Mukesh Gowda (Nihar) Bigg Boss Telugu 10 Biography: Age, Family & Photos

Known for

Television and film actor

Active since

2016 (Agni Sakshi, as a junior artist)

Also known as

Nihar — his screen name · Nihar Mukesh, his film credit · Nihar B Mukesh on Facebook · Rishi, after Guppedantha Manasu · ముకేష్ గౌడ in Telugu · ಮುಕೇಶ್ ಗೌಡ in Kannada

Age

31 (born 8 November 1994)

Hometown

Mysuru, Karnataka

Currently on

Bigg Boss Telugu 10 (Star Maa · JioHotstar, from 6 September 2026)

Film

Guppedantha Manasu (2020–2024) · Theertharoopa Thandeyavarige (2026)

Instagram

@_mukesh_gowda5

Facebook

@mukesh.malyur

Vote for Mukesh Gowda in the Bigg Boss Telugu 10 poll → Unofficial fan poll on our homepage; the vote that counts runs in the JioHotstar app.

Mukesh Gowda is one of the ten celebrity contestants in the Bigg Boss Telugu 10 house. For four years he was Rishi, the mathematics professor in Guppedantha Manasu, and in 2022 that made him the lead of the most-watched show on Telugu television. He is 31, he grew up in Mysuru without a word of Telugu, and he now signs his film work under a different name.

Who is Mukesh Gowda?

He is a television and film actor who came to Telugu from Kannada serials, played one character so well that people in Hyderabad still call him by it, and then walked away from the show at the height of it because his back gave out.

He has 309,000 followers on Instagram, where the display name is simply NIHAR. There is no film family behind him. His father spent his working life at the state milk federation and his mother told relatives her son was doing a course while he was actually going to theatre class.

Ask him what Guppedantha Manasu was, in one word, and he does not give you one word. “The manasu that gave me my life.”

Mukesh Gowda Bigg Boss age and date of birth

Mukesh Gowda was born on 8 November 1994, which makes him 31 as Bigg Boss Telugu 10 begins. His 32nd birthday falls on 8 November, inside the season.

He was born in Chamarajanagar, the town his mother and father both come from, about 60 km from Mysuru. The family moved to Mysuru when he was small and he has called it home since. He now lives in RR Nagar in Bengaluru, having started out in JP Nagar when he first came looking for work.

Mukesh Gowda’s real name, and why he is now Nihar Mukesh

His name is Mukesh. Nihar is the screen name he took while moving into films, and he has been open about all three reasons.

The first is an advertisement. The anti-tobacco film that plays before every release in an Indian cinema has a young man called Mukesh in it, and for the better part of a decade it followed him around. Friends would turn and look at him in the dark. He would think twice before giving his name to a stranger. He stopped walking into halls on time on purpose. “Go and see whether Mukesh has gone,” he used to tell them. “Then I’ll come in.”

The second is astrology. He was told Nihar would suit him better. The third was timing. He was moving from television into films and decided that was the moment to change.

Mukesh Bigg Boss, Nihar Mukesh and Rishi are the same person

He is not precious about which one you use. “Call me Nihar, call me Nihar Mukesh,” he says. Both are right. His film is credited to Nihar Mukesh, his Facebook profile reads Nihar B Mukesh, his Instagram just says NIHAR, and the Bigg Boss Telugu 10 line-ups all carry Mukesh Gowda.

Then there is the fourth name, which is not his at all. Across Andhra Pradesh and Telangana he is Rishi, and he has stopped correcting anyone. People suggested he should have taken that one as his screen name instead, and he admits he considered it. When the host of a Telugu podcast asked him in February 2026 whether to call him Mukesh or Rishi, he chose Rishi.

Mukesh Rishi and Rishi the Kannada actor are different people

Three other people carry pieces of his name and none of them is him. Mukesh Rishi, born in 1956 in Kathua, is the Hindi and Telugu character actor who has spent thirty years playing villains, and his name is the exact sum of Mukesh Gowda’s two. Rishi, the Kannada actor of Operation Alamelamma, is Monish Nagaraj. And an Instagram account under the handle @mukesh_gowda belongs to a different man of the same name.

