Bhagat Parmanand Ji has one hymn in the Guru Granth Sahib Ji, in Sarang. He is generally placed in Maharashtra, at Sholapur or Barsi, in the Vaishnav tradition.
The hymn is an accusation. It lists what the listener has spent a life doing, greed, adultery, deceit, and asks when the singing of the name was supposed to happen.
Nothing else about him is agreed. The Sikh tradition preserves the composition and not the man.
The hymn is seven lines and it is entirely accusation. It has no consolation in it, no instruction and no address to God: it tells the listener what they have done with their life and stops.
That is unusual even in a volume that contains a great deal of plain speech. Most of the Bhagat compositions offer a way out. This one closes the door and leaves the reader in the room.
It sits in raga Sarang, which is a daytime raga, and it is followed in the volume by compositions of a completely different temperature. The editorial decision to place it where it is was made at Amritsar in 1604 and nobody has written about why.
One hymn under his name is in the Guru Granth Sahib Ji, in Sarang, and it is short and direct: a life spent without remembering, and the reckoning at the end of it.
The tradition places him in Maharashtra in the sixteenth century, in the Varkari milieu around Pandharpur, but nothing about his life is established.
His presence in the volume is another instance of the compilation reaching well outside the Punjab for a single voice that said what the editors wanted said.