Gurdial Singh was born at Jaito in 1933 into a carpenter and blacksmith family and worked as a labourer as a child. He qualified as a teacher late and taught for most of his life.
His novel Marhi da Deeva, 1964, follows Jagseer, a landless Dalit labourer bound to a landowning family by dependence and affection, and it is the first Punjabi novel to put that relationship at the centre and refuse to sentimentalise it. It was filmed in 1989.
Anhe Ghore da Daan, 1976, was filmed by Gurvinder Singh in 2011 and is one of the few Punjabi films to be shown at international festivals.
He won the Jnanpith in 1999, the second Punjabi writer to do so.
He wrote about the Malwa: about landlessness, caste, debt, and villages that were emptying. His subject was what the Green Revolution did to people who had no land to improve.
Jagseer's tie to the landowning family is the thing the book will not resolve. It is affection and it is dependence at once, and Gurdial Singh refuses to let the reader separate them, which is why it is uncomfortable in a literature that had generally written that relationship as one thing or the other.
He wrote ten novels and a large body of short stories, along with children's books and translations, and he kept writing about the same twenty kilometres of country for fifty years. Adh Chanani Raat and Parsa are the other novels usually named beside the first one.
He said of himself that he had come to writing from the wrong direction, without a college education and without the Lahore or Delhi literary background nearly all of his contemporaries had. The material of the books is what he had done rather than what he had read.