Sohan Singh Sital was born at Kadiwind in Lahore district in 1909 and was a dhadi, a novelist and a historian at once, which is an unusual combination and worked.
He performed as a dhadi for decades, singing the vaars of Sikh history at gatherings across Punjab, and he wrote the material he performed.
He also wrote novels, several of them about 1947, and works of Sikh history in Punjabi aimed at ordinary readers rather than scholars. His histories of the misls and of the Sikh state are still read in villages.
He won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1974 for Jug Badal Gaya, a novel.
He is the clearest case of the dhadi tradition and the modern literature being the same thing in one person, and there is nobody now doing what he did.
The dhadi form is two men with dhads, a small hourglass drum, and one with a sarangi, performing a vaar with spoken passages between the sung ones. It is a battlefield form and it was performed at gurdwaras, at fairs and at political meetings.
He wrote the vaars he performed, which was not the tradition. Most dhadis sang an inherited repertoire, and by composing his own he made the form a place where new history could be put.
His novels about 1947 are written by someone who came across the line himself. Kadiwind is in Pakistan.