Nihar Mukesh Gowda images and photos

The studio portrait doing the rounds since his Bigg Boss Telugu 10 name went out.

The hair is longer than the Rishi years. He kept it that way for the film.

This is the frame his Bigg Boss Telugu 10 profile card is built from.

309,000 people follow the account. The name on it is NIHAR.

With a fellow actor, on an outdoor shoot.

Where is Mukesh Gowda from?

Mysuru, Karnataka. His native place is Chamarajanagar, where both his parents are from and where he was born, but the family shifted to Mysuru early and he did all his schooling there. Every audition of his early twenties meant a ride from Mysuru to Bengaluru, three and a half hours each way on the old road before the highway was built.

Nihar Mukesh’s education and college

He went to Gnana Ganga Vidyapeeta in Mysuru, and he was not a good student. He says so himself, repeatedly.

In class eight his desk was moved about twelve times because he would not stop talking. In class nine the school gave up and sat him alone on the dais at the front for a full year. In class ten they tried the opposite and put him in the middle of five benches of girls, the only boy there. He enjoyed all of it. He also wrote his name on every bench he sat at, so the juniors coming after him would know it.

He joined engineering after school and left it. Studying was never going to be his route. He finished a different degree instead, under the University of Mysore. Along the way the inter-college fashion shows gave him his first stage, and two trophies he still counts: Best Smile, and Mr Mesmer.

Nihar Mukesh’s career before fame

There were no opportunities. That is his own summary of the beginning. He tried every audition anyone in Kannada television was holding, riding up from Mysuru for each one.

The first job came in 2016, on a big Kannada serial called Agni Sakshi. He was called for a character, arrived, and found out it was a junior artist part: stand there, hold a photo frame. He was staying with a friend in Whitefield and shooting in RR Nagar, which is two hours across Bengaluru, and he did that ride with a bag of costumes strapped behind him on the bike for three straight days because they kept pushing his shot. The make-up man ran a powder puff over him and sent him off. When it aired he was a side profile in a wide shot, no close-up, after he had told every friend he had to watch.

He got 1,000 rupees a day plus 100 for conveyance. Junior artists were on 500 to 700, he says; it was a big serial, so they paid more. Three days came to 3,300 rupees and it is still the salary he talks about. He bought his mother a silver ring with part of it, put 101 rupees in the hundi at the Chamundeshwari temple, and spent what was left on a sack of rice and a packet of wheat flour for a charitable trust near his house. He has a photograph of it, kept in front of the god at home.

Then a year and a half nobody knows about. He anchored a one-hour song-dedication show on Sinchana TV, a Bengaluru local channel, taking calls and playing what people asked for.

Mukesh Gowda serials list and TV shows

The break came in 2017 and it came sideways. He had been selected for one serial, that serial got delayed, and the same production house had a running show whose hero was being replaced. They asked him to step in. He said yes and was a lead the next day.

A call from Annapurna Studios brought him to Telugu, and Prema Nagar on ETV was where he landed without a single word of the language. Kannada sets recorded live sound, so he had learnt every line and acted it with the emotion built in. Telugu sets ran on prompting, someone feeding him the words mid-take, and he hated it. He wrote Telugu dialogue out in Kannada script and read it back to himself. For a week he lived expecting to be sent home. In the second week it clicked.

Rishi in Guppedantha Manasu

Guppedantha Manasu ran on Star Maa from 7 December 2020 to 31 August 2024, 1,168 episodes. He played Rishendra Bhushan, the managing director and mathematics professor of a college, opposite Raksha Gowda as his student Vasudhara. In September 2022 it was the top general entertainment show on Telugu television, and it had been past 14 TRP points the previous winter. Asked about beating Karthika Deepam, he confirmed it happened once, and added that the two were in different prime slots.

The character shouts at the heroine in most scenes, and he was convinced when he started that audiences would hate him for it. He puts the opposite result down to the job. Everyone who has sat in a college classroom has had a crush on a lecturer, and the show was a college story, so college students came to it in numbers nobody planned for. It was dubbed into Kannada and the same thing happened there. He opened Instagram to a wall of messages. Girls came to the college location with roses. One kissed him and left.

