Dr Jaswant Singh Neki

Dr Jaswant Singh Neki was born on 27 August 1925 in Murid village, Jhelum district, in what is now Pakistan. His family moved to Quetta when he was an infant. He was a psychiatrist, a Punjabi poet and a scholar of Sikh thought, and he died at his home in New Delhi on 11 September 2015, aged 90.

He studied medicine at King Edward Medical College, Lahore, and finished at the Medical College, Amritsar, in 1949 after Partition disrupted the Lahore college. He took an MA in Psychology at Aligarh Muslim University and a Diploma in Psychological Medicine at Bangalore in 1958. As a student he was president of the All India Sikh Students Federation. SikhNet, reprinting an article from Sikh Chic, says he was close to Master Tara Singh and supported a Sikh homeland.

Key moments

• 1968 to 1978: Professor and Head of Psychiatry at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi.
• 1978 to 1981: Director of the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGI), Chandigarh. SikhNet says he is remembered there for giving autonomy to its super-specialty departments.
• 1979: Sahitya Akademi Award for his Punjabi poetry collection Karuna Di Chhoh Ton Magron.
• 1981 to 1985: World Health Organization consultant in Africa, based at Geneva.
• 1993: represented the Sikh community at the Parliament of the World's Religions.
• 2000: Order of the Khalsa. In 2011 he received the Shaan-e-Khalsa award.

He wrote more than ten volumes of Punjabi verse, including an autobiography in verse, and prose on Sikh thought. His books include Ardas: Darshan, Roop te Abhias, Vishav Ardas, The Spiritual Heritage of the Punjab and Pilgrimage to Hemkunt. He served as Professor of Eminence in Religious Studies at Punjabi University, Patiala, and as a member of the Dharam Prachar Committee of the SGPC. For a time he chaired the advisory board of an institute of medical sciences planned by the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee.

In January 2001, receiving the Giani Lal Singh memorial award at Patiala, he said his life's mission, like Giani Lal Singh's, had been to raise the standard of the Punjabi language through his writing. He is remembered as a psychiatrist who was also a leading Punjabi poet and a writer on Sikh prayer and the spiritual heritage of Punjab.