Jagtar Singh, who wrote as Jagtar, was born at Rajgarh in Jalandhar district in 1935 and taught Punjabi at Jalandhar.
He was the leading writer of the ghazal in Punjabi, taking a form built for Urdu and Persian and making it carry Punjabi speech without importing the vocabulary wholesale.
His collections span the 1960s to the 2000s and his ghazals were widely sung. He won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1995 for Jugnu Deeva Te Darya.
Much of his later work is about the militancy years and about the position of an ordinary person between two armed sides.
The Punjabi ghazal after him is a substantial body of work and is almost entirely unknown outside Punjabi.
The Punjabi ghazal before him was largely imitation of Urdu. What he did was to keep the form's discipline, the couplet and the radif, and fill it with Punjabi rural vocabulary rather than Persianate abstraction.
His couplets from the 1980s circulate in Punjab as anonymous sayings, which is the highest thing that can happen to a line in a language with a strong oral tradition and the worst thing that can happen to a poet's name.
He taught at a college in Jalandhar for his whole working life and published a dozen collections, and the standard anthologies of Indian poetry in English translation contain none of him.