Lal Singh Dil was born at Ghungrali Sikhan in Ludhiana district in 1943 into a Ramdasia Sikh family, and is the major Dalit poet of Punjabi.
He joined the Naxalite movement, was arrested in 1971 and tortured in custody, and wrote about it afterward without dramatising it.
He left Punjab, converted to Islam and took the name Mohammed Bushra, worked in Uttar Pradesh for years, and came back. He ran a tea stall at Samrala for much of his later life while continuing to write.
His poems are short and they are about caste, hunger, police and land, in a plain Punjabi with nothing decorative in it. His autobiography Dastaan is one of the few first-person accounts of Dalit life in Punjab by a Dalit writer.
He was recognised late and died in 2007 in poverty. His work is now taught.
He wrote about being a Dalit in a Jat village in language that gives no comfort, and the Punjabi literary world did not know what to do with him for most of his life.
His memoir Dastaan is one of very few first person accounts of the Naxalite period in Punjab written by somebody who was inside it and was tortured for it.
He ran a tea stall at Samrala in his last years. The recognition, the awards and the collected editions came at the very end and mostly after.