Amitabha Singh is a seasoned name in the Hindi film industry for his cinematography and now he is associated with PANCHAYAT. As the season 2 has been released on OTT platform, here is an interview to amplify the thought process in making of PANCHAYAT 2.
Question: How does it feel to come out with a new series on Panchayat 2?
Amitabha Singh: After the phenomenal success of PANCHAYAT, we took some time to come out with season 2. A sense of responsibility was induced in the creative team to ensure that the space for rural issues that we had touched through season 1 of PANCHAYAT got an echo and amplification in season 2. The audience which is consuming content on OTT is a vibrant audience and it is our belief that we would be able to meet the audience expectations with season 2 of PANCHAYAT as well.
Q: Why did the creative team of PANCHAYAT decide to focus upon the rural issues as a content subject?
AS: Through the PANCHAYAT series we are trying to test whether we can create a connection with the audience. It is the felt belief that there is a great disconnect between OTT viewers and the content. The rural portrayal being dished is being done by a very urban mind so we as a creative team decided to move into this space. Core of the creative team of PANCHAYAT has a very-very direct rural connect and have quite a large number of fingers in the rural pie of rural India and have a very frequent dialogue with the rural space, so we were able to establish a connection. Besides, most of the bureaucrats who were associated with rural India in their formative years were a source of good databases to provide their anecdotal experiences and this has added a sense of authenticity to the narrative of PANCHAYAT for both seasons. I would like to mention in particular the character of Abhishek, who is now identified by each one of the administrative services as their version of a bureaucrat in the job and this adds to the element of authenticity for our product. Through Abhishek all the bureaucrats who have served in the Hindi heartland are reliving their trials and tribulations.
Q: Has the acting team also brought their experience on to the table to add authenticity to the content?
AS: Of course, it has. We are fortunate to have colossal of actors in the form of Raghubir Yadav and Neena Gupta who honed their skills with the best directors in the field of cinema and having rich repertoire of rural cinematic content that they have been associated with, they have been our encyclopaedia for authentic content. Qualitative experiences of their own processes through their career have been used as a reference point by the creative team.
Q: When one talks of rural Indian landscape, the reference point or a template of how the bureaucracy functions is through the eponymous work of Sreelal Shukla, RAGDARBAARI. Has RAGDARBARI been a reference template for PANCHAYAT?
AS: For sure. RAGDARBAARI has been the foundation for PANCHAYAT but it has been seeped with the nuances of the present times as now technology has an overriding influence in the day-to-day both in rural and in urban India. This was not the case when RAGDARBAARI was written. Let me illustrate this with one example- during the earlier times when a telegram used to come to the village everybody would start weeping as telegram was symbolically associated with death and the spectre of death used to hover in the village till some literate person would decipher the content. Now in the present times Telegram is an app that gives you all kinds of content. So, from one telegram to the other has been the social leap that society has taken, and PANCHAYAT has factored in this leap for its content.
Q: In terms of cinematography, the camera in PANCHAYAT in both the seasons has been very inert or to say that it is invisible as a storyteller?
AS: Audio visual when it moves it captures depths, which even we are not aware and understand our relatability to the material. We may be mandated to focus on the narrow spectrum, the camera presents to us the nuances which even we may not have visualised at the drawing board and therefore its invisibility in content creation helps. In terms of cinematography we have tried to keep the visual language for both the seasons as authentic and as insightful and as invisible as possible, audience should not see the presence of camera through a designed and manipulated artificial light for me as cinematographer camera should move with such a stealth that one should be able to touch the texture and visual aspects of rural life visual, an element of aesthetics is there, the subject has guided it. My philosophy is that the audience should not be able to see the camera, the audience should not be awed by the cameras but be immersed with the content.
Q: In Season 1 there was a water tank, would it? Is it a SHOLAY hangover or incidental to the backdrop of content?
AS: Chuckling, it is not any hangover from SHOLAY. We selected this location in Sihor district in MP after rummaging through 300 villages. The village is synonymous with the script, opening shot starts with paanee kee tankee but Veeru (Abhishek) still has not climbed on to it for his Rinkie.
Q: Is it not time for broadbanding the subject matter of Panhayat to Panchayats of other states, outside the Hindi speaking belt?
AS: It is a very good idea and with the outreach of Amazon Prime and through Panchayats of different languages and cultures, world over would come to have a direct interface with how our rural India is progressing and how it lives. It would be able to shed beliefs which exist for ages without any basis. We have deconstructed the world view around rural India of the Hindi speaking belt and it is now for the content makers of other languages to pick the baton and set the ball rolling for seasons of PANCHAYATS across different parts of the country. My view of the rural people is that they are funny and have a dry sense of humour. The manner in which rural India has been cinematically covered is not the real rural content. PANCHAYAT through both the seasons has set the benchmark and the world is eagerly awaiting different versions of PANCHAYAT.