Bigg Boss Malayalam Season 8 is barely two weeks old and already has a controversy that has nothing to do with the contestants inside the house.

Artist Sijin Gopinath has accused the show's costume team, and by extension Asianet, of lifting his artwork for a shirt Mohanlal wore during a recent weekend episode. He posted the allegation on Facebook, alongside images of his own piece next to a photo of the host's outfit.

Mohanlal's weekend looks have built a small fandom of their own over the years. Each season, fans wait for the specially designed outfits he wears when he steps in to host the eviction and review segments. This time, though, the design has drawn a very different kind of attention.

Gopinath says the shirt draws from his work titled 'Global Peace,' a project he spent close to three years building by walking the streets of the UAE and sketching people from different countries he met along the way. In his post, he was careful to separate the man from the outfit.

"It's not against Mohanlal sir," he wrote. "My question is for the fashion, design and Asianet team behind this design. Taking three years of an artist's work without permission and modifying it isn't right."

He added that he doesn't claim ownership over the broader idea of painting people together or celebrating diversity, that's not anyone's alone, he said. But he argues that recognisable faces, expressions and the visual language of an existing artwork don't stop being someone's original work just because a few details get tweaked.

The post has picked up a fair amount of support in its comments, with several users backing Gopinath's version of events and questioning how a design like this made it to a national broadcast without a credit or a licence check.

Neither Asianet nor the styling team behind the episode has responded publicly to the allegation yet, and there's been no word from Mohanlal's camp either. So for now this is one artist's claim, backed by side-by-side images and a fairly detailed account of his own process, against a channel that has stayed quiet.

Whether Gopinath escalates this beyond a Facebook post, and whether Asianet says anything at all, will decide how long this stays a talking point and how far it travels beyond Kerala's entertainment pages.