Balraj Sahni was born at Rawalpindi in 1913, taught at Tagore's Santiniketan, worked for the BBC Hindi service in London during the war, and joined the Indian People's Theatre Association on his return.
He was jailed for his politics in the early 1950s and was filming Do Bigha Zamin under guard, going from prison to the set.
Do Bigha Zamin, 1953, in which he plays a Bengali farmer who becomes a rickshaw puller in Calcutta trying to save his land, is one of the founding films of Indian social realism. He trained by pulling a rickshaw in Calcutta.
Garam Hawa, 1973, his last film, is about a Muslim family in Agra deciding whether to leave for Pakistan after Partition. He died before it was released.
He also wrote in Punjabi and delivered an address at Jalandhar in 1972 on the state of Punjabi that is still cited, in which he argued that Punjabis had abandoned their own language out of embarrassment.
He acted in more than eighty films across nearly three decades, for most of that time as a character actor rather than a lead. That is the position from which both of the performances he is remembered for were given.
His brother was the writer Bhisham Sahni. The two came out of the same Rawalpindi household and worked in different languages and different forms for fifty years.
He wrote in Punjabi, including a travel book about Pakistan, and his 1972 address on the responsibilities of the artist is still circulated.