Surjit Patar was born at Patar Kalan in Jalandhar district in 1945 and taught at Punjab Agricultural University. He was the most widely read Punjabi poet of the last fifty years.
He wrote through the militancy years and against them, and his poetry of the 1980s and 1990s is the clearest literary record of what those years felt like from inside an ordinary Punjabi life. Hanere Vich Sulagdi Varnmala, the alphabet smouldering in the dark, is from that period.
His ghazals in Punjabi took a Persian and Urdu form and made it carry Punjabi rural speech.
He returned the Padma Shri in 2020 in support of the farmers protesting the farm laws. He was president of the Punjab Arts Council.
He died in May 2024. His lines are among the most quoted in the language and a large proportion of Punjabis know several by heart without knowing whose they are.
He taught at Punjab Agricultural University and headed the Punjab Arts Council. He translated European drama into Punjabi and wrote for the stage.
The poems of the 1980s were written by somebody in the middle of it, and their restraint is why they held. He did not take a side's language.
His lines are quoted on walls, at protests and in ordinary conversation in a way almost no other Punjabi poet's have been in living memory.