Amazon’s Panchayat’s Season 4 Sustains Its Mellow Momentum

Rating: ****

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 smalltown 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 buet 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 worldweariness  by Neena Gupta and Raghuvir Yadav, continue to be incurable  status quoists. In this season where more  of nothing happens in these placid lives, the most exciting debate in their household is  on whether  to serve lauki or kat-hal for 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  rubberstamp 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 selfconsciousness , 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.