Bingeing the Real India
A think-aloud piece by T on a few onscreen stories that show us “the real India.” Or do they? And also, who is ‘us’?
In season one of the Amazon Prime TV series Panchayat, when the protagonist Abhishek Tripathi is disgruntled at his posting in a rural panchayat office, his friend consoles him saying this is Abhishek’s shot at being “Mohan Bhargava from Swades.” The job would let Abhishek see and do something for the “real India.” The comment is self-aware and ironic since the friend himself works in a posh urban office, presumably for a multinational company, and earns five times the salary of a panchayat secretary. One of the things Panchayat establishes early on is that a guy like Abhishek, brought up in urban India, would not voluntarily take up a job in a village that is so off the beaten–or pucca–paths. Abhishek’s circumstances have forced him to go to the village Phulera. But, what the show is less clear about is its own gaze on the rural setting–how seriously Panchayat takes the idea of showing its audience the “real India.”
A question I ask when reading stories or watching shows and films is what makes the narrative tellable? I will admit, as many readers of Outspokenish already know, I engage with art as an academic and writer would (occupational hazards!). So, tellable, in the way I think, refers “to features that make a story worth telling, its “noteworthiness.” Tellability (sometimes designated “narratibility” or “reportability”) is dependent on the nature of specific incidents judged by storytellers to be significant or surprising and worthy of being reported in specific contexts, thus conferring a “point” on the story” (Raphaël Baroni; italics mine).
For the urban Indians Abhishek is supposed to represent, the folks who have an Amazon Prime subscription in India, Panchayat may seem to offer a rare glimpse into village life, or “grassroots India.” The web series may remind them of that one time they visited a relative–a mama, a chacha, a pishi–in a downtrodden village. Life was so slow and simple there, the air was so clean. This confers a significance on the setting–makes a story set there worth telling. And to Panchayat’s credit, it does not–especially in the first season–overemphasize the idyllic aspects of village life. While the whole village tells Abhishek he will fall in love with Phulera once he takes in the landscape from the high vantage point of the water tower, when he does end up there, he remains unimpressed. Jeetandra Kumar who plays Abhishek is quite wonderful in the role of a perpetually frustrated, though not foul-tempered, young man. To him the village looks as bekaar from up there as it did from the ground.
However, part of Panchayat’s “tellability” (and humor) also comes from the gap between the life Abhishek has presumably led in the city and the everyday life in Phulera. Episodes in the first season typically focus on a problem that is odd or idiosyncratic from Abhishek’s perspective, and again to the show’s credit, instead of depicting Abhishek as the harbinger of paradigm shifts (a la Mohan Bhargava from Swades), they characterize him as someone unwilling to go into much trouble for anything. He compromises and negotiates. Abhishek meets the villagers halfway, albeit reluctantly. Nonetheless, there is something in the style of the storytelling that seems to insist that the world of Phulera is a “foreign” milieu for an average India-grown boy like Abhishek, that there is a massive disconnect between urban and rural Indias, and this is what puzzles me.
For me, Panchayat is a look back at much of my childhood and adolescence spent in a place called Chuanpur along Pakuria Road, a couple hundred kilometers from Calcutta. A kuchcha road connected Chuanpur with National Highway 12. There was a sawmill at the intersection of the National Highway and the dirt road, an eutrophic pond across from our house–a government quarter, and a gram panchayat office less than a mile away. A temple behind the government quarter blasted Kumar Sanu and Bappi Lahiri in monsoon, on the eve of jhulan yatra. There was a field we used to call “Chandmari Maath,” where soldiers (most likely the Border Security Force) practiced shooting, and my father and other staff of the electricity board played cricket. These sites engraved in my memory are too small to appear on Google Maps. I zoom in and find a vast nothing.
I should find Panchayat “relatable.” After all, I have been in Abhishek’s place. Or to be more precise, if Abhishek married someone in the city and brought wife and child to his rural posting, that child would be me. My father, unlike Abhishek, was quite thrilled with his posting though, because it gave him on-site work experience, my mother not so much, and I was two when we moved to Chuanpur–had no opinion. But maybe because of my experience of living close to a “real” panchayat, I find Panchayat’s stance on the world it depicts–the show’s ethical orientation–confusing. The show follows Abhishek’s perspective and Abhishek goes from being a tourist-like outsider to an integral part of the village life over the course of two seasons. Integral only to an extent. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call him a mediating figure, a broker between the gaze of the urban audience (represented by the friend who visits Abhishek from the city in S 2) and the rural world.
What is this brokering for though? Did we need this brokering figure to know there are places like Phulera in India? Is it meant to give us–Indians–culture shock?
