Puneet Issar played Duryodhan in the show. (Photo: Sony TV, IMDb)BR Chopra and Ravi Chopra’s cult show Mahabharat was a big sensation when it first premiered in 1988. And its popularity grew with every passing episode. While the team behind the show got massive love from the audience, they also sometimes had to endure some difficulties that came with the series.
In a 2020 episode of The Kapil Sharma Show, Puneet Issar, who played Duryodhan in Mahabharat, revealed that BR Chopra, Ravi Chopra, himself and a few other actors who were a part of the Draupadi disrobing scene had to pay a price for doing their job so well on-screen.
“Someone told us, ‘Aapke naam ka warrant nikla hai, non-bailable warrant (Someone has filed a case against you in the court, and there’s now a non-bailable warrant issued against you). Someone from Benares had said that the disrobing of Drapuadi that you did has caused hurt to us,” Puneet told Kapil while recounting the incident.
The actor said the lot of them were flabbergasted, but somehow BR Chopra and Ravi Chopra got the case done with. But the more surprising bit came later, 28 years later to be precise.
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Puneet said, “28 yrs later the case had opened again, and we had to hire a lawyer to represent us. Turns out, uss bande ko bas photo khichani thi (That guy who filed the case against us, he only wanted a picture with the actors).” The actor said that by the time they were done sorting through all this mess, he thought they should have filed those cases against Ved Vyas, as he was the one who had written the story in the first place: “Agar kisi ko pakdana hai to Ved Vyas ko pakdo, usne likhi hai.”
Renu Chopra, late Ravi Chopra’s wife, who had also graced Kapil’s show, opened up about the time they had gone to pitch the idea of the show to Doordarshan. She said that the head at the time had doubts about Rahi Masoom Raza writing the script of Mahabharat, stating that how could he, being a Muslim, know anything about the Hindu epic. However, Ravi Chopra and BR Chopra insisted that Raza is a great writer and that they would not do the show without him.
Mahabharat’s original episodes were telecast from 1988 to all the way until June 1990. The show had 94 episodes in total, and was helmed by BR and Ravi Chopra. It was penned by Pandit Narendra Sharma and Rahi Masoom Raza.
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