PAL SINGH ARIF, SANT (1873-1958), mystic and poet, was born on Maghar sudi 15, 1930 Bk/4 December 1873, the son of Gurdit Singh Sandhu and Sahib Kaur of the village of Paddhari, now in Amritsar district of the Punjab. He learnt to read and write Punjabi from the village granthi

SOBHA SINGH (1901-1986), painter, famous especially for his portraits of the Gurus, was born on 29 November 1901 in a Ramgarhia family of Sri Hargobindpur, in Gurdaspur district of the Punjab. His father, Deva Singh, had been in the Indian cavalry. At the age of 15, Sobha

ADDAN SHAH, BHAI (1688-1757), third in succession to Bhai Kanhaiya, founder of the Sevapanthi sect, was born in 1688 in the village of Lau in Jhang district, now in Pakistan. His parents were of a devout temperament and he inherited from them a deeply religious bent of mind. He

AKALI, THE, a Punjabi daily newspaper which became the central organ of the Shiromani Akali Dal, then engaged in a fierce struggle for the reformation of the management of the Sikh gurdwaras and a vehicle for the expression of nationalist political opinion in the Punjab in the wake of the

ANJUMANIPANJAB, founded in Lahore on 21 January 1865 by the distinguished linguist, Dr Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner, who became successively the first principal of the Government College at Lahore and the first registrar of the University of the Panjab, was a voluntary society which aimed at the development of "vernacular literature"

ASRARISAMADI, a Persian chronicle by an anonymous writer who is now identified as Munshi Jot Prakash attached to the court of Nawab Abd us Samad Khan, the governor of Lahore from 1713 to 1726. Written around 1728, the work. which the author claims to be an eyewitness account of

ATTAR SINGH, SARDAR SIR (1833-1896), scholar nobleman, was a collateral of the rulers of Patiala, and belonged to the village of Bhadaur, in present day Sangrur district of the Punjab. He was born in 1833, the son of Kharak Singh. From the very beginning, he had a bent for

AHLUWALIA, JASBIR SINGH Jasbir Singh Ahluwalia,(1935 - ) born in 1935, is a leading radical Punjabi poet. He had a post-graduate degree in English and got his doctorate for his thesis on New conception of Reality, and got into the Punjab Civil Service. He came on deputation to Punjabi

Anoop Singh (1910 - 1989) was a lawyer by profession, hailing from the North-West Frontier Province of undivided Punjab. A lover of every good thing in life, he came to writing poetry seriously very late in life but his output compensated his late-coming both quantitatively and qualitatively. The most

ARIF, KISHAN SINGH Arif, Kishan Singh(1836 - 1904) was a popular Punjabi poet. His father Narain Singh was a publisher and bookseller in Bazar Mai Sewan, Amritsar. He began studying books and Kissas at an early age. After the death of his father, he adopted the same profession. From

Attar Singh is a famous critic. He has so far published three collections of critical essays—Kavya Adhyayan (Study of Poetry), Drishtikon (Viewpoint), and Samadarshan (Perspectives). In his view, it is the first duty of progressive literature to fight against those tendencies that would tie literature to reaction. This can