Sant Ram Udasi was born at Raisar in Barnala district in 1939 into a Dalit family, worked as a schoolteacher, and wrote revolutionary poetry that was sung rather than read.
He performed his own poems at village gatherings and at farmers' and labourers' meetings, in a form built from the folk repertoire, which is why they spread among people who did not buy books.
Lahu Bhije Bol and his other collections are standard on the Punjab left and his songs are still sung at agitations, including at the Delhi borders in 2020 and 2021.
He was jailed and tortured during the Emergency.
He died in 1986 on a train, returning from a literary event. His daughter has continued to perform his work.
His poems were written to be sung and most people who know them know them as songs rather than as texts on a page. The performance context was the village gathering and the union meeting, not the literary festival.
The subject is almost always agricultural labour, the landless worker rather than the landowning farmer, which sets him apart from most Punjabi rural writing and is why the Punjab left claimed him and much of the rest of the field did not.
His work is still sung and is still being recorded by younger Punjabi musicians. A collected scholarly edition of his poems, with variants and dates, has not been produced.