A Rs 350 crore film about a marginalised caste wrestler fighting for dignity managed to strip a woman of hers. That is the central contradiction of ‘Peddi’, the Ram Charan sports drama that released on June 4 and became the most talked-about controversy in recent Tollywood memory. The film did not just fail its female lead. It failed publicly, loudly, and in ways that forced even its director to apologise.
The conversation ‘Peddi’ has sparked is long overdue. Tollywood has a documented history of using the female body as set dressing while building male protagonists into legends. The problem is not restricted to one film or one director. It is structural. And it keeps getting box office validation.
Also Read: Will a sorry fix what ‘Peddi’ chose to do to Janhvi Kapoor for 189 minutes?
Peddi (2026)
Director Buchi Babu Sana released a public statement on June 6, two days after ‘Peddi’ hit screens, saying the film should not make anyone feel “uncomfortable or disrespected.” That apology was an admission in plain language.
The controversy centred on the treatment of Janhvi Kapoor’s character, Achiyamma. The camera lingered on her navel, waist, and chest across multiple shots without narrative justification. In one scene, Ram Charan’s character uses a power cut to barge into Achiyamma’s bedroom and forcefully kiss her. Viewers called the sequence sexual assault. In another scene, she is undressed by a group of men at a political rally before the hero steps in to rescue her.
Achiyamma was marketed as fierce and fearless. That characterisation does not survive contact with the film. Her role, as critics noted, contributes almost nothing to the narrative beyond serving the hero’s emotional and visual needs.
Leaked messages, unverified but widely circulated, suggest Kapoor objected on set to certain camera angles and was ignored. Her reported message read: “I told him no b**b and waist shots.” She has not publicly confirmed the chats. The director has confirmed the edits.
The film also featured a dance sequence with Shruti Haasan and Kapoor performing before a crowd of intoxicated men. Buchi Babu defended item songs in interviews as a commercial necessity for “mass” audiences. That defence, as The News Minute observed, places the burden of regressive gender politics on the very communities the film claims to champion.
‘Peddi’ wanted to tell a story about caste dignity. It told a story about male gaze instead.
Baahubali: The Beginning (2015)
SS Rajamouli’s ‘Baahubali’ became India’s highest-grossing film at the time of its release and was celebrated globally. It was also the film that prompted critic Anna MM Vetticad to write a piece titled “The Rape of Avanthika.”
Tamannaah Bhatia played Avanthika, a skilled rebel warrior dedicated to freeing a captive queen. The film established her as capable and mission-driven. Then Shivudu arrived.
Without her consent, he removes her armour, dabs berries on her lips, and tattoos her body to “feminise” her appearance. The scene is shot as romance. Flowers fall. Music swells. The camera frames it as seduction. The audience is invited to find it charming.
Avanthika, the warrior, is replaced by Avanthika, the love interest. She is subsequently sidelined from the mission she spent her life preparing for. The hero completes it instead, because she now “belongs” to him.
Rajamouli later said critics “didn’t understand the context.” That response captures something important about how Tollywood handles this criticism: the problem is located in the audience, not the film.
Pushpa: The Rise (2021)
‘Pushpa’ opened the item song “Oo Antava” as a commentary on the male gaze. The lyrics, in multiple language versions, point out that men ogle women regardless of their age, size, or clothing. The intent, on paper, was feminist critique.
The execution was not.
The song featured Samantha Ruth Prabhu dancing for leering men while a camera cut repeatedly to her body. Lyrics in different versions compared women to desserts, grapes, and sugar. The sequence had every element of the format it claimed to indict.
As features editor Sowmya Rajendran wrote at the time: “Treating women as consumables ends up justifying the ogling and lechery.” The song was not a critique of the male gaze. It was the male gaze dressed in a feminist caption.
The Men’s Association in Andhra Pradesh filed a lawsuit over the song. Allu Arjun’s response was to say “it’s true,” meaning the song’s portrayal of men as uncontrollable lechers was accurate. That is not a defence of the song. That is an endorsement of the problem.
Samantha reportedly was not initially willing to perform the number. She was convinced by Arjun and director Sukumar. She reportedly received Rs 5 crore.
Arya 2 (2009)
Long before ‘Pushpa’, Tollywood had a well-established formula for romanticising male obsession. ‘Arya 2’, directed by Sukumar and starring Allu Arjun, built an entire film around a man who pursues a woman who does not want him.
Arya’s pursuit of Geetha is relentless and framed as devotion. Her rejections are ‘obstacles’, not answers. The film positions his persistence as proof of love rather than as a violation of her stated wishes.
This template repeats across dozens of Telugu films. Activists have documented the real-world consequences for years. In 2017, a female software engineer was murdered at a Chennai train station by a man who had stalked her for months. Campaigners pointed directly at cinema as the normaliser of the behaviour. As one petition stated, these films “continually reinforce the message that stalkers will ultimately be rewarded for their persistence.”
‘Arya 2’ was a hit. Sukumar went on to direct ‘Pushpa’.
Temper (2015)
‘Temper’, directed by Puri Jagannadh and starring Jr NTR, features a rape as its central plot device. A woman faces assault, and the story becomes about the corrupt police officer protagonist and how the crime reshapes his moral awakening.
The victim’s trauma is not the film’s concern. Her suffering exists to trigger the hero’s redemption arc. This is a pattern critics have named repeatedly in Telugu cinema: a woman’s violation as the catalyst for a man’s character development. She is the wound. He is the story.
The film was a massive commercial success. Its Telugu-language record for highest TRP at a television premiere stood for years. It had a Hindi remake as ‘Simmba’ and in Tamil as ‘Ayogya’. The formula travelled.
Puri Jagannadh has built a career on this structure. The woman exists at the intersection of spectacle and sacrifice. She is visible when the camera wants her body and invisible when the script needs someone to suffer.