Panchayat makers have sensed the pulse of an India that is changing

Shah Rukh Khan's Mohan Bhargav act in Swades might have failed to rake in moolah at the box office, but Jitendra Kumar's relatable Abhishek Tripathi is winning hearts in Panchayat. Season 2 of the TVF series was recently released on Amazon Prime Video.

In the winter of 2004, the mainstream movie audience didn’t quite warm up to Mohan Bhargav trying to ‘rescue’ Charanpur from the clutches of rural under development. They should have, considering the project manager from NASA simply soldiered on to eradicate poverty, casteism, child labour and a host of other maladies the fictitious village in Uttar Pradesh was suffering from in Ashutosh Gowarikar’s Swades.

Critics opined the character’s growth arc apparently resembled Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s political climb after his return from South Africa. But even Shahrukh Khan, the then bankable star going against his romantic hero grain to channel the erudite NRI who chooses his country and an Indian girl over a plum white-collar job in the US, couldn’t rake in the moolah. Fabulous cinematography, great music by AR Rahman and liberal doses of ‘stark reality’ notwithstanding, Swades failed to do a Lagaan at the box office.

Gowarikar’s take on the award winning 2003 Kannada movie Chirugida Kanasu couldn’t connect with the masses. Or were they tired of the diatribe most filmmakers had been presenting in the garb of mitti ki khushboo from the hinterlands of India? Where a messiah of sorts was required to heal the village from social and economic ailments if not the Anurag Kashyapesque mafia raj!

If that is the case, it’s quite interesting how the train of thought or reel narrative has shifted. And how the audience, who dismissed the smart, uber-educated Bhargav, welcomed an unassuming Abhishek Tripathi (Jitendra Kumar) in their movie conversations despite him being a disillusioned graduate biding his time as the gram panchayat secretary of an Indian village who would love to flee Phulera once he pockets a secure managemement seat. Jitendra Kumar has done what King Khan couldn’t. Floor the audience. Maybe because he, rather Chandan Kumar, who scripted the extremely popular Amazon web series, didn’t paint him as a saviour. Yes, there are teething problems in his wake as he tries to settle down in the nondescript village the Indian government has sent him to but there is sense of ‘I could be in his place’ plays in our mind as he takes it all in his stride. Right from the moment, as he buys biscuits from a local kirana dukaan, a poor villager requests money from him to purchase oil so that he and his family don’t have to eat yet another frugal meal of boiled veggies and rice.

A sweeping sense of pragmatism hovers over the story as Tripathi instead of helping the old man tells him to come to the panchayat office the next day so that his dues are cleared. Yes, he will assist the people as a government employee, but he’s not even remotely interested in being a Godsent to deliver the downtrodden from penury. Hence, his character development is noteworthy, especially when he stands up to ‘banrakas’ Bhushan even as he learns to juggle grameen politics.

Fortunately, the Panchayat makers have sensed the pulse of an India that is changing, rather progressing, steadily (an instance is the modern miracle of cell phone penetration). There are enough instances where while the villagers need government support, life isn’t all torrid and woeful. Like it wasn’t in Govind Moonis’s Nadiya ke Paar, a delightful 1982 romance set in an eastern UP village, starring Sachin, Sadhana Singh and Inder Thakur. While most rural dramas in that era gratingly painted our villages as quicksand patches of cruelty meted out to farmers by feudal lords and evils committed against women, here was a Rajshri production where a girl openly tells her father she won’t marry somebody because she loves his younger brother.

It’s telling that the same sense of importance and freedom is given to Rinky (Sanvikaa) in Deepak Kumar Mishra’s work when her opinion is considered important in her own marriage. She is a young, educated and drives a scooty around. Her parents do not forbid her from talking to the new sachiv (the option of him being her prospective groom cannot be struck off) nor do they grudge her wearing kurta and jeans.