Chiragh Din, called Ustad Daman, was a tailor in the old city of Lahore who became the great Punjabi poet of the Pakistani side of the border and never stopped being a tailor.
He wrote in Punjabi at a time and place where serious poetry was expected to be in Urdu, and he refused to switch. He read at mushairas in a Punjabi that the audience spoke at home and did not expect from a stage.
His most famous lines are on Partition: that whether or not we say it openly, we have all lost in this, and that both countries have been ruined by freedom.
He was jailed under several Pakistani governments. A bomb was found in his house after one of his poems against Ayub Khan. He lived in a small room attached to a shrine near the Badshahi Mosque and refused offers of a better one.
He came to India in 1958 and read at a mushaira in Delhi, where he wept.
He is barely known in Indian Punjab, which is the ordinary condition of Pakistani Punjabi literature on this side of the line.
He was a tailor of Lahore who wrote and performed in Punjabi at a time when the city's literary establishment worked in Urdu, and he refused to move.
His couplet about both countries having lost in 1947 is the most quoted line about Partition on either side, and he recited it in Delhi in front of Nehru.
His work was not collected in his lifetime and much of it existed only in performance. What was published afterward was assembled from recordings and from what listeners had written down.