To re-enter the Panchayat universe so soon after its third season has its inbuilt hazards. There is the risk of the characters becoming over-familiar with the audience, the ghar ki murgi syndrome. However, that danger is cleverly circumvented in Season 4 with some sensibly aggravated writing.
The characters are never derailed to make them interesting.
The stillness of a small town is still unnerving in Amazon Prime Video’s Panchayat, a splendidly executed series about rural India where… well, nothing happens. Life goes on without adventure or change, let alone transformation
The very reason why the characters who populate the village of Phulera (Uttar Pradesh) in Panchayat seem so frozen in time makes them the cause for much curious probe and idle gossip in the series. Director Deepak Kumar Mishra, still firmly in command, and his writer Chandan Kumar plunge into these inert but alert lives, stirring up what can be called a storm of inconsequentiality.
The series is defined by the very essence of nullity that permeates these lives. There are long stretches of barren, building-less land in the third season of Panchayat. Not much has changed in the topography and emotional map of the Phulera dwellers since we last met them.
No one except the village Pradhan’s daughter Rinku (Sanvikaa) talks about leaving the village, and she, too, does so only in passing. The Pradhan and her husband played with smug world-weariness by Neena Gupta and Raghuvir Yadav, continue to be incurable status quoists. In this season, when nothing happens in these placid lives, the most exciting debate in their household is whether to serve lauki or kat-hal to the visiting administrative office. Daughter Rinki plods to a neighbour’s house to borrow a kat-hal: clearly the highlight of her day. The camera lurches through the Pradhan and her rubber-stamp Husband’s large (by the village standards) half-constructed pukka home (this is a village built on mud and hope rather than cement and mortar) like an elephant determined not to trample over the grass.
There is a deliberate self-consciousness, a calculated awkwardness, if you will, about these characters. The series’ protagonist, Abhishek Tripathi (Jitendra Kumar), has a romantic interest in Rinki. His awkwardness during the courtship is ably expressed by the actor. But there is an absence of excitement in the character’s life, which the actor is not able to articulate authoritatively. Is Tripathi a dreamer, a failure, or simply a slacker?
Panchayat is an insider’s job. Its director (Deepak Kumar Mishra), writer (Chandan Kumar), and the actors, in big and small roles, all know the rural milieu first-hand. Which explains why it all appears so real, so lived-in, and so smartly unsophisticated.
Sensibly, the episodes can be seen as independent stories, vigorous vignettes from an almost lifeless existence in Phulera. One could almost smell the stench of deathly stillness and ennui. Not all of Abhishek Tripathy’s “adventures” (if one may use the word to describe the rather humdrum incidents that are perked up by some insightful writing) are uniformly workable, and some of them just don’t build up into something substantial.
These characters are proud but rudderless products of an irredeemable wasteland. Panchayat is high on credibility and intelligent, insightful writing. What we get are teasing, heartwarming scenes from a rural life that is rapidly vanishing from the cinematic radar. Hold on to it. After a point, the cruel insubstantiality of the lives being described in the series, begins to get to you. There is no hope of a better tomorrow for villages such as Phulera. What keeps the episodes from sagging under the weight of its own despair is unflagging positivity of the characters. These are not people who are aware of the futility of their existence. In fact, they are proud of it.
