3 min readHyderabadJun 5, 2026 06:01 PM IST
Peddi director Buchi Babu Sana has admitted that certain portions of the film did not work as intended, noting he was caught off guard by the intense backlash over the portrayal of Janhvi Kapoor’s character.
In an interaction with SCREEN, Buchi said, “I had not anticipated that the scenes would be perceived so negatively by audiences.” The director added that the experience would change how he approaches female characters going forward. “The idea was to showcase a playful romance story between Ram Charan and Janhvi Kapoor. However, we’ll be more careful and make better representations.”
What Peddi did and why it drew backlash
To understand why this acknowledgment matters, it helps to understand exactly what audiences objected to.
Peddi is a sports drama set in the Vizianagaram district of Andhra Pradesh, built around a story about nameless villages and the fight for identity and recognition. Ram Charan plays Peddi, a cricketer-for-hire from one of these unnamed settlements, whose journey forms the emotional core of the film. The second half, by most accounts, delivers on that ambition. It is the first half, specifically the romance track, where the film runs into serious trouble.
Also Read: Peddi ignores consent, normalises assault, yet pretends to be a story about dignity
The criticism centred on the film’s romance track. Janhvi Kapoor’s character Achiyyamma is introduced through a sequence where the camera lingers on her body for several minutes without showing her face. What follows is a courtship where the hero openly tells friends he will touch Achiyyamma without her consent, enters her space and does exactly that, and later tells her, after she slaps him, that assault was his way of expressing love. The film resolves this arc with her kissing him. At no point does anyone face a consequence.
Viewers, particularly women, argued that what Peddi was calling a playful romance was in reality a scene-by-scene normalisation of harassment, non-consent and the logic that a woman’s objection is an obstacle rather than a boundary. The criticism spread well beyond the Telugu film audience.
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A pattern, not an incident
The controversy around Peddi did not emerge without context. Buchi Babu Sana’s debut film Uppena, which released in 2021 and won the National Award for Best Feature Film in Telugu, featured Krithi Shetty in a romantic role. Shetty was 17 years old during filming. The film’s framing of the hero’s obsessive pursuit of her character drew some criticism at the time, though it was largely drowned out by the movie’s critical and commercial success. The conversation did not last long, and it did not appear to change how the director approached the writing of his female lead in his next project.
Peddi is a much bigger film, with a much larger audience and a much louder reaction. The scale of the backlash has made it harder to move past, which may be why Buchi Babu Sana is addressing it at all.
Janhvi Kapoor in Peddi.