He describes going in and out of the part like a switch. Between takes he was Mukesh, sprawled somewhere laughing with whoever was nearest. The director would call “Rishi, ready?” and something else arrived, eyes open, not blinking, angry. He does not know whether a character like it will come again in ten years.

Why did Mukesh Gowda leave Guppedantha Manasu?

His back gave out. Two other explanations have circulated since, that he left for a film and that he fought with someone, and he has denied both every time he has been asked.

In November 2023 he was doing squats under heavy weight, lost his balance and fell. The MRI showed a bulged disc. The doctors told him to rest properly.

The timing could not have been worse. He had a film going at the same time. Geetha Shankaram, a Telugu one, had its muhurat in September 2023 and started shooting that October, and it ran October to December. So the obvious story wrote itself, and people inside the industry assumed he had dropped the serial to free up dates for it.

He could not stand or sit through a shooting day. Serial units work to daily targets, fifteen or sixteen scenes on two cameras, and he was the reason they were slipping. Recovery took five to six months.

He blames nobody for it. He never had a fight with a director in six years in Telugu, and he singles out Kumar, who directed the show, as someone he was close to and who never once raised his voice at him. From the first day the unit called him “hero” and on his last day they still did. The producer drove from Hyderabad to Mysuru to see him. Neither the production nor the channel asked him a single question about it.

The show wrote in another character while he was out. Viewers did not accept it, and the anger came back at him: comments, and people on his own set. That is the part he says knocked him flat, because the same audience had spent years finding him wherever he stood. His response was to say nothing at all, in public, to anyone. “Patience is the key,” he says. The film, he reckons, has given them their answer. He returned once he had recovered, shot about three more months, and the character was given a proper ending.

Nihar Mukesh movies list and upcoming films

The film that reached cinemas first was Theertharoopa Thandeyavarige, on 1 January 2026. It is a Kannada family drama written and directed by Ramenahalli Jagannath and produced by Jai Chamundeshwari Productions, and it is where the Nihar Mukesh credit first appears.

It is not the first he signed. That was Geetha Shankaram, a Telugu film with him as the lead opposite Priyanka Sharma, directed by Rudra and produced by K. Devanandh. Its first look came out in November 2023, he called it his first film at the time, and a song has been released since.

Rachana Inder plays Akshara opposite him. Sithara plays Janaki, his character’s mother, with Rajesh Nataranga, Ravindra Vijay, Ajith Hande and Ashwitha R. Hegde in support, and Joe Costa scoring. The story is a son estranged from his single mother who is forced back through the truth about his missing father, and he took it because he recognised the shape of it. A young man who cannot get along with his mother is where Guppedantha Manasu started too.

He did more than act in it. With four producers on board somebody had to carry the responsibility and he volunteered, bringing the investors in, putting them in a room with the director, and staying involved from pre-production through to the release. Five or six schedules, each in a different place: Chikkamagaluru, Mudigere and the Sakleshpur border, then Bengaluru, Mysuru, Kerala and Cherrapunji in Meghalaya, with thirty of the days in Karnataka. It took ₹5.32 crore at the box office.

The plan had been a simultaneous Telugu release, and he wanted it more than the Kannada one, because Telugu is where the audience that made him is. The budget had already overrun and the promotion spend on top of it did not work out. Speaking in February 2026, he said a Telugu dub and an Amazon release were both on the way.

Ask him to choose between Sandalwood and Tollywood and he picks Sandalwood, then explains the choice away immediately. He started in Kannada, Kannada is why Telugu called him, and he cannot look at either industry as the smaller one.

Mukesh Gowda in Bigg Boss Telugu 10

He is in the house as one of the ten celebrity contestants of Bigg Boss Telugu 10, which premieres on Star Maa at 7 pm on Sunday 6 September 2026 and streams on JioHotstar. Nagarjuna Akkineni hosts his eighth season. The theme is Dasavatharam, ten avatars for the tenth season, and six of the sixteen contestants came in through Agnipariksha 2 rather than from the industry.

