Balwant Gargi was born at Sehna in Bathinda district in 1916 and made Punjabi theatre. He wrote plays, ran the Indian Theatre department at Panjab University, and taught in the United States.
His plays, Loha Kutt, Kanak di Balli, Dhuni di Agg, took rural Punjab onto a stage and used its speech without cleaning it up.
His book Folk Theatre of India is a standard survey and remains one of the few serious accounts of naqqal, swang, bhand and the other Punjabi performance forms.
His autobiographical novel Naked Triangle, 1979, caused a scandal in Punjab for what it said about his own life and about other writers, and it is the most readable prose he wrote.
Punjabi theatre after him has had funding trouble, venue trouble and audience trouble, and it has never had another figure of his reach.
He founded and ran the Indian Theatre department at Panjab University in Chandigarh, which trained most of the generation of Punjabi theatre workers who followed him.
Folk Theatre of India came out of travel and fieldwork across the country and covers forms that have since disappeared in several cases. It is still cited because nobody has repeated the survey.
Loha Kutt, the ironsmith's play, is set in a village workshop and is the one most often revived. His work is staged more in Chandigarh and Delhi than in Punjab.