Sampooran Singh Kalra, who writes as Gulzar, was born at Dina in Jhelum district in 1934 and came across in 1947. He worked as a motor mechanic in Bombay before he wrote anything that was published.
He writes in Urdu and Hindi and has worked as a lyricist, screenwriter and director for six decades. He won the Sahitya Akademi award for Urdu in 2002 and the Jnanpith, announced in February 2024 as the award for 2023.
His triveni, a three-line form he invented, and his poetry collections are a separate body of work from the film writing.
He has translated Punjabi and Bengali poetry and has written extensively about Partition. His story collection Raavi Paar takes its title from a story of a man crossing the Ravi in 1947 with twin sons.
He is one of the last working figures whose adult memory includes the Punjab that existed before the line.
Dina in Jhelum district is also where Guru Gobind Singh Ji wrote the Zafarnama. The village is in Pakistan and he has spoken about not having gone back.
He worked in a Bombay garage before he was a lyricist and wrote in his spare time, which is the standard telling and is his own.
Punjabi is the language he grew up in and almost none of his published work is in it. That gap is common to his whole generation of west Punjab writers who came east.