DEVA SINGH, SIR (1834-1890), a highranking Patiala state administrator, was born in 1834 into an Arora Sikh family, the son of Colonel Khushal Singh, a brave soldier who had once killed a tiger (sher, in Punjabi) near one of the city gates conferring upon it the name Sheranvala which lasts to this day. Deva Singh received the only formal education available at that time by attending a maktab or Persian school, and entered Patiala state service at a very early age in 1846. In 1853, he was appointed assistant judicial minister and in 1855, a Risaldar in a cavalry unit.
NIRANJAN SINGH, PROFESSOR (1892-1979), educationist and writer, was born in 1892, the youngest of the five sons of Bhai Gopi Chand and Mai Mulan Devi, a Sahijdhari Sikh couple of the village of Harial in Gu|jarkhan tahsil, Rawalpindi district (now in Pakistan). His father died in 1901 and his brothers, Ganga Singh and the one who became famous as Master Tara Singh, took charge of him and supported him through school. After his primary classes in the village school, Niranjan Singh came to Amritsar where he matriculated at the Khalsa Collegiate School and passed his M.Sc. (chemistry) from the Khalsa College in 1916.
Narula, Surinder Singh is a technique-conscious novelist, whose Peo putar (Father and the son, 1946) gave a fresh thematic dimension to the Punjabi novel. His literary corpus includes 12 novels, 7 collections of short stories, some collection of poems and few books of literary critcism, both in Punjabi and English. He was born in Amritsar and after graduating from Khalsa College, Amritsar, with three medals to his credit, he joined the State Secretariat in 1938; but after doing his M.A. in English (1942), he joined as a Lecturer at the local Khalsa College. Afterwards, he was at Rawalpindi (Khalsa College) for a short period, and then after joining Government Service he was posted at different other colleges.
