A village in Bihar is well on course to bucking the state’s reputation for lawlessness. Dhadakpur – the “Belgium of Bihar” – hasn’t seen a single crime in 24 years.
Though money is tight and some Dhadakpur denizens have dreams of fleeing to Mumbai or Delhi, nobody feels compelled to pick another’s pocket. Panchayat member Pushpalata (Renuka Shahane) is expected to receive a promotion as a reward for nearly a quarter century of good behaviour.
So the theft of a motorbike purchased for a wedding expectedly leads to hysteria. Banwari (Gajraj Rao), who has borrowed money to pay for the two-wheeler, is beside himself. The nuptials of his daughter Rohini (Shivani Raghuvanshi) are a week away.
Banwari’s son Bhugol (Sparsh Shrivastava) teams up with his friend Amavas (Bhuvan Arora) to find the bike. Although the village tries to keep the news under wraps, police inspector Mithilesh (Yashpal Sharma) gets wind of the robbery.
A fan of pulp novels with lurid covers, Mithilesh declares that he can solve a murderer by the fifth page. But Mithilesh takes a while to understand who would want to ruin Dhadakpur’s fair name, and why.
Dupahiya is no hurry to get to the bottom of the mystery. Written by Chirag Garg and Avinash Dwivedi and directed by Sonam Nair, the Hindi series on Prime Video firmly believes that the journey is as important as the destination – a belief that doesn’t always hold over nine packed episodes.
The show has the exaggerated quirkiness that is the bane of films and shows set in fictionalised villages and small towns. But Dupahiya also wants to upend expectations about its provincial milieu, especially in the treatment of its female characters.
Rohini isn’t quite the submissive daughter waiting to be packed off to the nearest available groom. Pushpalata has firm ideas about how to manage the situation.
Pushpalata’s dark-skinned daughter Nirmal has her own sub-plot. Bhugol and Durlabh too have to check their macho swagger every now and then. These subversions run parallel to the mad scramble by the increasingly dishevelled Bhugol-Amavas pair.
At its best, the show is a cheeky, wacky satire of smugness. What’s the point of being crime-free when you can’t stem the flow of migration, improve income levels or, for that matter, stamp out pettiness or greed? There are echoes of Ashok Mishra’s script for Shyam Benegal’s film Welcome to Sajjanpur in the antics of Dhadakpur’s righteous residents.
The double-weave of social critique and crime thriller includes an encounter with a gangster devoted to his pet owl. Patches of tongue-in-cheek dialogue and sharp performances keep the show from going off the road.
Bhuvan Arora has an engaging buddy vibe with Sparsh Shrivastava, the talented actor from Jamtara and Laapataa Ladies. Arora and Shrivastava are finely tuned into the contrived chaos that accompanies their quest.
Yashpal Sharma is superb as Mithilesh, whose investigation reveals the hollowness of Dhadakpur’s claim on goodness. Unlike some of the other actors, Sharma knows exactly how to handle the absurdist humour and the imaginary village setting. While Dupahiya is a self-contained series, a follow-up case for this rural sleuth will be most welcome.
