The 2025 movie “Court – State vs. A Nobody” is a Telugu courtroom drama centering around the misuse of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offenses Act (POCSO)-2012 as a way to penalize consensual relationships between young adults. The plot revolves around a young man Chandu, a nineteen-year-old and Jabili, a young girl who is seventeen years and eight months. The two meet through phone calls, eventually falling in love and beginning to see each other outside just phone calls. During this period, we are introduced to a character known as Mangapati, a distant uncle who takes on the role of a patriarch in Jabili’s family after the passing of Jabili’s father and the retirement of Jabili’s grandfather.
The character of Mangapati has been heavily appreciated by a shockingly large part of Telugu audiences for disciplining the girls in his family. One scene in particular stands out, when Mangapati scolds a little girl and berates her parents for dressing her in a sleeveless frock for her birthday, claiming that a family’s reputation is based on the values of their women and girls. The message to be taken from the scene is how Mangapati’s first instinct upon seeing a mere eight-year old girl in a sleeveless dress, is to sexualize her. This depicts the patriarchal values regarding female purity that Mangapati possesses and upholds against the women and girls in his family.
Depiction of Caste Purity
When a woman of a certain caste-group, typically on the upper strata of the system, chooses a romantic or intimate partner outside her caste, it is viewed as a threat to the caste purity and leads to the emasculation of the men of that caste. This concept of caste-purity typically leads to honour-killings and other atrocious acts of repression towards inter-caste relationships. This is perceived to be the value upheld by Mangapati; that women are the carriers of honour of the family. Chandu hails from the Chakali caste (a traditional caste occupationally involved in washing clothes), which is at the receiving end of caste-oppression whereas Jabili hails from an upper caste. Although neither of their castes is explicitly stated, it is depicted visually through multiple scenes of Chandu’s mother ironing and washing clothes for a living, as well as the power and authority Mangapti holds over several lower-class individuals like milk man and even police officers and lawyers.
Mangapati learns of Jabili’s relationship with Chandu through CCTV footage of Chandu and Jabili entering a room at a wedding from her side of family, which she invited Chandu to join too. Again, Mangapati’s first inclination is to assume that any interaction between Chandu and Jabili inside the walls of the room, were sexual. This presumption that any intimacy between children is purely sexual is not only a mere perspective of adult sexual behaviour but also slightly pedophiliac and predatory in nature. As a form of repression of their inter-class and caste relationship and as a way to preserve their caste and family unit’s honour, Mangapati hires a lawyer to file multiple charges against Chandu including a case under the POCSO Act, the case being valid as Chandu is legally a major and adult while Jabili, only being seventeen years and eight months old, is a minor. Through this loophole, Mangapati accuses Chandu of multiple offenses such as IPC section 366A Procuration of a minor girl, among other various accusations including even rape.
Scenes depict Mangapati beating up Jabili which is classified as child abuse and corporal punishment, which is unlawful under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Rules 2007 but this goes unchecked by the law but Jabili’s status as a minor is only utilized to place Chandu behind bars in order to preserve caste and patriarchal purity of Jabili and her family.
Distorted Response of Telugu Audiences
The distorted response is mainly caused by the ignorance of Indian audience towards the message trying to be conveyed through the character of Mangapati, who is being acclaimed for his ways of keeping the girls and women in his family subservient, docile and above all pure. However the audience seems to perceive the preservation of patriarchal purity as protection of the child’s innocence when the truth could not be further from it. What people fail to understand is that Mangapati ran a background check on the boy before taking any action, only getting him arrested after it is revealed that he is the son of a washerwoman coming from a lower class background. This proves to show the Mangapati is not keen on “protecting the innocence of the child” but rather preserving the highly brahminical concept of caste-purity. In a situation if the boy might have hailed from a dominant hegemonic caste and class, Mangapati would have certainly extended Jabili’s hand in marriage once the two reached the legal age of marriage. At times, girls in India are even married off before the age of eighteen, and in such cases, the sexual abuse in marriage is condoned.
It is also important to consider that the audience of this movie are largely from the Telugu states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, states that still have rampant caste-oppression and atrocities. This audience is the same composition of people that hailed Amrutha’s father a hero in a case of the Miryalaguda Honour Killing referring to the murder of Pranay Kumar, a 23-year-old man from the oppressed Dalit community, occurred on 14 September 2018 in Miryalaguda, Telangana, India. Pranay was murdered in front of his wife, Amrutha Varshini, who was five months pregnant at the time. The young couple had married despite the social barriers of caste, and the murder was reportedly orchestrated by Amrutha’s father to preserve their caste honour. So it is no surprise that Mangapti is being hailed as a hero and “what this generation needs” by a large part of Court’s audience as it is the very same demographic that endorsed murder in the name of caste sanctity.
Another factor that comes into play is that Mangapati depicts an ideal patriarch for an upper-caste Hindu family as he upholds values of caste and patriarchal purity and will go to any extent to preserve the family’s honour even through violence and crime. He represents what a family man is for Indian and Telugu society, which despite the claims of castelessness are still casteist, patriarchal and status-driven. These are the values which are sustained by Mangapati in the film Court.
The Legal System as a Tool for Caste and Class Based Oppression
Mangapati hires Advocate Damodar to file multiple cases against Chandrashekar, including Section 354-A (sexual harassment), Section 366-A (procurement of a minor girl), Section 354-B (assault or use of criminal force to disrobe a woman), Section 354-C (voyeurism), Section 354-D (stalking), and Sections 11 and 12 of the POCSO Act.
The POCSO act (Protection of Children from Sexual Offenses Act-2012) is designed to protect minors and children from sexual offenses but in this context is being (mis)used to reinforce caste oppression. Upper-caste individuals like Mangapati may use their hegemonic status and influence to manipulate the legal system whereas lower-caste individuals like Chandrashekar may find themselves caught in the gears of a system that does not offer them the benefit of fair treatment. The legal system in this scenario is being used as a tool for caste-based oppression. In many real-life situations, the justice system has failed to serve its purpose of delivering fair and impartial judgments in cases involving lower-caste and Dalit individuals. Mangapati misuses his social and political power, leveraging his dominant caste status and ownership of a rice mill. Moreover, the police officials and lawyers who assisted him in filing false cases against Chandu are also upper-caste men who uphold the same casteist values. Mangapati even expresses his frustration to his father-in-law, arguing that times have changed from when his father-in-law could pronounce judgments like a Pedarayudu (a feudal landlord) at the Panchayats, and that he must now deal with lower castes through the judicial process. This highlights how feudal dominance of the upper castes continues to persist, now manifesting through their overall control of judicial proceedings.
The lawyer that is hired by Chandrashekar’s friends to defend him in court, ends up being bribed to not advocate for Chandu and instead let the prosecution win the case. Mangapathi and Advocate Damodar outright threaten the lawyer to not fight the case properly, to which he agrees partially due to the bride he offers and partially out of intimidation considering the power held by him. The monopolization of the justice system by high-caste individuals is shown through bribing witnesses and fabricating evidence by Mangapathi.
The movie offers a critique of the legal framework surrounding the POCSO Act, particularly how it criminalizes consensual relationships between young adults. The law sets a strict threshold, where a girl below 18 engaging in a consensual act with a partner only slightly older—such as 19 years—can lead to severe legal consequences. This rigid interpretation often disregards the complexities of real-life relationships and agency, punishing love and intimacy instead of protecting minors from actual exploitation of minors from adult teachers and older family members.
The POCSO Act is mostly misused in the Indian society by the upper-caste families to squash the consensual relationships between young adults and punish the lower-caste boy. Even if two children entered a relationship—one in, say, grade eight and the other in grade nine—by the time one of them graduated (completing the final school year after grade 12), the other would still be a minor, POCSO would still applied in this scenario of consensuality, leading to rigid legal consequences and punishment. In this case, relationship doesn’t always mean a sexual one but an intimate or a romantic relationship between young adults can also be punished severely using the POCSO act.
Intersectionalities of Caste in Gender
The film also depicts intersectionalities of caste and gender. Jabili, being part of an upper-caste family, in theory would be able to voice her perspective and have it validated by the justice system. However as a young girl she still faces oppression in the name of gender. Despite upper-caste women being powerful in terms of caste status, Jabili is still subjugated as she is silenced by the adult men in her family. Caste purity itself is an intersectionality of gender and caste as it is based on critiquing the moral values of women from upper-castes. The general perception is that upper-caste and brahmin women are pure and morally superior to lower-caste and dalit women, largely perceived to be devoid of all morals. This is evident in Mangapati shunning Chandu’s mother as an immoral woman for merely allowing her son and daughter to befriend Jabili, while in reality she is only a loving mother and kind parent. It is this concept of purity that leads to the oppression of women on both ends of the caste system. Dalit women are exploited and subjected to rape and other atrocious acts considered morally acceptable due to the subhuman status assigned to Dalits in the ideology of caste, while upper-caste women are subjugated by honour killings, cultural violence and other acts of endogamy enforcement as they are the carriers of caste purity.
Jabili, hailing from an upper-caste is faced with violence from Mangapati as a form of condemnation of her relationship with Chandrashekar. She is beaten up and locked up, while her lover is put behind bars for daring to have entered a relationship with her. The brutality faced by Jabili is a form of preserving caste purity and punishing her for having seemingly lost it after her relationship with Chandrashekar. Mangapathi’s actions highlight the oppressive nature of caste-based control, where an individual’s, particularly women’s personal choices around relationships and marriage, are subjected to strict scrutiny. The brutality Jabilli faces is not just physical; it also symbolizes the the emotional and psychological torment imposed by rigid patriarchal and casteist social structures that dictate how individuals, particularly women, are expected to behave.
This goes on to show the dehumanizing nature of caste-based oppression towards women, either being seen and treated as subhuman or raised to a status of sanctity that is impossible to live up to. In conclusion, the film Court: State vs A Nobody has sparked widespread discussion and debate, encouraging critical reflection on caste and gender dynamics. The narrative of the film has certainly delivered a compelling storyline and has created a wave of intellectual exchange.
Sahitya Netha is a 9th Grader from Glendale Academy, Hyderabad
