Dupahiya

Banwari Jha, a teacher in the remote village of Dhadakpur, is anxious to find a husband for his daughter, Roshni. Despite her relationship with childhood friend Amavaas, Roshni accepts a marriage proposal, surprisingly opting for the groom’s brother, Kuber. Kuber’s demand for a five-lakh worth motorbike as dowry sets off a chain of unexpected events. Fresh after his heartfelt performance in Laapata Ladies – Sparsh Shrivastava is back in a familiar avatar (with a few tweaks) but still manages to leave a strong imprint, thanks to his agile body language, ease with humour and drama. Gajraj Rao brings warmth to yet another fatherly role. It’s a pleasant sight to see Shivani Raghuvanshi grow with every project while staying true to the pitch of the character.

A stolen motorcycle– ‘dupahiya’– in the fictional village of Dhadakpur becomes the fulcrum around which this new comedy and its characters revolve, delivering a melange of Bihari-via-Mumbai accents, loads of quirk and broad life lessons. This is the mix that gave ‘Panchayat’ its mojo, with Phulera’s Sachivji and Pradhanji and their cohorts becoming a byword in the madly-popular OTT-specific ruralcom genre. Here, Uttar Pradesh is replaced by Bihar, but the mood remains similarly overall sunny, as the occasional clouds created by the busy plot (written by Avinash Dwivedi and Chirag Garg) are dispelled by the show’s determinedly cheerful air: leave the viewer smiling is clearly the mandate.

I remember watching the first season of Panchayat (2020) and thinking: Wow, this is going to change things. And it did. It altered the way we perceived “comedy” as a serious genre. It was very exciting to see a simple, slice-of-life environment — the iconic fictional village of Phulera and its bittersweet characters — seared into the modern streaming lexicon. But I’d be lying if I said I was blindly optimistic. At the back of my mind, there was this fear — a fear derived from years of watching Hindi cinema overkill a new sensation. Nobody knows how to quit while they’re ahead.

Gajraj Rao can act in his sleep. Quite literally. An agreeably slapstick moment in the new Prime Video comedy series Dupahiya finds Rao’s character, a kindly but superstitious school principal, snoring away on a cot, making sweet music with those silly, rumbling, guttural sounds. Rao has the training of theatre, of engaging a crowd with the bare tools of physicality and behaviour, and is so warm and winsome a comedian that we tend to forget his nastier roles (he played the menacing, mysterious caller in 2008’s Aamir). Perhaps Dupahiya could have harnessed Rao’s lurking nastiness to lend itself some zing. Built around a stolen motorcycle in a village, this is a ‘Panchayat’ lite, a sweet, soporific series that passes the time, exceedingly flaky and forgettable. Director Sonam Nair, who made the charmingly zany short film Khujli once upon a time, is decidedly out of her depth in the rural setting. The writing (by Chirag Garg and Avinash Dwivedi) is vacant and amateurish, the texture crumbly and second-hand. The oddball cast exhausts its whimsy in the first three episodes; indulged for six more, they verge on annoying.