Hindi films and web shows are going through this phase of fixating on places like Phulera or whatever they think is “real India.” There’s Mirzapur whose blueprint, I suppose, is Wasseypur. There’s Bareli, Kanpur, and other tier-two cities in northern India. There’s also Dharavi. Taking pride in their portraits of these worlds, filmmakers and showrunners say we haven’t quite seen stuff like this on screen before. Reviews use the same terms. Real India. Grassroots India. It is true we haven’t seen villages and tier-two towns, at this frequency anyhow, on screen since the 1990s, when neoliberalization and other economic shifts prompted big budget Hindi films to showcase the diaspora. I am not sure if anyone who has spent any time as part of the desi diaspora thinks Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Ghum and Kal Ho Na Ho are realistic representations of the diaspora…I know I don’t. Such films are oblivious of the histories that brought Indians across classes and castes to the UK, US, Australia, and other shores. However, somehow, at the moment, there is a bit of an unquestioning acceptance of this “real India” trope when much of this turn toward “real India'' is the middle- and upper- creative class voyeuristically traveling through “backward” places and addressing one issue at a time, like the savior Ayushman Khurana plays in Article 15. And when I mention class I am not pinpointing the backgrounds of individual directors or artists but the viewpoints the projects bring with them. Electricity problem, water problem, dowry, casteism, sanitation issues, superstition. In rural India. Tier Two India. And, of course, no problem is insurmountable as long as there’s a hero. Abhishek in Panchayat is not a hero–which is why I watch the show–and yet, he seems to be the only one who wonders and asks why the village’s real pradhan–a woman (played by Neena Gupta)–gives her title and power to her husband. Rahul Desai’s glowing review of Panchayat Season One notes that Abhishek’s noble deeds are not byproducts of heroism but results of his selfishness. I agree but it still means the villagers need city boy Abhishek to cue new thinking.
What goes unsaid and unacknowledged in these films and shows, beyond the most basic forms of class friction, is that much of the “evils” the stories showcase via villages, slums, and brothels are on display in urban- and middle- class households in the heart of the polite society, both in India as well as the Indian diaspora. The number of women who cede control of their lives and finances to their husbands, undermining their own agency willingly or unwillingly, is fairly high in Indian cities and the diaspora. So, the pradhan of Phulera is hardly anomalous. Social divides between urban and rural India, between genteel and seedy neighborhoods are not as wide as the cinematic and televisual portraits project them to be in order to justify setting stories in smaller villages and towns, “telling” their stories.
There are differences in access based on class-caste and geopolitical advantages separate Delhi from Phulera, Calcutta from Chuanpur, but the social drama plays out much the same way (I mean, in California people are celebrating “sacred thread” ceremony, proclaiming their Brahminism. What can I say?). Anyone who has grown up in India across regions, classes, and castes has seen the “real India” already. If someone grows up insulated from the congestion of slums and the stench of sewers in India, never walks on pot-hole riddled roads, then what they experience is “real” too–they experience what money can do in India, how far it can shelter one from certain elements while leaving them exposed to others.
There’s a scene in Gully Boy where Murad (played by Ranveer Singh) talks back (well, unexpectedly raps) to “slum tourists” wanting to see his house. The scene, I imagine, intends to take a dig at the idea of “poverty porn.” Gully Boy is not your Slumdog Millionaire, the scene seems to suggest. And yet we–the audience–are seeing what that tourist came to see in Dharavi. Some of us have lived in houses like Murad’s, some of us have not. Then, is Gully Boy, inspired by the lives of two Indian rappers, one coming from a slum in Andheri and another from a chawl in Kurla, “exploitative”? I don’t have a straightforward answer because “exploiting” and “selling out” in art depend on how a story is told, and Gully Boy does not treat slum dwellers as other worldly curiosities, unlike Slumdog. Yet, I do think that part of Gully Boy’s tellability comes from the fact of poverty–it becomes a story worth telling because someone growing up in Dharavi has the angst, swag, aspiration, and talent to rap, apna time ayega. Shocking.
Is it?
A friend born and raised in Sacramento once told me that she’d heard of a tour company taking visitors from America to the Taj Mahal and then, immediately after, to a slum. My friend explained they do it so the visitors feel uncomfortable–like, if you are admiring Taj Mahal, then you must go see a slum, the latter is the “real India.” I laughed. Taj Mahal is “real” too, I said, and I thought of the heat and the crowds in Agra, around the Taj Mahal area. Very real, too.
The point I am getting at is: it takes a touristy view of India to say that a section of the country is real, and another is not. And if we note the kinds of stories whose tellability depends on problems of so-called “real India '' we see how these magnify a hypothetical disconnect between urban and rural values, mistaking appearances for reality, like an outsider would. The richest and the most powerful in India are as parochial as they come. Aishwarya Rai married a tree because she is mangalik. In Panchayat, rumors spread about a banyan tree chasing the villagers. Both are very real India.
