While the film/series may be rural, in its setting, its gaze has gotta be urban — because that’s what its OTT subscription audience is. India may reside in the villages. That’s not where its pockets are deep
Still from Gram Chikitsalay
On: Amazon Prime Video
Director: Rahul Pandey
Actors: Amol Parashar, Anandeshwar Dwivedi, Vinay Pathak
Rating: 3/5
First off, I have a soft corner for stuff set in villages. Even if Gram Chikitsalay feels like simply the first draft of that show.
I also love the way all the characters refer to the doctor in this series as ‘Daak Saab’. That’s also how it shows up in the subtitles. It’s the colloquially correct pronunciation.
Although the gentleman that the villagers call Daak Saab is actually a “jhola chhaap” quack. Of which there must be God knows how many in rural India.
Actor Vinay Pathak plays this beloved role, doing Internet searches for symptoms/diagnoses; rather trigger-happy, doling out “booster shots” to unsuspecting patients!
Pathak, as Chetak Kumar, equally gets his purbi (eastern Indian) accent right. We know Pathak (Bheja Fry, Khosla Ka Ghosla) first from his days as VJ on Channel V, where he held a legit American twang. He’s a rare actor, who can seamlessly switch between both.
Where’s this purbi accent in the show from, to be precise? Well, in the first episode, you observe an old bloke on a cycle, asking for directions to Danapur, that is supposedly 2 km from this village named Bhatkandi.
Danapur, I know, is a satellite town of Patna. Only, the vehicle number plates in this village mention Jharkhand state, while you observe its district headquarter in a document as Bulsitiya — quite funnily named, like Fakoli (Bazaar), off Panchayat’s Phulera village in UP, that was shot in Mahodiya, MP.
I call attention to such trivia, only because villages that constitute 70 per cent of India is somehow seen as anonymous/generic onscreen, while most good films/series attempt to capture every nuance of the big/small cities, where they’re set.
It’s also unclear when, why or how (perhaps mid 1990s onwards), India’s villages swiftly fell off the mainstream entertainment map.
Anything that authentically reverses it is, foremost, a pleasure to dive into, even give a longer rope to — including the last such show I watched, Dupahiya (also on Prime Video), that was much richer, in terms of (comic-thriller) plot.
That rural entry happens in this case, with the pastoral long-shot of an auto-rickshaw meeting a herd of sheep in Bhatkandi, with farms/fields and lake on either side.
The gent, Prabhat Sinha (Amol Parashar), on that rick, is a doctor sent over from Delhi to take over its defunct primary health centre, or gram chikitsalay.
The irony of the show’s title is there are hardly any properly functional gram chikitsalayas in India’s eastern heartland.
Although seeming quite affected in his manners, the good doc looks around clueless in an altogether foreign shore, that he must figure out, in order to set up base, even if temporarily.
For closest company, he has his associates, chiefly a friendly assistant (played wonderfully by Anandeshwar Dwivedi).
Now, this is a predicable trope, alright — that of a city boy hit by cultural shock/struggles, supplanted into a village. Take Agastya Sen crash-landing into Madna as a bureaucrat in English, August (1994). Or, of course, Abhishek (Jitendra Kumar), similarly thrown into a gram panchayat in Panchayat.
The reason for this is kinda obvious. While the film/series may be rural, in its setting, its gaze has gotta be urban — because that’s what its OTT subscription audience is. India may reside in the villages. That’s not where its pockets are deep.
Also, it’s not that the premise of Panchayat was particularly unique.
Consider the Doordarshan TV serial in the 1980s, titled Ummeed, where a bank manager from the city is posted in a run-down office, at a village, with one assigned assistant. He has to get used to rural life. Who played this lead character in that show? Shah Rukh Khan!
For the most part, the beauty/charm of Gram Chikitsalay lies in its atmospherics; casual observations, say, the kavi sammelan at the funeral bhoj/dinner.
Or untested faces in walk-on parts — the old man with swollen testicles; that bombastic bloke, who’s the local teacher seeking medical certificate; the other guy, who’s gone ahead and farmed on government property…
Over time, I’ve come to realise, slice-of-life shows work best when they’re about nothing at all. Of course, there’s no show about nothing.
What I mean is, say, Friends or Seinfeld in an Indian village. That’s what the first season of TVF’s Panchayat charmingly felt like.
TVF has also produced Gram Chikitsalay that appears to lose grip over the narrative, when cursorily dealing with hard issues like mental health or electoral politics, without the depth to offer its characters, eventually.
Or even the plot’s central conflict, for that matter — that nobody in the village wants to visit its health centre; now that it’s fully functional, for the first time! Why would they not?
It helps that the show is short, hence sweet — at five episodes flat, of about 40 minutes each. As against overstaying its welcome.
There is no reason to catch another season. But if vela/chilling, will pick a village over villas, any day!
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