Sohan Singh Josh was born at Chetanpura in Amritsar district in 1898, was drawn in by the Akali morchas, and became a founder of the Kirti Kisan Party and one of the first Punjabi communists.
He edited Kirti after Santokh Singh's death and published Bhagat Singh's writings in it, including Why I am an Atheist.
He was among the accused in the Meerut Conspiracy Case of 1929 to 1933, in which thirty-one trade unionists and communists were tried for four years in a case that gave the Indian communist movement a public platform it had not had.
He wrote histories in Punjabi and English of the Ghadar movement, the Akali morchas and the Kirti tradition, from inside them.
He is the main written bridge between the Sikh reform politics of the 1920s and the Punjab left, and both traditions have tended to leave him out of their own accounts.
The Kirti Kisan Party was formed in 1928 out of Ghadar returnees and Akali veterans, and it is the vehicle through which the Punjabi peasant and the communist movement found each other. Most of the Punjab left's leadership for the next forty years came out of it.
He led the Communist Party's Punjab organisation, was inside for long stretches under the colonial government and again after independence, and lived until 1982, which made him at the end the last man alive who had been in the room for most of it.
He wrote histories of the Akali morchas and of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association and an autobiography, all in Punjabi. They are primary sources written by a participant.