Ishwar Chander Nandaਈਸ਼ਵਰ ਚੰਦਰ ਨੰਦਾ

Life

Ishwar Chander Nanda was born on 30 September 1892 in Gurdaspur district of Punjab, then part of British India. He received his early education in Punjab and went on to take a B.A. Honours degree from Dyal Singh College, Lahore, where he came under the influence of Norah Richards — the Irish theatre enthusiast, wife of a visiting professor at the college, who ran drama activities and playwriting competitions that drew many young Punjabi writers toward the stage. Nanda followed his bachelor's degree with an M.A. in English from Punjab University, Lahore.

After completing his studies, Nanda joined the teaching staff of Dyal Singh College, Lahore, and spent his working life there as a professor, retiring on 15 August 1947 — the very day of India's independence. The Partition that followed cut him off from the city where he had studied and worked for decades. Like many Punjabi families uprooted in 1947, he moved to India and settled in New Delhi, where he lived for the rest of his life. He died on 3 September 1965.

Works

Nanda came to playwriting through amateur acting, inspired by Norah Richards in Lahore. She instituted a playwriting competition in which he entered his maiden attempt, Suhag (Wedding), a one-act script in Punjabi. It was adjudged the best entry of 1913 and was staged, and that success set Nanda on the path of drama. Suhag — later published under the title Dulhan (The Bride) — is regarded as the first properly structured modern Punjabi play, written in a realistic style along the lines of Western drama. Its story concerns a child of ten substituted as a bride in place of her elder sister, who refuses to marry an elderly man and runs away from home.

His one-act plays Dulhan and Bebe Ram Bhajni (1914) pioneered modern Punjabi drama, and his first full-length work, Subhadra (1922), made his reputation. Subhadra takes up the plight of a young, childless widow badly treated by her mother-in-law, and it stages a daring solution for its time: the widow's brother, a college student touched by new ideas, arranges her remarriage to a classmate. Other full-length plays followed — Bebe Ram Bhajni, Shamu Shah (1928), his fond Punjabi adaptation of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, and Var Ghar or Lily Da Viah (1930), a plea for love marriages against the orthodox practice of arranged marriages. Late in life he published Social Circle (1953), three one-act plays satirising the urban middle-class elite, along with collections of one-act plays such as Jhalkare (Reflections), Lishkare (Flashes) and Chamkare (Sparkles).

The main themes of his plays were the social problems of the day: widow remarriage, the marriage market, superstition, and the friction between an English-educated younger generation and its elders. Henrik Ibsen, rather than Shakespeare, became the model for the mature Nanda, and he blended Western dramatic technique with the folk theatre tradition of Punjab — marriage scenes, religious ceremonies, folk songs and dances — giving his work a recognisably Punjabi character.

Legacy

Ishwar Chander Nanda is popularly remembered as the father of modern Punjabi drama, the writer who freed the Punjabi stage from purely religious and mythological themes and made it a vehicle for contemporary social realism. His plays were shaped by the educated middle class of Lahore and by the reformist energy of the early twentieth century, and they reached audiences precisely because he wrote in the colloquial speech of ordinary Punjabis, sharpened with irony and satire.

The generation of playwrights that followed — Harcharan Singh, Sant Singh Sekhon, Balwant Gargi, Kartar Singh Duggal among them — worked in the mould Nanda had created, even when they broke away from his realism. His plays continue to be studied in Punjabi universities and staged by theatre groups, and his life remains a reminder of what Partition cost Punjabi culture: a lifetime of work built in Lahore, carried across a new border, and completed in New Delhi.