Director: Deepak Kumar Mishra
Writer: Chandan Kumar
Cast: Jitendra Kumar, Raghubir Yadav, Neena Gupta, Faisal Malik, Chandan Roy, Sanvikaa, Durgesh Kumar, Pankaj Jha, Sunita Rajwar, Aasif Khan
Episodes: 8
Available on: Prime Video
If Panchayat were a person, each season unfolds like a life stage. Season one is its childhood – hopeful, young, unphased by the bigger picture. Its nothingness is everything: There’s MBA aspirant Abhishek (Jitendra Kumar), the not-too-simple villagers of Phulera and a Malgudi Days-like mundanity. Season two is its adolescence – curious, receptive, more alive to the world it occupies. It develops a personality: The levity makes space for rivalries, politics and sobering heartbreak. The tragedy in its closing moments arrives as a reminder that the village is not a pitstop in someone’s journey; it has a life and identity of its own. You’d think Season three, then, would be adulthood. But it’s that fleeting phase between adolescence and adulthood – awkward, restless, inevitable in its movement. The slice-of-life linearity is challenged by broader narrative strokes: A proper villain, a brewing civil war, a budding romance, upcoming elections, and an escalating Gaul-village-versus-Romans battle of egos.
Phulera is no longer an isolated and low-stakes setting. There is more external ‘interference’ in this season. Reporters, ministers, media coverage, hitmen and law enforcement officers feature at different points. This third season is what I expected the second season to be. The camera zooms out further; there’s a constant motion towards life, drama, consequences – and tropes.
The change is a little disorienting, because it’s like watching your favourite person slowly lose their innocence. The flaws of de facto council leader Dubey (Raghubir Yadav), for instance, are more apparent: His regional bias is exposed in a housing scheme racket. Faced with rival Bhushan’s scheming, Dubey’s compassion is more politically motivated this time. When a local is threatened by arrogant MLA Chandra Kishore (Pankaj Jha), Dubey protects the man in service of his own campaign. With his seat threatened, the (disappointing) finale is designed to raise questions about his seemingly docile ways. It heads into political potboiler territory, but in its own clumsy attire.
The growing-up extends to the rest of the gang, too. Deputy leader Prahlad (Faisal Malik) is consumed by the despair of his soldier son – he hits the bottle and his grief spans half the season. Office assistant Vikas’s (Chandan Roy) marriage comes of age, and Abhishek begins to act upon his ‘fondness’ for Rinki (Sanvikaa), the pradhan’s daughter. Even the MLA turns to violence as a last resort – once his alliances fail – to teach Phulera a very Mirzapur-style lesson. The music is more prominent, as is the general noise of the face-off between a thug minister and defiant citizens.
This mainstreaming of Panchayat has a two-fold effect. On one hand, the compromises are too visible. A subplot featuring the government housing scheme is fine; it feeds the show’s idea of rural kinship as a welcome contrast to urban loneliness. But the product-placement vibe is inescapable. The term “Pradhan Mantri Garib Awas Yojana” is mentioned time and again, in full form by different characters, often hindering the naturalism of dialogue. When the minister plans to attack Phulera, there’s an unnecessary shot of him glancing at his watch – the brand name (Citizen) is a decent in-joke, but it also yanks the viewer out of the show. Some touches are uncharacteristically lazy. For example, the last episode opens with two characters in a car instead of four, but it’s patched up with an off-screen voice (“I’ll drop you both off at the market”) to justify the missing exposition shot.
There’s also some tonal confusion surrounding the villain. The implication is that he is a hinterland baddie stuck in a slice-of-life comedy. The ordinariness – the humanisation of conflict; the petty problems and in-between events otherwise erased by the beats of narrative structure – is what Panchayat usually thrives on. A lot of his scenes are staged to be quirky, as if to suggest that his aura cannot hijack the lightness of the storytelling. But it doesn’t work because he represents a reality-check, a rude shock, to the utopianism of Phulera. In fact, the humour of his arc – like being jailed for allegedly killing a dog; bidding an emotional goodbye to his horse (prompting his enemies to shed a tear); turning vegetarian only to be served mutton in front of the news cameras – is jarring for how misplaced it feels.
It leaks into the climax of the eight-episode series which, among other things, features an assassination attempt scored to ‘funny’ music. For the first time, the makers themselves don’t seem to be sure about which way their genre leans. The gravity of these moments is perpetually at odds with the show’s traditional spirit. This also amplifies the inherent flaws of Panchayat – the caste-blindness, the sidelining of its female characters, the shabby background cues.
