Dalip Kaur Tiwana was born at Rabbon in Ludhiana district in 1935 and was among the first Punjabi women to take a doctorate and hold a university chair, at Punjabi University Patiala.
She wrote over thirty novels. Eho Hamara Jivna, 1968, won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1971 and follows a woman's life in a Malwa village with no relief in it.
Her subject was almost always a woman's position inside a family, in a rural Sikh Jat society whose treatment of its women she wrote about without polemic and without excuse.
She returned the Padma Shri in October 2015 in protest at rising intolerance and attacks on freedom of speech in the country.
She is the most substantial body of work by any Punjabi woman prose writer and outside Punjab she is almost unread.
Rabbon is a Malwa village and she was brought up in a landholding family and educated at a time when almost no girl in that district was. That put her where she wrote from: inside the society, with just enough distance to see it, and with no illusions about either part of that.
She wrote in a plain register with very little ornament and it was deliberate. Her contemporaries were doing land and politics in a heightened style, and she did domestic interiors in flat sentences and was taken less seriously for it while she was doing it.
Her autobiography, Nange Pairan Da Safar, is one of very few first person accounts of a Punjabi woman's passage through the mid century academic and literary world.