Harinder Singh Mehboob was born in 1937 at Chak in Lyallpur district, now in Pakistan, and taught at a college at Garhdiwala for his whole working life, refusing to move.
His poetry collection Jhanan Di Raat won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1991. It is very long, difficult, and written in a Punjabi dense with Sikh theological vocabulary and imagery that most readers cannot follow without help.
His prose work Sehje Rachio Khalsa is a large study of Sikh history and thought written from inside the tradition rather than about it.
He wrote about the events of the 1980s from a position sympathetic to the Sikh movement of that period, which places him politically in a way that has affected how he is read.
He is the most demanding Punjabi poet of the last fifty years and the least accessible, and the argument about whether difficulty of that order serves the reader is a live one in Punjabi criticism.
Sahije Rachio Khalsa, published in 1988, is a long work combining verse, history and philosophy, and it is regarded as one of the most difficult books in the language.
He taught at a college in Gurdaspur district and lived away from the literary circuit, which is part of why the work took the shape it did.
It has never been translated. A book of that ambition existing only in Punjabi is a fair summary of the language's position.