Bhai Vir Singh is called the father of modern Punjabi literature. He was born at Amritsar in 1872, founded the Khalsa Tract Society in 1894 and the newspaper Khalsa Samachar in 1899, and wrote for sixty years.
He wrote the first Punjabi novels, Sundari in 1898, Bijay Singh, Satwant Kaur, historical romances set in the eighteenth-century persecutions, written to give a reforming Sikh public a literature of its own. They were enormously popular and they shaped how two generations imagined that century.
He also wrote the epic Rana Surat Singh, a large body of lyric poetry, and the eight-volume annotation of the Guru Granth Sahib Ji, the Santhya Sri Guru Granth Sahib, which he did not live to finish.
His lyric poetry brought the short free-verse form into Punjabi and moved it away from the qissa metres.
He was a Singh Sabha writer and his fiction is a reform programme in narrative form. Read as history it is unreliable; read as the literature of a movement it is the central document.
Sundari is the story of a Hindu girl abducted, rescued, initiated and made part of a jatha in the eighteenth century. It went through edition after edition and was read aloud in villages, and it is the book that put the persecution period into the imagination of ordinary Sikhs in the shape it still has.
His annotated editions and his dictionary work were the practical infrastructure of the Singh Sabha's literary programme, and much of it is still in print.
He was made a member of the Punjab Legislative Council and was the first Punjabi writer given the Sahitya Akademi fellowship. He is called the father of modern Punjabi literature and the phrase is close to accurate.