Lily Da Viyahਲਿਲੀ ਦਾ ਵਿਆਹ

About the book

Lily Da Viyah — listed in literary histories under its fuller name Var Ghar or Lily Da Viah, translated as "Lily's Marriage" — is a full-length Punjabi play by Ishwar Chander Nanda, the professor-playwright of Lahore who is remembered as the father of modern Punjabi drama. Written in the late 1920s and published in book form in 1930, it is one of only a handful of full-length plays Nanda completed, alongside Subhadra (1922) and Social Circle (1953).

The play's premise is deliberately domestic. A young woman, Lily, is at the centre of the drama, and her wedding becomes the ground on which two ideas of marriage collide: the older generation's insistence on an arranged match, and the younger generation's claim to a love marriage. The title itself announces the subject — a wedding — and the action turns on who gets to decide how and to whom the bride is given away. In this, the play follows the line of Henrik Ibsen, the dramatist Nanda most admired in his mature years: the family drawing-room as the stage for a clash between inherited custom and individual conscience.

One clarification matters for readers meeting Nanda for the first time. The distinction of being the first modern Punjabi play belongs not to Lily Da Viyah but to Nanda's maiden one-act, Suhag (1913), later published as Dulhan (The Bride). Written for a playwriting competition instituted by Norah Richards at Dyal Singh College, Lahore, Suhag was adjudged the best entry and staged, and it was the first Punjabi play written in a realistic style on the Western model. Lily Da Viyah, written some fifteen years later, is best read as the work of a playwright who had outgrown his apprenticeship and was now confident enough to take a controversial social theme head-on.

The timing matters. By 1930 Lahore was the cultural capital of undivided Punjab, and the city's colleges were producing a generation that read Ibsen and Shaw alongside the folk tales of its villages. Nanda, himself a professor of English at Dyal Singh College, belonged to the bridge between these worlds. Writing a Punjabi play that took its structure from European realism while drawing its manners, speech and ceremonies from Punjabi homes was itself a statement: that the modern Indian stage need not be in English, and that the quarrels of ordinary families were worthy of serious drama.

Themes

The play's central contrast is between love marriage and arranged marriage — the arranged match defended as family duty, community honour and the wisdom of elders, and the love match defended as the right of the young to choose their own lives. Literary historians describe the play as an outright plea for love marriages against the orthodox practice of arranged ones, and note that, much like Ibsen, Nanda sides with youth against age in this generational conflict.

Beneath the marriage question lies a second theme: the education of the Punjabi middle class. Nanda's plays consistently stage college-educated young men and women carrying new ideas into homes run on old ones, and Lily Da Viyah is no exception. The friction between the two generations is not presented as villainy on either side; it is presented as the cost of a society in transition, where neither the elders' certainties nor the young's freedoms come without a price.

The play also shows Nanda's characteristic method. He writes in the colloquial Punjabi of everyday speech, uses irony and satire to make his intentions unmistakable, and sets his realistic, Western-style structure inside unmistakably Punjabi material — wedding customs, family councils, folk songs and ceremonies. It is this blending, contemporary critics noted, that gave his plays their Punjabi character while keeping them formally modern.

Critics have noted a characteristic restraint in Nanda's treatment of such themes. He does not turn the elders into villains or the young into saints; the older generation's fears about family honour are given their due, just as the younger generation's hunger for self-determination is. What tips the balance is the direction of history itself — the quiet suggestion, running through his plays, that custom must eventually answer to conscience. It is this refusal to preach, letting the argument work itself out through character and situation, that keeps his plays actable rather than merely readable.

About the author

Ishwar Chander Nanda (1892–1965) was born in Gurdaspur district of Punjab and spent his working life as a professor at Dyal Singh College, Lahore, where he had himself been a student of Norah Richards. He took to playwriting after his one-act Suhag won Richards's 1913 competition and was staged, and he went on to write the plays that made modern Punjabi drama: Bebe Ram Bhajni (1914), Subhadra (1922), the Shakespeare adaptation Shamu Shah (1928), Lily Da Viyah (1930), and the late satire Social Circle (1953), along with collections of one-act plays. After the Partition of 1947 he settled in New Delhi, where he lived until his death. His full biography is recorded in the Jugti Kosh people entry for Ishwar Chander Nanda.

Legacy

Lily Da Viyah has a secure place in the canon of early Punjabi drama as one of the first full-length Punjabi plays to treat marriage as a social question rather than a romantic backdrop. Together with Subhadra's treatment of widow remarriage, it established the pattern of Nanda's work: take a lived social problem, stage it in a recognisable Punjabi household, and let the argument play out through character rather than sermon.

The play's importance is also historical. With plays like this, Nanda freed Punjabi drama from the religious and mythological themes that had dominated it and gave the Punjabi stage a modern, realistic grammar — one that later playwrights such as Sant Singh Sekhon, Balwant Gargi and Harcharan Singh inherited and transformed. Studied in Punjabi universities and revived by theatre groups, Lily Da Viyah remains evidence that the marriage debate now so familiar in Punjabi popular culture was already being argued on stage nearly a century ago.

For today's reader, Lily Da Viyah carries an extra charge. The arranged-marriage debate it staged in 1930 never left Punjabi life; it travelled with the diaspora to Canada, Britain and beyond, where it is argued in every generation anew. Nanda's play is therefore not a museum piece but an early chapter of an unfinished argument — and a reminder that the Punjabi stage, nearly a century ago, was already giving that argument a public voice.