On the other hand, however, I like that some of the chaos reflects the unchoreographed whims of life. A ‘gang war’ outside a hospital is anything but slick; grown men grab sugarcane sticks and slap and scratch and drag and air-punch each other in a gloriously messy battle. A stand-off in the middle of the village is interrupted by a phone call and a policeman desperately trying to reason with both sides. At another point, two hired goons spend so long intimidating their target in a field – as if they’ve been inspired by cool gangster movies – that he manages to escape without a scratch. A Lagaan-style montage shows the villagers training for combat, except their bravado is not backed by any skill. When they pose on camera to show their solidarity on a news channel, they keep looking for the right frame composition. The show’s sense of place, too, is defined by the sunny simplicity of its camerawork. The mental map of the panchayat office, the water tank, the highway and the characters’ homes transcends the actual geography. It’s the distance between these locations, rather than the directions, that eases the viewer into the illusion of Phulera.
Another thing the loss of innocence does is amplify the tiny pockets of humanity across the series. Some things – like the sense of community in the village – stay intact, almost as if they’re somehow surviving the mutation of the environment. It’s reassuring to see – a version of visiting old classmates and noticing that they’re still (trying to be) the same. The everyday squabbles are put on hold the second one of them is in trouble. When a character receives a phone-call about his wife’s health, the gang convenes in his living room with furrowed brows. When an old lady falls sick, multiple scenes are spent on how they get her (in a rickshaw that everyone is too drunk to drive) to a clinic in the middle of the night. It’s not screwball comedy so much as a nod to the silly practicalities that fiction often overlooks.
The best parts of the season involve Prahlad’s shape-shifting grief – and by extension, the caregiving cocoon around him. Vikas and the Dubey household quietly make sure he’s fed and rested every day, regardless of how drunk he is. They become his surrogate families. At times, you feel anxious when Faisal doesn’t appear in a scene for a while, because you’re afraid that the show – like the rest of the village – is moving on. But they never leave him behind; even Manju Devi scolds the men for not keeping track of Prahlad’s whereabouts enough. (The steps to the water tank are cordoned off to prevent a potential accident – or suicide).
It’s also a testament to Faisal Malik’s wonderfully affecting performance that Prahlad’s big-teddy-bear vibe in the first two seasons feels like a distant memory. He looks so stricken that it’s hard to recognize the actor. In the opening episode, during an argument with the District Magistrate about Abhishek’s transfer, his disarming response – “Nobody should leave before their time” – comes like a bolt from the blue; Malik’s voice breaks just enough to convey that the character’s worldview is tinged by his relationship with grief. You can tell that Prahlad is so irreversibly altered by the pain of losing a son that he puts everyone else’s worries into sharp perspective – the sympathy towards him makes way for wise-veteran reverence. When Vikas and his wife discuss the possibility of a child, her reference point is the loneliness of their beloved Prahlad-cha. Which is why it’s nice that Prahlad morphs into Vikas’s father figure and a bit of a philanthropist. With nobody left to inherit his name, he uses the monetary compensation as a way of reinventing his purpose – and his will to live.
To the show’s credit, it doesn’t milk the continuity of the previous season. Just like Abhishek’s transfer is reversed by the end of the first episode (with no fanfare or reunion at all, like they – and we – were always expecting him), Prahlad too returns to some semblance of normalcy. In one of those casually poignant Panchayat moments, his grief finally breaks while discussing the MLA’s ridiculous demands with his friends. It’s such a relief to see him laugh that it feels like a tender antidote to the validation people get when they see a stuck-up patriarch let go at a party (read Chaudhary Baldev Singh in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge). It’s a beautifully acted scene by the cast, too, because Raghubir Yadav’s Dubey is so visibly encouraged and tickled by his old friend’s reaction that he starts to behave like an indulgent father who’s just realised that his child enjoys his jokes. He keeps stretching it, deriving great joy from seeing Prahlad rediscover his laugh.
It instantly levels the mood in a village that’s in the throes of narrative transition. Such transient moments are the DNA of Panchayat, a show whose third season struggles to land that sweet-meets-sour tonal punch. You enjoy these parts, but you also savour them because there’s the unmistakable feeling that something good is coming to an end. The heart breaks a little when the show makes certain choices. The honeymoon phases of adolescence are over. For something – and someone – like Panchayat, there is no turning back: A long and familiar adulthood awaits. It was nice while the discovery lasted. As a franchise, however, it’s still worth acknowledging that the quality of the first two seasons upends that immortal quote from The Office: The way they unfolded, you knew you were in the good old days before you actually left them.