Aris Daya Singh (1894 - 1946) was popular writer of devotional and didactic verses. He belonged to a backard rural family of farm labourers called Mazhabi Sikhs. Having been thrased by his poor father, Santa Singh, because of his pursuit of learning, left home and started living as a recluse; learnt Punjabi, Hindi, anskrit, Urdu, Persian and Arabic: and studied scriptures of the Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims from their traditional teachers at their respective places of worship and instruction. He began writing poetry while in teens and published his maiden book, Fanah da Makan (Abode of Mortality), in 1914: followed by his most popular work, Zindagi Bilas (Discourse on Life), in 1915.
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 striking feature of his verse is his thought-content. Evidently, he owes this to his age; maturity of outlook on life, wealth of experience, and the asset of erudition that he gathered over the years. An admirer of Saadi and Hafiz, Meer and Ghalib, Iqbal and Faiz, he was equally knowledgeable about the Vedas and the Upanishads, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