It is his first reality show, and the first time since 2024 that Telugu audiences get him live and unscripted rather than in reruns and fan edits.

Mukesh Gowda’s fellow Bigg Boss Telugu 10 contestants

The other nine celebrities include Chaithra Rai, who like him came to Telugu from Kannada serials and led Ashta Chamma, and Debjani Modak, the Kolkata actress who learnt Telugu on the set of Ennenno Janmala Bandham. From film there are Temper Vamsi and Krishnudu, and from television Varshini Sounderajan, the Jabardasth anchor. The full line-up, celebrities and the six Agnipariksha names together, is on our Bigg Boss Telugu 10 contestants page.

Bigg Boss Telugu 10 voting for Mukesh Gowda

Once nominations start in the week after launch, the official vote runs free in the JioHotstar app while that week’s window is open. Our Bigg Boss Telugu Season 10 voting page carries each week’s nominees, the counts as they move and the eliminations as they happen, and you can back him in our unofficial fan poll there too.

Mukesh Gowda’s marriage, wife and girlfriend

He is not married and he is not in a relationship. There are no marriage photos because there has been no marriage.

He was in one before, with an actress in the Kannada industry, and he was asked for her name twice in the same interview. Both times he declined. “Why the name, leave it,” he said. He put the fault on both sides. His own answer to everything then was that he needed time, for his career and for his finances, and the time was the one thing he could not give. She has moved on; asked who the “lucky girl” was, he corrected the host to unlucky.

Marriage is what comes next rather than another relationship, but not one arranged over his head. It has to be someone he actually likes. Asked what he is looking for, he gave an answer he says he has carried since he was a boy. He wants to fall in love with a woman’s eyes rather than her looks. After that, trust, patience, and someone who will stand next to him when it goes wrong.

Mukesh Gowda and Raksha Gowda

The interviewer told him Rishi and Vasu drew several times the fan pages a Bigg Boss couple does, and a good number of those pages decided the two actors were living together and about to marry. In four years in Bengaluru he and Raksha Gowda met once, on her birthday. They were close on set in Hyderabad, close enough to have had a fight so loud the whole unit came over to break it up, which they ignored, and close enough not to speak for two or three months afterwards while still playing a romance. “There is nothing between us,” he says. “It is friendship, that’s all.”

They are still friends. When a podcast put him up to prank-calling her with an “I love you” in February 2026, she saw through it within a couple of minutes.

Mukesh Gowda’s family

Father, mother and siblings

His father worked at the Karnataka Milk Federation, the cooperative behind Nandini, as an extension officer. Forty villages were his responsibility. He travelled 60 to 70 kilometres each way by bus, left at seven in the morning and came home at nine or ten at night, and that is most of what his son remembers of him from childhood. There was not much time in the day left over.

When Nihar was 19 his father was paralysed. A man who had been healthy the week before could not get up, could not speak, could not use his hands. “Like a newborn baby,” is how he describes it. It is the line he returns to when asked for the biggest turning point in his life. He had been the kind of college boy who would not walk to a shop if sent, and overnight he was doing the medicines, the ration and the bills. He learnt at 19 what it costs to hold a family up.

His father died some time after attending a Star Maa Parivaar Awards ceremony with him. His first film is dedicated to him. Theertharoopa Thandeyavarige is Kannada for the way a letter to a father used to be addressed, and he wanted the man in a theatre seat for it more than he wanted anything else about the release.

His mother is the reason any of the rest happened. She never once scolded him after a parents’ meeting, however long the list of complaints; she would hear the teacher out, correct him quietly and leave. When college seats ran out she went to the administration herself and asked for one, and she begged them. When he decided to become an actor she did not argue and did not set a condition, and told relatives he was doing a course while he went to Rangabhoomi. And through his father’s years in bed, while her son was away in Bengaluru chasing work, she did all of it: the feeding, the lifting, the diapers.

He has never spoken publicly about brothers or sisters, and nothing on the record establishes any.

