Modern Punjabi's popular canon is short: Amrita Pritam, Shiv Kumar Batalvi, Mohan Singh, Surjit Patar, Pash, Waris Shah and Bulleh Shah from the older tradition, and Nanak Singh and Gurdial Singh in prose.
That list was made by three things: the school syllabus, All India Radio Jalandhar, and the singers who set the poems to music. A poem that was sung became known and a poem that was not did not.
Poets of comparable stature who were not sung, Harbhajan Singh, Harinder Singh Mehboob, Jagtar, are read by people who study Punjabi and by very few others.
The same mechanism operated in Pakistani Punjab in reverse: what the qawwals and folk singers carried survived, and what was only printed did not.
The canon of a language whose readership is small is made by musicians, and that is a more honest description of Punjabi literary reputation than any prize list.
Amrita Pritam and Shiv Kumar Batalvi are the two Punjabi poets almost every Punjabi can name, and both were made by the radio and the school syllabus as much as by the work.
Two texts stand in the popular mind for the whole of Punjabi poetry, and the rest of both bodies of work is much less read.
A canon assembled by broadcasters and textbook committees is narrow by construction. The writers left out of it are not lesser so much as unpromoted.