As Peddi becomes the highest-grossing film in Tollywood this year, while simultaneously courting controversy over its treatment of women actors, I realised something interesting. Having somewhat given up on Telugu cinema for any sustained engagement with social reality, what occurred to me was that the best recent film about Hyderabad – the nerve centre of the Telugu states – is ironically not from Tollywood at all. It is the 2024 Malayalam film, Premalu (Loves), directed by Girish AD.
Hyderabad’s transformation at the turn of the century, under the impetus of Chandrababu Naidu, has unfolded at a dizzying pace and remains an unfinished project. As an engineering student in the late 2000s, I witnessed the city’s early metamorphosis first-hand. Having now lived away from Hyderabad for almost two decades, every return visit has been accompanied by a sense of gaping incredulity at its relentless expansion. Premalu, a love story about two Malayali youngsters fresh out of college, is, among many other things, an ode to this ascending Hyderabad – a city that is still nowhere close to reaching any kind of equilibrium.
It is a new Hyderabad that has emerged as a global technology centre and educational hub, drawing talent from across the country. Multiple convulsions of modernisation have produced an explosion of infrastructure alongside historic water bodies and ancient rock formations. Premalu is set amidst this churning, where a kind of first-world cosmopolitanism co-exists with a stubbornly conservative landed feudalism. It is heartening to see that, in the interstices of such contradictions, a new kind of sensitive storytelling may be nurtured. What truly distinguishes the film is Girish AD’s assured grasp of the class complications within contemporary relationships. It takes the romantic comedy genre seriously enough to not just explore its conflicts with a lightness and emotional intelligence but firmly situate it in the stark hierarchies of its urban landscape.
Hyderabad through migrant eyes
The pan-South Indian crossover film shows the different journeys of its protagonists, Sachin (Naslen K. Gafoor) and Reenu (Mamitha Baiju). Sachin can’t leave home fast enough, pinning his hopes on the UK after studying in Tamil Nadu, far from his perpetually feuding parents of meagre means. Reenu, by contrast, comes from a more well-off and affectionate household. Both are engineering students from mediocre colleges, but we see how Sachin is cruelly hemmed in by his state-board Malayalam-medium education when it comes to future job prospects, a predicament that disproportionately confronts lower-caste students.
The proliferation of engineering colleges in the South may have made professional degrees accessible to millions of young people, but the distance between qualification and job security remains as daunting as ever. There are whole universes to be explored in these mostly private institutes that have been churning out engineers at an extraordinary rate since the 1980s, a milieu that was the subject of Sekhar Kammula’s cult classic, Happy Days (2007).
Premalu begins with the fag end of Sachin’s engineering years and almost immediately signals that we’re in the hands of seasoned writers. There is an admirable tenderness in the way it captures both the momentous and the mundane in a phase of life when the faintest flirtation is all-consuming, rejection feels like the end of the world, and time stretches endlessly as one waits for life to begin. One of the film’s enduring qualities is its patient attention to apparently unimportant details: Sachin’s daily commutes, his visa anxieties at the post office, and delivering for his dad’s bakery. None of these scenes serves any obvious narrative purpose except to give us an intimate lay of the land, its aspirations, its food cultures and its small-town rhythms.
The same observational sensibility extends to Hyderabad. Reenu’s life as a fresher in the IT corporate world is rendered with equal acuity. The film gently mocks a work culture that places a premium on team-building and the performance of togetherness, while doing little to recognise individual strengths or encourage genuine growth. As the bottom-most cogs in the multi-national wheel, appearing busy is often a more important skill for employees than actual participation, and having a mind of one’s own risks upsetting one’s ‘office family’.
In the meantime, we follow the struggles and squabbles of Sachin and his doting confidant Amal Davis (Sangeeth Prathap) as they navigate the high-pressure mean streets of coaching centres, another distinct feature of Hyderabad. Sharing a dingy flat with too many mates, taking turns to sleep on the room’s only bed, earning minimum wages, and living hand-to-mouth are all thankfully dealt with gumption and humour, steering clear of any easy sentimentality that enjoys taking audiences hostage. Many of these scenes have an indelible quality, like when the boys’ paying guest struggles are set against the glittering city horizons, or when they dodge a shepherd and his goats negotiating the same construction-lined roads. In attending so carefully to lives, gestures and spaces that mainstream cinema usually treats as incidental, Premalu is reminiscent of Jacques Rancière’s idea of radical aesthetics, reorganising the “distribution of the sensible” by expanding the limits of what is visible and worthy of perception.
New intimacies, fearless youth
The film points to deeper questions about the tectonic shifts in the way we love and the travails of modern dating. Reenu struggles to relinquish an idealised image of romance in favour of a more illogical desire that actually moves her, settling instead into a limbo of indecision. It’s suggestive of an emotional dithering that can accompany the illusion of endless choice, where self-care and peace of mind become ends in themselves, often at the expense of embracing the discomfort that meaningful relationships demand. Then there’s Sachin with his real economic constraints and conflicting approach to love, the kind that is not domesticated by convenience or common sense. When Sachin finally says that he’s tired of waiting for the single tick to become a double tick, and the double tick to turn blue, he articulates a frustration that is only too familiar to anyone who has lived through the peculiar uncertainties of digital intimacy.
Premalu perceptively captures the blind spots that can accompany upward mobility, even among women whose own independence has been hard-won. When Sachin’s tenuous pursuit of Reenu is labelled as stalking by her friend, the accusation comes as a genuine jolt to the young man, not because the charge itself is illegitimate, but because it reveals the distance between two social worlds. It reflects a broader social shift in which women today have far greater autonomy over their lives than their mothers ever did, and yet the new language of autonomy and consent is mediated as much by class and caste as by gender.
It’s not that Tollywood hasn’t tackled transgressive love stories, but they have often culminated in gratuitous violence, if not outright tragedy. Premalu playfully acknowledges this trope in its closing sequence, which features producer Syam Pushkaran as the leader of a bumbling mercenary gang hired by the vengeful Aadi (Shyam Mohan). In doing so, it deftly undercuts the expectation that love must inevitably invite spectacular retribution.
Lastly, a noteworthy sequence occurs when Sachin and Amal accidentally topple an ancestral statue at the wedding where he first meets Reenu. On the surface, it is a delightfully comic scene in which all the principal characters make one another’s acquaintance. Yet it also seemed to hint at something more. The fallen statue appears almost as a metaphor for a fearless generation that no longer has the patience for the fetters of an earlier era, and is willing to run them down, quite literally, in pursuit of a life of its own. The growing opportunities afforded by education, employment and disposable incomes may not have dissolved older social hierarchies, but they have given first-generation graduates the confidence to question them rather than accept them as fate.
Girish AD’s expansive imagination of life, its possibilities as much as its discontents, in a rapidly transforming metropolis, is a consoling reminder that outsiders often possess the sharpest eye for the nuances of a society and its relations. The title itself has a certain ambiguity on whether it’s a Telugu or Malayalam coinage, and perhaps Premalu‘s greatest strength lies precisely in inhabiting that in-between space. It is this ability to belong to both worlds that makes it one of the most commendable cinematic tributes to Hyderabad in recent years.
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Sukruta Alluri is a PhD scholar from Hyderabad at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC).