The narrative brilliance of these storylines is that the fault is rarely one-sided. Here is how the blame is typically distributed:
Trivikram Srinivas’s film directly addresses the Tappu Evaridi Chelli question. Here, the heroine’s brother is a faction leader. The romantic storyline is almost secondary to the debate: Does a sister need her brother’s permission to choose a husband? The film’s climax features a lengthy dialogue where the brother finally admits: “Tappu nadi, chelli. Nadi.” (The fault is mine, sister. Mine.) This was a watershed moment, shifting the blame from the lover to the paranoid brother.
In Telugu folklore, cheli or chelli appears in Janapada geethalu (folk songs) — often elopement stories.
Modern literature (Yandamuri Veerendranath, Kodavatiganti Kutumba Rao) uses such relationships to critique feudal family structures, where the chelli is property.