<Warning: Panchayat S 2 spoilers ahead>
The contemporary milieu that films and TV shows built around “real India” are too busy circumventing is one plagued by communalism and sectarianism. The most politically powerful figure sitting in Delhi identifies as coming from peechda jat (backward caste) while several activists and leaders from oppressed castes fighting for social and economic justice are identified as anti-national. Happens in real India. But Panchayat’s mentions of community and caste distinctions are fleeting. The pradhan’s family and Abhishek’s are from the same caste. That’s all we know and it’s a running joke that the pradhan could marry off his daughter to Abhishek because they come from the same birādrī. There is little mention of how national political sentiments trickle into a village like Phulera, except when in season two, the show plunges into sentimentality about the plights of soldiers in Kashmir. The episode reminded me of the comedian Kunal Kamra’s viral punchline: “Siachen mein hamare jawaan lar rahe hain” (“Our soldiers are fighting in Siachen”). The punchline pokes fun at “patriots” who say since our soldiers are fighting in Siachen (and elsewhere along the border), willing to sacrifice their lives, we should not complain about minor inconveniences like demonetisation.
The topic of soldiers fighting in Kashmir or anywhere for that matter came up only marginally throughout the second season of Panchayat. The show had no political or ethical stance on J & K at any point as far as I can recall. Then, what made the showrunners decide to locate a soldier’s predicament in Kashmir center stage in the finale? What made them think the material in the episode was worth telling?
Most likely they thought it would be significant and shocking for an audience to learn that the soldiers in the Indian army fighting in Kashmir come from small villages like Phulera. As an audience, even if I pretend for a moment I didn't know this, I am still left with the question of ‘so what’? Is the show critical of the fact that wars and military campaigns draw the blood of the disenfranchised? Well, then, why are its characters hyping up how the soldier’s parent can live with his head held high? Or, is the show suggesting that the urban youth should also enlist in the military instead of confining themselves to arm-chair debates on nationalism? I would be inclined to accept that the show was simply ‘observing’ a fact if they did not stretch the fact into a story lasting a whole episode.
The last episode in Panchayat makes the most of the surge in arm-chair debates on nationalism without adding anything much to these conversations or challenging the conversation. It does not have anything complicated to say about nationalism and social values, nationalism and the rural economy. It has little to say about unemployment rates in India that force graduates like Abhishek to reluctantly work for the panchayat or the rural youth to enlist in the army. Abhishek’s plight is made out to be related to him not taking his college education seriously (he keeps saying “I should have studied harder”).
Panchayat embodies what I think of as a “new provincialism.” The “new provincialism” in Indian entertainment pretends to be cutting and biting…a far cry from the escapist entertainment of the ‘90s and early 2000s, but truth be told, these new provincial shows are escapist too. They just happen to be set in brothels, slums, and villages. A majority (though not all) of the “new provincial” fare refuses to treat these settings as extensions, rather than the crummy “other side,” of the ordinary, urban world the OTT and multiplex audiences supposedly inhabit.
Love,
T
Postscript from P
The thing about gaze is it never ceases to be. No matter how mindful, aware, conscious, guilty, I can be of my privileges as a Netflix subscriber in a country that does not know or care for its existence - let alone fathom spending actual money for a subscription that offers… what? Entertainment? But I get that on Facebook… for free - it will invariably bleed into the corners of the screen of whatever it is I’m watching. I will continue to question who gave authority to so-and-so for staking claim on the real India, all the while ignorant of the echo chamber I willfully inhabit, and remain naively dismissive of the audience it’s meant for.
Who ultimately are looking to be entertained. Which is why the primacy of feel-good - and the definition changes currency according to the flavour of the month, like a certain brand of nationalist pride is so in these days - dominates everything else. Even its tellability, as T puts it.
So, even as my kickass colleagues in Khabar Lahariya choose '90s Bollywood song and dance again and again for their daily, weekly, monthly fix - none of the OTT platforms hold any sway for them in rural, last mile northern India - I mostly try and stay away from anything that’s being called “gritty”. And I find myself drawn to the feel bad/it’s all so grey/the-world-is-broken-but-it-can-still-be-worth-living-for kinda stuff.
Like Zee5’s recent newsroom drama The Broken News. In its refusal to offer well-rounded closure, in its interrogation of truth and lies and the narrow no man’s zone between them, and in its portrayals of edit meetings in TV news offices, it felt pretty real.
More from T & P
Speaking of acclaimed portrayals of real India, check out P’s rant on the grittiness of Paatal Lok, developed with her friends at KL.
T’s story “Camp City” won Berkeley Fiction Review’s 2022 Sudden Fiction Contest and appeared in the magazine’s latest issue. While “Camp City” is only available in print right now, here’s another “real India” short story by T available to read online.