Patwant Singh wrote The Sikhs, a general history for a non-specialist readership, and a biography of Maharaja Ranjit Singh Ji, and edited a design journal for years.
He built and funded a hospital in the Mewat region and wrote extensively on Indian public affairs.
He belongs to a small category of Punjabi writers who wrote in English about the Sikh tradition for readers outside it: Khushwant Singh, Patwant Singh, Kapur Singh in a very different register, and more recently a wider group.
That category matters because for most of the twentieth century almost everything available in English about Sikhs was written either by Sikhs writing apologetically or by outsiders writing anthropologically, and there was very little in between.
The general reader's picture of Punjab is formed by whatever is in the language they read, which is why what gets translated and what gets written in English matters more than it should.
He was not an academic and did not claim to be. What he did was assemble the standard accounts into a narrative for readers who would never open a monograph, which is a job that had to be done and that the universities were not doing.
He wrote in English for an audience with no Punjabi, and that is what he was for: a translator of the Sikh case into the language of Delhi's drawing rooms.
The list of English language writers of record on Punjab is short. Most Punjabi writing about Punjab has never been translated at all.