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

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

BHADRA (29°10`N, 750151E) in Ganganagar district in Rajasthan, was, according to Sikh chronicles, visited by Guru Gobind Singh in 1706. There is however no historical shrine there. There are very few Punjabi Sikhs in the town but a number of Sindhi families, who though shaven are followers of the

DAKKHANI SIKHS or Sikhs of the Deccan, a distinctive ethnic community scattered in parts of Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka, are the descendants of Punjabi Sikhs who went to the South during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries and permanently settled in what was then the princely state of Hyderabad.

GURMUKH SINGH, BABA (1888-1977), a Ghadr revolutionary, was born in 1888 to a poor peasant, Hoshnak Singh , of the village of Laltori Khurd, in Ludhiana district. Second of three brothers, he was sent to school at Ludhiana. His ambition was to join the army, but he could not

Hasrat, Sukhpal Vir Singh was born in 1938 at Khanewal (now in Pakistan), in a Sikh family of Bajwas. His father, Harcharn Singh, migrated to India at the time Partition of Punjab in 1947 and settled in village Vasarke (Batala), district Gurdaspur. Hasrat did his M.A. in Punjabi from

Kamal, Ajaib Singh was born in the family of Babu Jung Singh at Village Dandin (Distt Hoshiarpur, Punjab). After completing his earlier education in his own district, he got his higher education in Khalsa College Mahilpur and then in Khalsa College Amritsar. He is a poet who has successfully

PANJABI PRACHARNI SABHA, society for the promotion of Punjabi language, established in 1882 under the aegis of the Lahore Singh Sabha. In pursuance of the policy set forth in the famous Wood`s Dispatch of 1853 (a letter from Sir Charles Wood, President of the Board of Control of the East

SADHU JAN, a Punjabi poet of the seventeenth century who wrote verses on mythical and spiritual themes. His identity is not clearly established. While Gurbilas Chhevin Patshahi (1718) identifies him as Bhai Sadhu who married in 1629 Bibi Viro, daughter of Guru Hargobind, Sarup Das Bhalla, Mahima Prakash, part

SVAPAN NATAK, lit. dream play, is an allegorical poem in Braj, comprising 133 stanzas, by Giani Ditt Singh, a leading figure in the Lahore Singh Sabha. Published in the supplement to the issue, dated 16 April 1887, of the Khalsa Akhbar, a Punjabi newspaper of which Giani Ditt Singh himself

Singh, Jagtar, an eminent Punjabi poet, was born at Rajgomal, district Jallandhar (Punjab). He did his M.A. in Punjabi and Urdu (first class first) and later Ph.D., on the critical study of Punjabi poetry in Pakistan from 1947 to 1972. Jagtar is well versed in Urdu, Punjabi, English and