Jaswant Singh Kanwal was born at Dhudike in Moga district in 1919 and wrote for eighty years. He died in 2020 at a hundred, still publishing.
Puranmashi, 1953, and Raat Baaki Hai, 1957, made him the most widely read Punjabi novelist of the century. His readership was rural and enormous and it was not the literary establishment's.
Lahu Di Lo, 1974, is about the Naxalite movement in Punjab and was read by the generation it was written about.
He worked in Malaya as a young man and came back. He never left Dhudike again, wrote in a room in his own village, and was visited there by readers for sixty years.
He supported the Punjabi Suba movement, the Naxalites, and later the farmers' agitation, and was consistently at odds with whichever government was in power. He was a hundred and one when the farm protests began and he issued a statement supporting them.
Puranmashi and Raat Baaki are the novels usually named, and Lahu Di Lo, about the Naxalite years, is the one that made him a political figure as much as a literary one.
He wrote for seventy years and published into his nineties. He died in 2020 at ninety-nine.
Dhudike is also Lala Lajpat Rai's village. Two national figures out of one Moga village a century apart, and the village is not marked for either in any way a visitor would find.