Nanak Singh
The father of the Punjabi novel, who survived Jallianwala Bagh and wrote a poem about it that the British banned.
Nanak Singh was born Hans Raj in a Hindu family at Chak Hamid in Jhelum district and became a Sikh as a boy, taking the name Nanak Singh. He had little schooling but an enormous gift for story. On 13 April 1919 he was in the crowd at Jallianwala Bagh; two of his friends were killed, and he survived by lying among the bodies.
Out of that day came Khooni Vaisakhi, 'Bloody Vaisakhi', a long poem describing the massacre and blaming the government, which the British banned and confiscated; it was only rediscovered and republished decades later. He went to jail in the Akali agitations of the 1920s and there began writing novels.
He wrote nearly forty of them, among them Chitta Lahu, Pavittar Papi and Ik Mian Do Talwaran, which won the Sahitya Akademi award. They brought social realism to Punjabi fiction: the cruelty of caste and dowry, widowhood, the lives of the poor, written in plain, gripping prose that ordinary readers loved. He is rightly called the father of the Punjabi novel.
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