Gurbaksh Singh Preetlari founded the magazine Preet Lari in 1933 and in 1938 built Preet Nagar, a planned settlement on the road between Amritsar and Lahore, intended as a community of writers and artists living on cooperative principles.
He had trained as an engineer at Michigan and the settlement was built on ideas taken from there and from Tagore's Santiniketan. It had a school, a theatre, a press and shared kitchens.
Preet Lari ran a progressive, secular, anti-caste line and was widely read across Punjab for decades. It published Nanak Singh, Amrita Pritam, Mohan Singh, Balwant Gargi and most of the writers of the period.
In 1947 the border was drawn a few kilometres from Preet Nagar, which was built deliberately on the road between the two cities. The settlement lost its position and most of its population and never recovered its purpose.
The press is still there. The magazine has continued, intermittently, under the family, for over ninety years.
The houses were laid out facing inward on a common green with the press, the school and the theatre at the centre, on the principle that people who ate and worked together would write differently.
His own essays and novels argued for companionate marriage, for educating daughters, and for a life arranged around work rather than caste. That programme is why the magazine was read and why it was attacked.
The magazine has been published almost continuously since the 1930s and is one of the longest running Punjabi periodicals. The settlement continues at a much reduced scale.