The makers of the recent web series Panchayat could not have anticipated the pandemic, but the timing of its release could not have been more serendipitous. It is the story of an Indian village where a young man from the city is like a fish out of water.
In a mirror image, as the show launched, urban Indians were also confronted with the sight of millions of their compatriots leaving cities to return to their villages. They left not because they wanted to, but because the unplanned lockdown revealed the faultlines of their precarious existence — their daily wages stopped overnight, their meagre savings evaporated within days, and their employers and even the government were seemingly not much concerned whether they lived or died. Not only did the chance of a better life seem no longer possible, the lack of concern or support made them feel unwanted.
Living it
The only option then was to leave this unfeeling universe and head back to the places they knew were poor and prejudiced but where people cared. As they left, urban Indians responded with bemusement. It was as if they were startled by the sight of their fellow citizens, normally hidden away in cramped slums and under plastic sheets, on highways and railway stations. There was little they could draw on to imagine what life in these villages must be like.
Recent cinematic representations of rural India have been awash with blood and caste politics, confirming Ambedkar’s famous characterisation of villages as ‘dens of vice’. On the other hand, Gandhian characterisations of villages as the real heart of India have always been met with scepticism by dynamic urban Indians. The truth is, recent films and plays have rarely been set in rural India; the villager has simply vanished from national popular culture and even our stalwarts who wrote so eloquently for and against villages, had scarcely lived in one themselves. Panchayat took us right inside one.
Five stars
Reassuringly nondescript, its cluster of buildings, trees and water tank sit on the vast dusty Gangetic plain alongside thousands of others. The audience encounters the village through a young, urban, male gaze as it did in the much-loved novel from the 60s by Srilal Shukla, Raag Darbaari , which was also set in Uttar Pradesh. The Panchayat Secretary’s job is available to anybody who is a graduate and willing to conduct the business of government at this lowly level, at a commensurately lowly salary, and thereby open to outsiders.
But governance at this level remains opaque to most urban Indians. The Panchayat, drawn from the concept of an assembly of five ( paanch ), is represented here by five key characters — the urban Panchayat Secretary, his assistant, the Pradhan, her husband and the Deputy Pradhan. Together, they represent Indian democracy as it functions at the most local level, an arm of representation and government that did not exist when Shukla wrote his novel, but a need for which its grim reality anticipated. Panchayat aired in April and painted a picture of village administration just as it also became evident to everyone reading the news that it is good governance at this level that is key to meeting challenges like the pandemic.
The magic of the show lies in the dynamics between these five characters and by the end of each episode, the viewer, like the newly appointed Panchayat Secretary from the city, is able to recognise that the village may not be such a bad place after all. While people still eat petharather than biscuits, mistake computer monitors for TVs, and are willing to believe in ghosts, the village has people who help each other out, forgive failings and who are willing to forego their own convenience and expectations. The young man has only to blurt out how lonely he is to find his newfound friends arrive with beer and snacks. In each encounter, the contrast between the restless young man from the city for whom this job is the equivalent of failure and the village that is willing to embrace him is stark.
Not a paradise
In the last episode of the series, much drama ensues over the celebration of Republic Day. But as with problems everywhere, solutions are inevitably found, with everybody giving way for the sake of rubbing along. Every such encounter weakens the city dweller’s disgust for the village and softens his self-loathing at failing to secure an urban job.
While this may seem like a bit of a bucolic paradise, we can also see it isn’t one. Water still has to be pumped out laboriously, men do not have jobs, women are illiterate, people have children they cannot feed, caste still matters and petty rivalries abound. The message however is that if people are inventive and willing to work together for a common good, in the spirit of what sociologist Ashis Nandy called an ‘alternative cosmopolitanism’, much good can be achieved. Panchayat invites us to look beyond the deprivation and prejudice that we know exist in villages to examine its positive attributes, much as we do with cities.
So, as we watched workers walk away from India’s cities, risking life and limb to get to their villages, Panchayat might help us understand their motivations a little better. Perhaps it was humanity that they looked forward to when they got home, a humanity that the city had failed to display. In their minds, the village was a place where they were not just a statistic and where people knew their names even if it was stigmatised by caste, and where their presence, thoughts and actions counted for something.
For they knew, as we do now, that the village can be a place of solidarity and care, where no one dies alone, and that alone can redeem the most curmudgeonly sceptic.
The writer is Director, LSE South Asia Centre, and Associate Professor of Anthropology at London School of Economics and Political Science.
