On paper, Peddi had everything to be a historical film. The intention was there, the theme was there. The emotions, the technical artistry, the powerful lead performance, it was all there. But somewhere along the way, someone decided that the film also needed a romantic track to ensure commercial success. That decision unravels an important part of what the film was trying to be, and resulted in one of the most uncomfortable theater experiences I’ve had in recent memory.
Telugu cinema has talented writers, actors, technicians and directors. It produces films of genuine scale and emotional intelligence. But there is one area in which he has shown almost no growth across generations, and that is the way he writes and films women. If you watch enough recent Telugu releases, you’ll start wondering if anyone in the newsroom has ever had a real conversation with a woman. We have to be honest about what is really happening. Which brings us back to Peddi.
The moral basis of the hero.
Peddi, put plainly, is a story about dignity. Specifically, it’s about a man who refuses to accept that his village and the people in it deserve to be invisible. Appalasoori, played by Jagapathi Babu, has spent thirty years trying to get the village to have an official name, to appear on a map, and to have the government recognize that the people who live there are citizens with rights. Peddi takes up that fight and decides to win it through sport. The film asks you to root for this man because he understands, deep down, what it means to not be seen.
Ram Charan in Peddi.
That’s why what happens the moment Janhvi Kapoor enters the scene is so jarring. Because the man who will spend three hours fighting for his people’s right to be seen cannot bring himself to see the woman in front of him as a person.
SPOILER ALERT!
The intro shot of Achiyyamma, played by Janhvi Kapoor, shows her removing her dupatta and standing there, trying to make a point about how she can rally the crowd to vote. For the next three minutes, the film cuts between her body and Ram Charan’s reaction to her body. Slow zooms. Persistent retentions. The scene has a purpose and it’s not to tell you who Achiyyamma is. It’s to show you what she’s like and make sure you understand that Peddi finds her desirable.
Three minutes is a long time to look at someone without once showing their face. Try to think of another recent Telugu film where the introduction of a male character was handled this way. You’ll be hard-pressed to find one, because the camera doesn’t typically treat men as collections of body parts to be inventoried. This is what the male gaze looks like in practice.
The scene following the introduction is where the film’s attitude becomes impossible to misunderstand. Peddi tells his friends, clearly, that a woman from Achiyyamma’s entourage would never agree to be with a man like him. Because? She is from a higher social position and he knows the gap. And his conclusion, expressed without shame or hesitation, is that since she will never be his anyway, he will simply touch her. If something goes wrong, he says, you only live once.
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Ram Charan and Janhvi Kapoor in Peddi.
His friends respond and remind him that it is wrong to do so. However, he dismisses them. The film doesn’t present this as a warning sign.
There is also a recurring detail throughout the romantic track where Ram Charan’s character puts his hand in his pants whenever he sees Janhvi Kapoor. This happens more than once, presented as a character color. It’s worth sitting with what’s really being normalized in these scenes, because the movie certainly doesn’t accommodate that.
What Peddi does
Peddi jumps over the wall to enter Achiyyamma’s private space and touches her without her consent. The film frames what happens as an accidental kiss, a moment that just happened, something not entirely deliberate. This framing is doing a lot of work it shouldn’t be doing.
Also Read: Peddi movie review: Ram Charan carries a worthy but uneven sports drama on his shoulders
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When she fights back, he runs away. Neither the scene nor the events that followed acknowledge that a rape had occurred. When Achiyyamma tells someone close to her what happened, she is told two things. That what happens in private must remain private and that his honor is now at risk. The concern is not that she was touched without permission. The concern is what people might think of her if they found out.
This is a specific and recognizable logic. It is the logic that has historically been used to keep women silent after being raped. The film unfolds it here and continues.
The campaign setting
Achiyyamma publicly campaigns for her father during a local election. His father is running against a candidate backed by Rambujji, played by Divyendu Sharma. Rambujji, threatened by how well she is connecting with voters, hatches a plan. He and his people will cut off her skirt while she is on stage, publicly humiliating her and destroying her campaign. They proceed to do this.
Janhvi Kapoor in Peddi.
Peddi intervenes at the last second by cutting the rope of a tent covering her before the skirt falls. This is played as a hero moment. The intervention leads to a confrontation and a fight sequence.
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Let it sit for a moment. The hero, who moments before was doing the same thing in the name of love, saves the woman from a form of sexual humiliation. The film treats this as heroism. She doesn’t realize that rescue and threat exist in the same moral world, one in which a woman’s body is the battlefield of men’s disputes, and the best outcome she can hope for is a man who takes her side. Neither Peddi nor Rambujji face any consequences for anything in this sequence or anywhere before.
Later in the film, Achiyyamma discovers that Peddi is the man who entered her space and touched her without consent. She confronts him and slaps him. His response is to tell her that this was his way of expressing love. Other people write letters or bring flowers. He touched her without asking why he wanted her.
And then she kisses him. The film arrives at this as the natural, even sweet, conclusion to their story together. Peddi is not the first Telugu film to do so and sadly, it is unlikely to be the last. Bollywood has been telling versions of it for decades. Tamil cinema has also done it. But the particular packaging here, wrapped inside a film that otherwise asks you to care about human dignity, makes it harder to swallow than usual.
Buchi Babu Sana’s debut Uppena was a really well-made film. It won the National Award for Best Telugu Film and was widely celebrated. It also featured Krithi Shetty, who was 17 during filming, in a romantic role in which she was pursued by an older man whose obsession the film framed as devotion. The way it was filmed, the way its resistance was treated as a temporary obstacle, generated some criticism at the time. Those criticisms did not significantly slow anything down.
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When a manager is not faced with a true analysis of those decisions, there is no pressure to make different decisions next time. Buchi Babu Sana made the same decisions in Peddi, on a much larger canvas, with a much larger audience.
Why this matters beyond a movie
Films do not exist in isolation, they circulate among the masses who celebrate them. They play in towns and cities all over the country. They are watched by teenagers on individual screens who are still forming their understanding of what is normal between men and women. They are watched by men who find their own attitudes reflected and validated on a forty-foot screen. They are watched by women who are simply trying to enjoy a movie and instead spend two hours remembering how they watch it.
The argument that this is just entertainment, that it should not be taken seriously, does not hold water. Entertainment is one of the main ways a culture tells itself what is acceptable. When Telugu cinema repeatedly shows a man touching a woman without consent and presents it as a romance, it is making a cultural statement. That calculation must change. And it won’t change until audiences, critics, and the industry itself stop filing these things away as minor flaws in otherwise good movies and start calling them what they are.
Peddi is, in many ways, a good film. In fact, it deserved to be better. And the reason it’s not like that is because it’s right there on the screen, if anyone wants to look.
