4 min readNew DelhiOct 1, 2026 05:58 PM IST
One of the reasons that Dupahiya worked was its cheerful focus on the importance of the two-wheeler—its ‘whereof’ and ‘whyfor’. A potential groom demands a dupahiya to marry an excited girl who has fallen, not for his brash charms, but for the promise of getting away from here to there, a fictional Dhadakpur to a real-life Mumbai.
It became the dhuri (fulcrum) around which the series revolves, telling the story of a gaon, its people and its politics in a spry and enjoyable way. The second season suffers from a plot which doesn’t thicken till way past the halfway mark, even though it feels timely: the leaking of exam papers is a fraught issue, whose fire has caused unimaginable turmoil.
Even a few years back, a serial picking up on aspirants, coaching centres and corrupt leakers-of-papers could have got away with the languid comic tone this second season coasts on. But now, fiction needs to feel sharper to land. Here Roshini (Shivani Raghuvanshi) the exam-giver, with full support of her school-teacher father Banwari Jha (Gajraj Rao) and mother (Anjuman Saxena), as well as chota bhai Bhugol (Sparsh Srivastava), who has his own reasons for her to crack the exam.
These are characters who made us invested. Would the entitled dulha (Avinash Dwivedi), aptly named Kuber, take his dulhaniya away? Would the shiny dupahiya still be the star of the show? Would a good-hearted-thief-turned-honest-guy (Bhuvan Arora) with a not-so-secret crush on Roshni, be able to put his case forward?
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The first few episodes are spent in creating a new problem for ambitious neta Pushplata Yadav (Renuka Shahane), when the possibility of a ‘mobile tower’ divides people for and against, with the standard jokes about male virility popping up more than once. Banwari’s plot is the designated spot, and he is delighted; the money in exchange for land-use is much-needed.
But his wanting-to-pass-at-any-cost daughter means that the cash may need to be deployed elsewhere, and that in turn means a ‘hulchul’ in a village which proudly claims to be crime-free: it’s good that the village is fictional, otherwise the idea of a crime-less gaon in Bihar would only make us laugh harder, much to the consternation of local cop (Yashpal Sharma) as well as the villain of the piece (Dinesh Lal Yadav).
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The trouble, in fact, is just that this time around: the laughs are not as free-flowing, with a bunch of sketchy characters floating about as paper-seekers and paper-leakers and greedy cops, and the groom who turns out to be an ‘answer-giver’: Dwivedi is still quite funny, even though not as fresh as before. I also liked Srivastava’s diving into his ‘nachaniya’ part with dignity, and Arora’s wanting-to-be-better character; the latter really needs to get a lead role.
And a near-tragedy of an exam-giver, seen briefly fighting for his life in hospital, brings a sudden tonal switch, which feels more real than any of the let’s-have-fun-with-paper-leaks-Peter Sellers’- type-characters speaking in a melange of faux-Bihari accents.
Dupahiya 2 cast: Gajraj Rao, Renuka Shahane, Shivani Raghuvanshi, Sparsh Srivastava, Bhuvan Arora, Yashpal Sharma, Dinesh Lal Yadav, Samarth Mahor, Anjuman Saxena, Avinash Dwivedi
Dupahiya 2 director: Sonam Nair
Dupahiya 2 rating: 2.5 stars