Panchayat, Laapataa Ladies: Lessons In Community & Friendship

In both <em>Laapataa Ladies </em>and <em>Panchayat</em> people are preserved and shaped by innocuous, caring, onlookers. At times it’s a person, at other times it’s the village that attends to your joy and grief.

Manik+Sharma

Jul 16, 2024

Promo poster for Panchayat

IN A SCENE from the third season of Prime Video’s Panchayat Prahlad played by the exceptional Faisal Malik, argues incredulously against the abrupt transfer of a colleague. “Samay se pehle koi nahi jayega,” he says, as a sobering declaration that clenches the otherwise disorderly air of this world. It’s a moment where the chaos of a wry, quirky landscape settles to consider the painful dent in one of its many fixtures. Fixtures that if not for the friends around them would slip into the drains of disaster. In Laapataa Ladies, much like Panchayat, people are preserved and shaped by innocuous, caring, onlookers. At times it’s a person, at other times it’s the village that attends to your joy like it does to your grief.

Incidentally, both Laapataa Ladies and Panchayat have been shot in the same district of Madhya Pradesh. Beyond the overlapping Venn diagram of imagery though there is much that connects both worlds. In Laapataa Ladies women from different walks of life, ages and contrasting life experiences, coalesce to form a singular thread of disruption. In Panchayat men huddle around the dysfunction of office space to also become the glue trying to keep the fractures in each from breaking a shared bandage into pieces. Unlike seasonal empaths from cities, India’s villages rely on the currency of humanity to resist the tide of everyday challenges. As opposed to ‘hanging out’ or ‘taking a trip together’ therefore, people in the village visit the ill, listen to the afflicted and throng to sites of torment and agony.

To a lot of us living in urban sprawls, friendship and community resemble pursuits of likes and wants as opposed to systems of emotional sustenance. Our relationships thrive through the many compartments of insulation we can afford – restaurants, malls, cafés, vacations and just about anything that can replace the loneliness of our homes with the noisy symmetry of a public place. In cities, grief merges with the opacity of the socio-economic fence you choose to live behind. To the point that you never quite know who is sobbing behind the door your elevator scurries past or the wall, you haven’t bothered to look beyond. In India’s villages, though, the joys of celebration are as ecstatically on display as the contortions of loss. Prahlad therefore sleeps under a tree, offering to at least be witnessed if not seen.

In India’s villages, communities are obviously drawn along the axis of gender. This conservative worldview is portrayed in both stories. In Laapataa Ladies dialogue is a feature of the relationships between women, be it the chai stall owner Manju Mai (Chhaya Kadam) and her naïve subject, or Jaya (Pratibha Ranta) and the domesticated women she tries to casually radicalise. The relationships between women and men are in comparison subdued, punctuated by silences as opposed to wild exposition. In Panchayat, this division is relatively permeable but visible. In this third season when the show’s first seeds of love – in some sense also rebellion – begin to sprout between Sachiv Ji (Jitendra) and Rinki (Sanvikaa), the language adopted is hesitation and cluelessness. Of course, both Panchayat and Laapataa Ladies fail to account for the predicaments of caste but in terms of innocence, both manage to speak from the hallowed parcels of earth where camaraderie and concern feel spontaneous.

Both Laapataa Ladies and Panchayat are abundant in time. Time to loiter, time to seek, time to learn, time to ask, time to suspect, time to wonder and time to thoughtlessly coax friends into modest schemes or mindless missions. In Panchayat doors open at odd hours, help is frantically summoned and assistance is unhesitatingly offered. It makes you yearn for a world where neighbours would casually exchange Sunday meals and experiments instead of recommending places to order from. When neighbourhoods stood still to mourn loss not because it was demanded but because a place’s map is often the memory of those who have walked along its streaks of ink. The map of urbanity, unfortunately, is drawn in straight lines. Lines that feel exclusive by definition, insecure by design, and uninvolved as a matter of choice. Understandably, people with less to lose (think Manju Mai) seem to offer more.

None of this is to say that open vulnerability and empathy cannot co-exist in India’s cities. But increasingly, these urban slums feel like disasters trying to reverse engineer survival and a curated togetherness. It makes you wonder if the rush to encash all that privilege deprives you of the chance to also care for something, anything, other than the things that interest you. Things that are maybe a bit bigger than yourself, but also a bit modest in their aspirations. Because community and friendship was never about the scourge of global conquests, about life-altering ideas, but about the small losses we step over, like puddles left unattended by a crammed city. Or like the battles we refuse to fight for our neighbourhood. The stranger’s grief we refuse to accommodate.