Mitti Ek Nayi Pehchaan, spreading serenely and significantly into eight episodes on Amazon MX Player, is OTT’s own Swades. You remember Shah Rukh Khan returning to his village, leaving behind his cushy job at NASA. In Mitti, it is a back-to-village impactful punch-varshee yojana for Ishwak Singh.
While Jitendra Singh in Panchayat behaves as though he is doing the village a favour by settling among the bumpkins at the cost of the city job, Ishwak as Raghu in Mitti is never patronizing. He moves back to his roots after his grandfather (the wonderful Yogendra Tikoo) passes away suddenly, leaving behind a crippling debt after his death, and Raghu with a nagging guilt and no hope of a closure to his relationship with his grandfather.
It is always a pleasure to watch good actors plunging into a screenplay that doesn’t always give them the room to grow anywhere but exponentially. Mitti has nothing new to offer the actors. They nonetheless seem fully invested, not only Ishwak but even the minor characters like Raghu’s two childhood buddies Baiju (Pranjal Patheriya) and Mahu (Piyush Kumar) who insist on trailing him and reminding him of what wonderful times they had during their childhood, even if Raghu is not interested. The duo’s disarming use of English words to punctuate their torrent of conversations makes you giggle even when it’s overdone.
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Excesses are rare in Mitti. The co-directors Alok Kumar Dwivedi and Gaganjeet Singh exercise a vigilant control over the proceedings. And apart from a terribly overdone moneylender, the modern-day avatar of the roles Kanhaiyalal played in the cinema of the 1950s, there are no intrusive characters. While Ishwak takes centre stage quietly, Nikhil Sachan’s writing has room for some women characters to take control of their own lives rather than wait for the men to activate the trigger.
The redoubtable Alka Amin is pitch-perfect as Raghu’s grieving but practical grandmother. There are two other prominent women characters, one is Raghu’s supportive girlfriend Stuti (Diksha Juneja) and the other is an upright young civil servant Kritika (Shruti Sharma) struggling to make a difference.
At the end of eight episodes, Mitti left me impressed by its purpose for existence and unflagging allegiance to portraying village life as underrated. Nothing here that we hadn’t seen before and yet so much to take away.
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