Realistic Realism in TVF's Web Series Panchayat: A Study of Experimental Genre in New Cinema

With the emergence of high-speed internet and OTT platforms, Web Series emerged as a very popular and strong audio-visual medium of entertainment. This new mode of entertainment has provided a tremendous scope of experiments in new cinema. That's why it proved to be the best platform for the talented and skilled artists, who cannot get a chance or make a place in the mainstream cinema even after great struggle, to prove their talent. In the last few years, various experiments have been done. This new cinema is generally famous for violence and vulgarity in both scenes and speeches. Among all these there are some who are presenting a very unique kind of realistic cinema that can aptly be called Realistic Realism in new cinema. Such Cinema is a manifestation of multifarious themes and social issues through very real lifelike characters and scenes without any extra fantasy, violence or vulgarity. In short, such cinema can be called a purposeful recreation of real life. The aim of this paper is to study various aspects of one such new cinema web series 'Panchayat'. The main focus of the paper is the textual interpretation of the series that will be based on the analysis of the speeches and scenes. Moreover, this paper is an effort to explore the varied themes and the social facets addressed in this web series, like, corruption, patriotism, social responsibility, rural vs urban life, youth ambition, Indian marriage system, dowry, village politics, political responsibility and corruption, truth vs propaganda, etc.