker isn’t excited at the prospect. As a secretary of the village panchayat, he’ll earn a meagre Rs 20,000 per month. It’ll be a life that will have no life at all.
Amazon Prime Video’s new eight-part series Panchayat, directed by Deepak Kumar Mishra, begins on a fascinating note.
The inciting incident is very English August-like, a novel centred on a young IAS officer moving to a remote, nondescript part of the country. When Abhishek’s friend (Biswapati Sarkar) prods him to look at the brighter side, I could almost hear the novel’s memorable line: “I’ve a feeling, August, you’re going to get hazaar f*%#ed in Madna.” Unlike the book though, Panchayat’s pleasures are simpler and direct. The harshest of critics may call it “surface-level”, but even they’ll concede that it is never superficial – a much tougher feat to accomplish, and one by no means insignificant.
Panchayat does this by keeping its ambit small. The show doesn’t have a lot of characters or locations. Or complications for that matter; it’s a what-you-see-is-what-you-get world. By staying clear of the frills – at the levels of story, themes, aesthetics – Panchayat is, in a unique way, an ode to simplicity, to the spirit of rural life. What’s even better? It achieves all that without making a big deal about it.
Besides Abhishek, the show features four recurring characters: the office assistant Vikas (Chandan Roy); the deputy pradhan Prahlad (Faisal Malik); the sarpanch Brij Bhushan (Raghuvir Yadav), or “Pradhan ji”; and his wife, Manju Devi (Neena Gupta). Turns out, the elected head is Manju, but Brij gets to be the pradhan – a deceit that feels like fact. Most movies and shows hinge on a hook that is essentially a question, compelling us to watch.
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Panchayat has a similar question, too – how will Abhishek adjust to the village life? – but there’s no real urgency to it. Even the other attendant questions and their subsequent answers – will he want to escape this humdrum routine (yes, by preparing for CAT), how will he fare in that exam (not too well) – are not ‘hook-ey’ enough. And yet, we remain hooked.
Episode after episode, Panchayat journeys through a series of trivial problems, where the real joy is just staying with the characters, seeing them struggle with moles that look like mountains. So much of fictional dramas are about the grand that we’ve forgotten the mundane. A moment where nothing dramatic – nothing revealing – happens. A moment that is self-contained. A moment that just is.
Panchayat is a treasure trove of such moments. There’s an entire episode on a revolving chair (Chakke Waali Kursi), another on a computer monitor (Computer Nahi Monitor). They don’t seem planted for effect, either. Each one of them, in a wonderfully understated manner, tells a distinct story about this world and its people. Panchayat cares for those who think a fancy chair is a marker of power, who believe that a solar lamp in front of their house signifies stature, who treat time like elastic – there’s always enough of it to gossip about someone, to pry into someone’s life. And it makes sense: in a lake that has stagnant water for years, even a ripple feels like a tsunami.
Even though Panchayat is not a ‘gritty’ look at rural India, it has reams of social commentary. An episode on solar light illuminates the difficulties of achieving even small reforms in a place like Phulera. Abhishek’s fight is a story of class mobility. Vikas’s of quiet resignation. Manju’s life dignifies self-determination. Unlike many other series, where every episode intensifies in pursuit of the final answer, Panchayat has no tiered escalation. But with each subsequent episode, the writing becomes more refined, the details get richer, the subtexts begin to arrange itself in an impressive ensemble.
The show is elevated to a large extent by the performances. Kumar, the new face of Indian everyman, is excellent. His acting style, more so in this role, has no room for clutter. He has an ingenious knack of distilling ‘Indianisms’ – whether expressing annoyance or joy or exasperation – into a small moment. It could be a line of dialogue, a smile, a frown. When Kumar is in his element, it feels like he’s finishing your lines and reading your thoughts. In the Chakke Waali Kursi episode, there’s a scene where he finally sits on the revolving chair. He knows that it’s not a big deal, and yet in that moment, there’s a feeling of familiar urban comfort, and he soaks it in, and smiles. It’s a spellbinding scene.
The other performances are worthy of note, too. Roy is masterful in his portrayal of Vikas. He’s the kind of guy that most of us have met at some point: someone who missed the prosperity train, and yet is not bitter or cynical, someone who has made acceptance an art form. Malik’s Prahlad, on the other hand, is cheeky and sly, a performance that makes the series entertaining. Manju is the soul of Panchayat; her resurgence is a key that unlocks several answers. But Gupta plays her boss-like, a megaphone of truth bombs. Yadav is a kaleidoscopic glimpse into the village. In him, you can see its humour, hunger, humanity, ambition, ingenuity, shrewdness – and Yadav, accustomed to shades of strivers, sails through it.
Panchayat has a constant lightness of touch, and that is reflected in the aesthetics, too. Its scenes aren’t hurried; a consistent relaxed rhythm informs the entire show. Some of the editing decisions though, especially in the earlier episodes, seem unmotivated. In a regular conversation filmed outdoors, for instance, the scene often cuts to a wide shot, emphasising the setting. It’s alright once (perhaps twice), but when that happens multiple times in a scene and that pattern carries over to subsequent scenes, you get the feeling that the makers are whispering, “Look, this is set in a village.” Similarly, a lot of scenes transition via a repeating drone shot, indicating reluctance and laziness to find intriguing segues.
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The writing, too, falters at times. The central conflict in the fourth episode is relatively contrived. These are just slip-ups though – nothing that feels jarring or particularly upsetting. But the sixth episode – Bahot Hua Samman – is a bigger misfire. This episode, like others, is still entertaining; it’s just that it fails to add value to the overall series. Centred on a frivolous fight, where Abhishek must stand for himself, it feels mismatched with the rest of the series.
But the best part about Panchayat is that it’s an accurate encapsulation of a part of Indian village. While watching the show – especially in scenes capturing the essence of quietness, of stillness, of mundane inaction – I was often transported to my own village. I went there last in November 2018.
On one night, a few cousins and I were standing near a paan shop. It was around eight, and it felt as if the entire village was sleeping. It was almost pitch dark; there were stars in the sky, and a small lantern at the shop. The only sound came from the shopkeeper’s stereo, playing an old Hindi film song. In front of us spread a beaten road, and beyond that endless fields, all still, all frozen in wait. And then there were us, doing absolutely nothing. That was the moment – just that, a small world unto itself. And then, it got over.
