Straight from the heartland:Wknd talks to Panchayat director Deepak Kumar Mishra

So when fans took to Twitter last week to cheer Panchayat, many of them pointed to the director’s surprising career trajectory. Mishra has no formal training in filmmaking. He got his start lampooning Raghu Ram, the acerbic, urbane host of MTV Roadies in a parody show called TVF Rowdies in 2012. “I am amazed that it still has so much recall value after a decade!” Mishra says. “But I am happy to tell people that was me, and now this is also me.” he says.

At the time, Mishra had just completed a degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay when he got a call from the production house The Viral Fever (TVF) for Rowdies. “I was doing a lot of street plays then and I had a loud, booming voice. I think I was picked because main chilla accha leta hoon camere pe (I can shout well on camera),” he says, laughing. “The Rowdies videos went viral and my life changed overnight. I decided, this is what I wanted to do: write sketches, act in them and learn filmmaking.”

The engineer worked his way up from acting, to being an assistant director and made his directorial debut with Permanent Roommates (2014) and followed it up with Panchayat in 2020. But for much of the past decade, he says, he’s most enjoyed collecting katran (fragments) of footage, and working out new ways of stitching them together to tell a story. “It’s fascinating how we start from nothing but a few words on paper and end up creating a whole magical world, full of people, emotions and music,” he says.

Phulera, the fictional Uttar Pradesh village in which Panchayat is set, is one of those worlds. There are unpaved roads flanked by fields, mud houses, local bullies and new-fangled CCTV cameras. And yet, it draws from Mishra’s own life. The son of a government employee, he grew up in a middle-class household in Varanasi, watching shows like Malgudi Days (1986), Byomkesh Bakshi (1993) and Shanti (1994) on Doordarshan. Much of the straightforward, situation-led storytelling of that era ended up in Panchayat. “I wanted to show people that something that isn’t fast-paced, or doesn’t have blood and gore can be entertaining too,” Mishra says.

Inspiration also came from Mishra’s memories of annual visits to his grandparents’ home in their ancestral village in Mau district, UP. “For two months every year, I would be this city boy grudgingly living in a village that wouldn’t have electricity for 18 hours at a stretch,” he recalls. “This is why I could relate to the protagonist Abhishek Tripathi’s character and his ambitions that transcend the monotony of rural life.”

That ambition is universal. But Panchayat’s beauty lies in its details. Mishra and his team keep the narrative as real as possible, shooting in an actual panchayat in Mahodiya village in Madhya Pradesh. The vehicles have UP’s Ballia district number plates. The wall paint of the panchayat offices is two-toned as Mishra remembers them fondly from summer trips. Even the clothes are sourced from local markets. “We washed them several times so that they looked threadbare like they had been worn often,” Mishra says. “Neenaji [Gupta, who plays the headman’s wife] was fed up of wearing the itchy, polyester saris by the end of it all.” Fans have renamed Mahodiya’s water tank, where Abhishek meets his love interest Rinki, as Rinki ki Tanki on Google Maps.

But it’s the beating heart of rural India that has been key to the show’s success. “Panchayat has taught me that your show needs to be real and tickle the hearts and minds of people,” says Mishra. “A huge chunk of India lives in villages. We aren’t telling enough stories from the hinterland, which are not propaganda-driven. We have to take Azamgarh, Mau, Satna, Rewa, Bhusawal, Itarsi — places that people haven’t even heard of —to everybody’s screens.”

Adding comedy was useful to temper Panchayat’s socially relevant themes. “People prefer subtle, thought-provoking or sarcasm-ridden humour over slapstick comedy now,” Mishra says. “It shows that we are reading more, consuming more content and our tastes are evolving.”

It echoes Mishra’s own evolution, from making 10-minute sketches in 2012, to working on short-format shows like Permanent Roommates (2014) and Humorously Yours (2016) to Panchayat’s 35-minute episodes. “I do harbour dreams of making a full-length feature next,” he admits. “I want to hear from writers belonging to small towns and villages because I truly believe chotte chotte gaaon mein bohot badi badi baatein hoti rehti hai (big things happen in little villages).”