One day, my husband casually wondered whether his village would even exist in a few decades. In that passing remark, I caught a melancholy that lingered long after the conversation ended. A nostalgia for a place that is still t/here, yet increasingly difficult to return to when life pulls us elsewhere. That moment expanded my understanding of what it means to belong to a place, and of what is at stake when a community fears losing its identity.
It was with this understanding that I watched the Telugu film Peddi.
My husband’s experience is not entirely comparable to Peddi’s. He does not occupy the kind of marginalised position the film depicts, and I do not mean to collapse those very different realities. But his reflections gave me a frame of reference through which the film’s central yearning — for recognition, for continuity, and the very right to exist as one’s own community — became emotionally legible. My husband has helped expand my world, giving me new ways of seeing and understanding experiences beyond my own.
Much has already been written about Peddi’s problematic representation of women and its treatment of consent . I won’t revisit those critiques here, but this review offers a thoughtful example. Suffice it to say, there are storytelling choices that are wholly unnecessary, distracting, and that substantially diminish what is, to me, its most compelling idea. Instead, I want to dwell on the idea that stayed with me long after the film ended.
At its heart, Peddi is about a village fighting for its rightful identity. Not merely being given a name, but everything that follows from being recognised: dignity, belonging, rights, and a place within the imagination of the state. The struggle is not just about daily survival but about being acknowledged in a way that counts and affords dignity, about identity. That is what makes the film’s central premise so powerful. And the train is at once a powerful narrative device and an evocative symbol.
As a media and communication scholar whose work draws on Science and Technology Studies (STS), I found myself thinking about the train in ways that extend beyond the film itself.
The train is, of course, a mode of transport. Yet, it does more than enable movement. Railways connect villages to markets, schools, hospitals, employment, and wider networks of mobility. They also connect communities to systems of administration and recognition. A railway station can put a village on the map. It can bring greater visibility, a recognised address, administrative connections, investment, and opportunities. It becomes part of the process through which a place is acknowledged by institutions that distribute resources and rights.
This is where STS offers a useful way of reading the film. Infrastructures are not neutral systems that simply enable movement. They are sociotechnical arrangements that shape who becomes visible, who is connected, who is counted, and who risks being forgotten.
The train, the railway line, the station in Peddi are part of the material infrastructure through which identity itself is produced and legitimised.
A village is more than a collection of houses and people. It is also a name on a map, an address in a database, a stop on a railway line, a place that institutions know how to locate (and send a gold medal to). Infrastructure helps transform a place from something inhabited into something acknowledged.
That, to me, is where the film is at its strongest.
Peddi stayed with me despite its flaws because it is about belonging, about whether a community is seen, remembered, and recognised. The train, railway line, and the station carry the possibility of visibility and being acknowledged.
It is a shame, then, that storytelling choices (such as the objectification of Achiamma) weaken the film’s political argument. A film about recognition, dignity, and the right of a marginalized community to be seen undermines itself when it refuses those same principles to its principal female character. These choices are wholly unnecessary. They distract from a reality many village(r)s continue to face 78 years after India’s independence and, ironically, reinforce another: even when communities secure recognition, it is often men who benefit from it while women continue to bear the brunt of invisibility. Across the country, communities still struggle for recognition, connectivity, and the basic infrastructures that make citizenship meaningful. That struggle, too, is intersectional. Recognition is not experienced equally; it is shaped by gender as much as it is by geography, caste, and class.
Dr Sai Amulya Komarraju 