Phulera Politics:
It couldn’t last—the rural paradise that is Phulera, in UP, had to encounter violence and wickedness, which happened by the end of Season 3. The popularity of this TVF show is such that Season 4, drops earlier than scheduled, without a recap. So anyone who has not watched the earlier seasons, might want to binge, before diving into the new episodes.
The TVF team that created the original and utterly charming show, returns to this one—writer Chandan Kumar and director Deepak Kumar Mishra. Panchayat started with the entry of city bred Abhishek Tripathi (Jitendra Kumar), into Phulera; the engineering graduate had accepted a job as the panchayat secretary in the village to get some work experience as he prepared for the MBA entrance exam. The village sarpanch is Manju Devi (Neena Gupta), but as it usually happens in patriarchal societies, her husband Brij Bhushan Dubey (Raghubir Yadav), tales on the title and the duties of the Pradhan.
With his office assistant, the always beaming Vikas (Chandan Roy), and deputy Pradhan, Prahlad (Faisal Malik), the reluctant “sachivji” sets out to administer the village, encountering problems they don’t teach at any business school. A groom refusing to proceed with the wedding with a girl from the village till he gets the revolving office chair belonging to Abhishek; the villager who wants the newly-installed CCTV cameras to help find his missing goat, a man stealing a computer monitor believing it to be a TV, villagers objecting to family planning slogans and so on. The genius was in creating humour out of ordinary situations.
Abhishek gets absorbed into the Dubey family, finds loyal pals in Vikas and Prahlad, and a tentative romance with their daughter Rinki (Sanvikaa). There is also a rivalry with Bhushan (Durgesh Kumar) and his shrewish wife, Kranti (Sunita Rajwar). The power-hungry MLA, Chandrakishore Singh (Pankaj Jha), whom the Phulera team rubbed the wrong way in Season 3, is seething with anger now. Pradhan is recovering from a gunshot wound, Prahlad is still haunted by the tragedy of losing his soldier son; Abhishek is still struggling with his CAT exam preparations, his feelings for Rinki and his confusion about the future.
The village with walls painted with cute and funny slogans, is now infected with politics, and violence – Chandrakishore is seen whipping a man. In the years since the series first came out, some more structures are visible from the Panchayat office, which overlooks the water tank, where Abhishek and Rinki have their chai dates. Cleanliness is an issue now, and a hilarious episode has Pradhan and his allies competing with Bhushan and his men Vinod (Ashok Pathak) and Madhav (Buloo Kumar) to clean the dirtiest spot in Phulera.
Bhushan and Kranti plan to oppose Manju and Pradhan in the upcoming panchayat elections, and pull out as many arrows as they can from their quiver of dirty tricks, including an anti-corruption raid on the Dubeys, Abhishek and Vikas, and questioning the character of Vikas’s pregnant wife (Tripti Sahu). The episode, that goes on for too long (or just seems that way, because the eight episodes run less than 40 minutes), brings out the kind of viciousness that had been absent in Phulera before. The effect of politics is detrimental to the placidity of a village that seems untouched by the caste-religion-gender complications of north India.
Manju’s poll symbol is a lauki (gourd), which has been a running gag in the series, and Kranti’s is a pressure cooker—the slogans that can arise from these can be imagined.
This time round there is a downplaying of the usually lively humour, perhaps because society on the whole has little to laugh about. There also seems to be a slight paucity of ideas—for instance, the visit of Manju’s elderly father (Ram Gopal Bajaj) does not go anywhere; the comic potential of the power outage fizzles out too.
Panchayat Season 4, mainly because of the wonderful actors, who, over the seasons have developed a warm rapport, is watchable, even though it suffers in comparison to the previous seasons—particularly a superb Season 2. It is possible that some degree of déjà vu has crept in, because of the Panchayat wannabes, including TVF’s own Gram Chikitsalay. Still, there are very few web shows in which the actors simply own the characters they play.
There is a Season 5 built into the finale of this one, and it does look like sachivji will have to look sharp and keep his wits about him.
(This piece first appeared in rediff.com)
