Harbhajan Singh was born at Lumding in Assam in 1920, headed the Hindi department at Guru Tegh Bahadur Khalsa College in Delhi from 1951, and taught Punjabi at Delhi University from 1968 to 1984.
He was a poet, critic and translator, and he brought modern critical theory into Punjabi criticism when it was still largely working in a nineteenth-century frame.
He translated Sophocles, Aristotle's Poetics, and a range of Sanskrit and European material into Punjabi, on the principle that a language needs the world's texts available in it to be a serious literary language.
He won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1969 for Na Dhuppe Na Chhaven.
The translation programme he argued for has never been carried out at scale. Punjabi still lacks translations of most of the standard world literature that Bengali, Malayalam and Marathi have.
He came east in 1947 as a refugee, like most of the Punjabi literary establishment of his generation, and the displacement is present in the work without being its declared subject.
He taught at Delhi University for decades, and that department was one of the two places, with Punjabi University Patiala, where Punjabi criticism was being written as an academic discipline rather than as reviewing.
He made the translations because the texts did not exist in Punjabi and a reader who wanted them had to go through English or Hindi. That is still largely true and the gap is wider now than it was when he was working.