Punjabi theatre has three strands. The urban proscenium tradition that Balwant Gargi built at Panjab University. The Indian People's Theatre Association tradition of political street theatre. And the older folk forms, naqqal, swang and bhand, performed at fairs.
Gursharan Singh, known as Bhaji Gursharan Singh, took the second of these into Punjab villages from the 1970s. His group performed on tractor trolleys and in courtyards, on caste, on landlessness, on communalism and on the violence of the 1980s, at a time when saying any of it in public was dangerous.
He performed through the militancy years, when both the state and the militants had reason to stop him, and continued.
Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry's company at Chandigarh has worked with traditional naqqal performers in contemporary productions, which is one of the few sustained bridges between the folk and the modern traditions.
Punjabi theatre has no permanent professional company, no dedicated venue in most cities, and an audience that has to be brought to it. It exists because individuals keep doing it.
The modern Punjabi play begins at Dyal Singh College, Lahore, where Norah Richards, an Irishwoman married to a professor there, put students to writing drama in their own language instead of English. Ishwar Chander Nanda's Suhag of 1913, also called Dulhan, came out of that and is taken as the first of them. She spent her last decades at Andretta in Kangra and the open air theatre there carries her name.
He performed through the militancy years when both sides had reason to want him silent, and he kept going. That body of work is the largest thing Punjabi theatre has done.
The institutional theatre is at Chandigarh, Amritsar and Patiala, funded thinly, playing to small audiences. The village theatre is voluntary and has no funding at all.