Giani Ditt Singh was born at Kalaur in 1850 into a Ravidasia weaver family, in a society where that determined everything. He became the leading polemicist and journalist of the Singh Sabha movement.
He edited the Khalsa Akhbar at Lahore, wrote around seventy books and tracts, and was the principal Sikh voice in the public argument with the Arya Samaj, which he conducted in print and in debate.
His writing on caste inside the Panth was direct and it cost him. He was subjected to caste hostility from within the Singh Sabha establishment throughout his career, which is documented in the correspondence of the period.
He taught at the Oriental College Lahore and was one of the founders of the Khalsa College project.
A Dalit Sikh intellectual was central to defining modern Sikh identity in the 1890s and was treated as an inferior by the movement he was defining it for. That is not a comfortable fact and it is the reason he is worth reading.
He came from a Ravidasia family in Fatehgarh Sahib district and became one of the leading figures of the Singh Sabha at Lahore, which is a route almost nobody of his background took in that period.
A large part of his output was in dialogue form, plays and staged debates written to be read aloud in a sangat, which was the fastest way to move an argument through a population that mostly could not read.
He was treated as an outsider by parts of the movement he helped lead. His writing on caste inside the Sikh community is the sharpest of its period and is still not widely reprinted.