Ahmad Rahi was born at Amritsar in 1923 and went to Lahore in 1947. His collection Trinjan, published in 1952, is one of the major works of modern Punjabi poetry.
It is written in the voices of women at the spinning gathering, using the folk forms, and it is about 1947. The women in it are the ones who were abducted, killed by their own families, or left behind, and the poems are in the metres of wedding songs.
Using the trinjan songs, which are the songs women sing together at the spinning wheel, to write about women taken in 1947 is the most exact formal decision anyone made about that material.
He wrote film songs in Lahore for a living for the rest of his career.
Trinjan was published in Shahmukhi. It has been transliterated into Gurmukhi and is still barely read on the Indian side.
Trinjan, published in 1952, is built on the women's songs of the Punjabi countryside and was written in the years immediately after he left Amritsar.
He wrote film songs and dialogue at Lahore for a living. The poetry was the smaller part of his output by volume and the larger part by weight.
He wrote in Punjabi in a country whose literary establishment worked in Urdu, and he stayed with it for fifty years.