The Telugu film industry likes to boast about numbers. Hundreds of films a year. Massive openings. Record collections. Pan-India blockbusters. On some weekends, it even rivals Bollywood in box-office revenue.
But as the Telugu saying goes, raasi kante vaasi goppa – quality matters more than quantity.
The uncomfortable truth is that while Telugu cinema has mastered scale, spectacle, and star worship, it still struggles with something much more basic: how to portray women.
The controversy surrounding Peddi is therefore not merely about one film, one director or one actress. It is about a culture that has existed in Telugu cinema for decades.
The hero is the story
In most Telugu commercial films, the hero is not just the protagonist. He is the universe.
The story revolves around him. The camera worships him. Supporting characters exist to praise him. Villains exist to be defeated by him.
And the heroine? More often than not, she arrives as an accessory. Her character arc is thinner than her costume. Her purpose is to dance, smile, admire the hero, and occasionally provide emotional motivation. If she disappears from the screenplay for twenty minutes, few would notice.
Watching Peddi, one gets the feeling that Janhvi Kapoor’s Achiyyamma exists less as a character and more as a visual interlude between Ram Charan’s larger-than-life moments.
Ram Charan dominates almost every frame. Janhvi Kapoor, despite being the female lead, often receives less narrative importance than several supporting actors.
That is not a criticism of Ram Charan. It is a criticism of an industry formula that has become so normalised that few even question it.
The camera’s wandering eye
The controversy erupted because many viewers felt that Achiyyamma was filmed less like a person and more like a body.
Repeated focus on the waistline. Lingering shots of the midriff. Strategic camera angles. Costume choices that seemed designed more for visual consumption than characterisation.
The criticism resonated because audiences have seen this before. For generations, Telugu cinema has maintained a peculiar obsession with the female navel.
Long before item songs became fashionable, directors were choreographing elaborate sequences around midriffs, waistlines, fruits, flowers, and suggestive camera movements.
It became so normalised that it was treated as harmless entertainment. Only later did many begin asking a simple question: why does the camera spend more time examining a woman’s waist and cleavage than her personality?
The Raghavendra Rao legacy
No discussion of this phenomenon can avoid mentioning filmmaker K. Raghavendra Rao.
His films defined an era. His commercial success is undeniable. Yet his visual grammar also institutionalised a style in which heroines were routinely fragmented into body parts.
A navel here. A cleavage shot there. Fruits and flowers landing with remarkable precision.
When actress Taapsee Pannu jokingly referred to the famous coconut-on-the-midriff sequence from her debut film, she faced intense backlash. But the reason the joke landed was because everyone instantly understood the reference.
It was not an isolated incident. It was an established cinematic language. The tragedy is that many younger filmmakers inherited that language without questioning it.
Importing glamour
Another curious aspect of Telugu cinema is its dependence on actresses from outside the Telugu-speaking states. There is nothing inherently wrong with casting talent from elsewhere. Cinema is, and should be, borderless.
Yet one cannot ignore a recurring pattern. Many heroines neither speak Telugu nor understand the dialogues being delivered around them. Their lines are dubbed. Their cultural rootedness is minimal.
What they often bring, however, is a particular glamour quotient that producers believe the market demands. The result is that female characters become increasingly interchangeable. Remove one and replace her with another and little changes in the narrative.
Meanwhile, genuinely talented Telugu-speaking actresses remain underrepresented.
Romance or entitlement?
The debate over Peddi intensified because of scenes involving consent. Many viewers objected to the portrayal of a kiss that appeared non-consensual and to a romance track in which persistence was presented as love.
Defenders argue that the protagonist is meant to be flawed and shaped by his environment. That is a fair artistic defence.
Cinema has every right to portray flawed men. The problem arises when the filmmaking itself appears to endorse rather than critique that behaviour.
A character can be problematic. A film need not celebrate him for being problematic. That distinction is where many commercial films stumble.
The audience grows up
The most encouraging aspect of the Peddi controversy is not the criticism itself but the fact that audiences noticed. A decade ago such scenes might have passed without serious discussion.
Today, viewers question them. Women question them. Men question them. Actors question them. And directors are forced to respond.
When filmmaker Buchi Babu Sana apologised and acknowledged that some scenes sent unintended messages, it reflected a changing reality.
Audiences are no longer passive consumers. They are active participants in shaping cultural standards.
Beyond box office numbers
Peddi will probably be remembered as a commercial success. But the debate it sparked may prove more important than its collections.
Telugu cinema possesses extraordinary technical talent. It produces some of India’s most ambitious films. Its reach is now global.
The next challenge is not bigger budgets or larger action sequences. It is learning to see women as complete human beings rather than decorative extensions of male stardom.
A film industry capable of creating larger-than-life heroes should also be capable of creating fully realised heroines – not women whose primary function is to display miles of midriff between a tiny blouse and a lehenga while the camera lingers where the screenplay does not.
That would be real progress. And unlike opening weekend collections, it would actually age well.
Very well written and correctly said.