Did you know Arun Govil played Lakshman in Jeetendra’s film Lav Kush after playing Lord Rama in Ramayan?

Arun Govil, who is best remembered for playing Lord Rama in Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan, played Lakshman in a 1997 film titled Lav Kush, in which Jeetendra was seen as Lord Rama.

The successful rerun of Ramanand Sagar’s 1987 television series Ramayan has made Arun Govil, who played Lord Rama, a household name all over again. Did you know that a decade after the popular show, the actor appeared in a film on the epic Ramayana, this time as Lakshman?

Arun Govil and Jeetendra in Lav Kush.

Arun played Lakshman in V Madhusudhan Rao’s 1997 film Lav Kush, which starred Jeetendra and Jaya Prada as Lord Rama and Sita, respectively. A still of the film, featuring Arun and Jeetendra, has surfaced online.

 

Recently, Arun wrote on Twitter that his contribution to the television in the industry was never acknowledged by either the central government or any of the state governments. He said that though he belonged to Uttar Pradesh, he was never felicitated by the state government. He never got any recognition from the Maharashtra government either, despite living in Mumbai for the last 50 years.

After Ramayan, Arun reprised the role of Lord Rama in Ramanand Sagar’s Luv Kush, which was a follow-up to the 1987 series. The show, known as Uttar Ramayan when it first aired in 1988, is an adaptation of Uttara Kanda, the last book of the epic Ramayana.

The rerun of Ramayan on DD National came to an end earlier this month, after registering historic ratings. It garnered the highest-ever rating for a Hindi General Entertainment Channel (GEC) programme since 2015 when the Broadcasting Audience Research Council (BARC) started measuring the television audience.

In its final week, Ramayan stoked a controversy, when viewers alleged that crucial scenes from the show were edited out by Doordarshan. However, Prasar Bharti CEO Shashi Shekhar clarified that there was no truth to these claims. “There have been no cuts, they were not part of the original production,” he wrote on Twitter.

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