Interesting facts about Nihar Mukesh Gowda

• Kichcha Sudeep is the reason he wanted to act. He once lived 600 to 800 metres from Sudeep’s house in JP Nagar and walked past it constantly hoping to catch him. When a car finally came out he followed it on his bike to a signal he knew every vehicle had to stop at. Sudeep, on a video call with his wife, rolled the window down and said “careful, buddy”, then gave him the photograph.
• His friends called him Junior Sudeep. For one birthday they printed a cake with half his face and half Sudeep’s, made masks of it and wore them to the cutting.
• He started as the lowest-paid artist on Guppedantha Manasu and finished as the highest, with the channel and the production both paying him.
• Fans sent so many clothes that he did not shop for over eighteen months and had to build a second open wardrobe in another room to hold them. Some still have the tags on.
• He will not spend 800 rupees on a coffee. “I’m fine with the one for ten or fifteen.”
• He does not cry. When it does come, he says, it comes in the shower, because he cannot stand to look at his own face doing it.
• The song he cannot stop playing is “Tulasi”, a Kannada mashup of a Purandara Dasa composition. He sang two lines of it on camera and then said that was not really singing.
• Raksha Gowda’s account of him, given while he was sitting there: very open, a very big foodie who will finish your plate on set, and a man who forgives but does not forget. Hurt him once and he keeps it.
• If he had not acted, he would have gone into construction. It is still the thing he likes talking about.

Mukesh Gowda Instagram and social media accounts

Two accounts are his, and both were checked. Follower counts are a snapshot taken on 6 September 2026.

• Instagram — @_mukesh_gowda5: 309,000 followers, 345 posts. The display name on it is NIHAR.
• Facebook — Nihar B Mukesh.

He has no verified YouTube channel of his own. Accounts carrying his name that these two do not connect to are not his, and there are a lot of them: the handles built around Rishi and Vasu are fan pages, and at least one account under the plain name Mukesh Gowda belongs to somebody else entirely.

Nihar Mukesh wikipedia

He does not have a Wikipedia article of his own yet. He does appear on two, as a credited cast member: the Guppedantha Manasu page lists him as Rishendra Bhushan, and the Theertharoopa Thandeyavarige page lists him, under the name Nihar Mukesh, as Pruthvi.

The wiki-style facts in one line: Mukesh Gowda, credited on screen as Nihar Mukesh, born 8 November 1994 in Chamarajanagar and raised in Mysuru, 31, a Kannada and Telugu television actor and Kannada film lead, known as Rishi from Guppedantha Manasu and for his debut film Theertharoopa Thandeyavarige, and a celebrity contestant on Bigg Boss Telugu 10.

Mukesh Gowda FAQ

How old is Mukesh Gowda?

He is 31. He was born on 8 November 1994, so he turns 32 during the Bigg Boss Telugu 10 season.

Where is Mukesh Gowda from?

Mysuru, Karnataka. He was born in Chamarajanagar, his family’s native town, and grew up and went to school in Mysuru. He lives in Bengaluru now.

What is Nihar Mukesh’s serial name?

Rishi. He played Rishendra Bhushan, called Rishi, in Guppedantha Manasu on Star Maa from 2020 to 2024. Before that he led two Kannada serials, Nagakannike and Nagamandala, and his Telugu debut was Prema Nagar on ETV.

Is Mukesh Gowda married?

No. He is unmarried and, by his own account in February 2026, not in a relationship.

Who is Mukesh Gowda’s wife?

He does not have one. He has spoken about a past relationship with an actress in the Kannada industry but has declined to name her, and he says marriage rather than another relationship is what he expects next.

Which TV show is Mukesh Gowda in?

Bigg Boss Telugu 10, from 6 September 2026 on Star Maa and JioHotstar.

What is Nihar Mukesh Gowda’s Instagram ID?

@_mukesh_gowda5, where he posts under the name NIHAR, with 309,000 followers as of 6 September 2026.

More Season 10 profiles

• Chaithra Rai — television actress
• Debjani Modak — television actress
• Krishnudu — film actor
• Naresh Jabardasth — comedian and jabardasth team leader
• Sudheer Reddy — anchor and podcast interviewer
• Temper Vamsi — film actor
• Varshini Sounderajan — television anchor and actress