Krishna Sobti was born at Gujrat in what is now Pakistan in 1925 and came to India in 1947. She wrote in Hindi and is among the major Indian novelists of the century.
Zindaginama, published in 1979 after decades of work, is set in a Punjab village before 1947 and reconstructs a whole society, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh together, in the Punjabi-inflected Hindi of that world. It won the Sahitya Akademi award.
Mitro Marjani, 1966, was a scandal for its treatment of a young married woman's sexual frankness and is now standard.
She wrote about Partition without writing about the violence directly, on the ground that what was lost was a way of living rather than only a number of lives.
She won the Jnanpith in 2017 and returned her Sahitya Akademi fellowship in 2015 with the other writers.
She is a Punjabi writing in Hindi about Punjab, which is a common enough position and is one reason a great deal of writing about Punjab is not in Punjabi.
She wrote in Hindi, with Punjabi and Urdu running through it, and her language is one of the arguments about her: it is a Punjabi's Hindi and it was made deliberately.
Zindaginama is set in a Punjabi village before Partition and is the largest of her books. Mitro Marjani, about a woman's sexuality in a joint family, caused an argument in 1966 that has not entirely stopped.
She returned her Sahitya Akademi award in 2015 and resigned from the academy. She died in 2019.