Najm Hosain Syed is the central figure of the modern Punjabi literary movement in Pakistan. He has written poetry, verse plays and criticism in Punjabi since the 1960s and has consistently refused to write in Urdu.
His critical work, particularly Recurrent Patterns in Punjabi Poetry, reads the classical Punjabi tradition, Waris Shah, Bulleh Shah, Shah Hussain, as a coherent body of thought with a politics in it rather than as folklore.
The Sangat, a weekly reading circle he has held at Lahore for decades, has been the main institution of Punjabi literary life in Pakistan. It has no funding, no building of its own and no formal membership.
His verse plays take Punjabi historical and folk subjects, including Dulla Bhatti, and treat them as arguments about power.
He is the strongest available answer to the claim that Punjabi in Pakistan has no serious modern literature, and he is almost unread in Indian Punjab because his work is in Shahmukhi.
He writes plays and criticism in Punjabi at Lahore and has run a weekly reading of the Punjabi classical texts for decades.
His readings of Bulleh Shah, Shah Hussain and Waris Shah treat them as political texts about power and the peasantry rather than as devotional literature.
He is the central figure of the Punjabi language movement in Pakistan and almost none of his work has crossed into Gurmukhi.