Giani Ditt Singh

Giani Ditt Singh (1853 to 1901) was a Singh Sabha reformer, teacher, editor and one of the most prolific Punjabi prose writers of the nineteenth century. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism gives his birth as 21 April 1853 at Kalaur in Patiala district; other accounts say about 1850. His father, Devi Singh, was a Ravidasia weaver. At nine he was sent to a dera near Kharar, where he studied Gurmukhi, prosody, Vedanta and Niti-Shastra. He became a Gulabdasi preacher, known then as Sant Ditta Ram.

He met Swami Dayanand, founder of the Arya Samaj, in Lahore in 1877 and worked with the Samaj for some years. He came back to the Sikh fold through Bhai Gurmukh Singh of the Lahore Singh Sabha, passed the Giani examination in 1886 and was appointed to teach at the Oriental College, Lahore.

Key moments

• 1886: he became the main contributor to, and soon the editor of, the Khalsa Akhbar, the Lahore weekly started by Bhai Gurmukh Singh. The paper closed in 1889 and was revived on 1 May 1893 under his editorship. He also helped launch an English weekly, the Khalsa, on 5 January 1899.
• 1887 to 1888: his satire Svapan Natak, aimed at leaders of the Amritsar Khalsa Diwan, led to a defamation suit. He was fined Rs 5 and acquitted on appeal on 30 April 1888.
• 25 November 1888: after Arya Samaj speakers at the Lahore Samaj's anniversary spoke disparagingly of the Sikh Gurus, he left the Samaj for good. His Sadhu Dayanand te Mera Samvad and works such as Durga Prabodh and Panth Prabodh answered the Samaj. Anshu Malhotra writes that he threw his weight behind the Lahore Singh Sabha's attempt to forge a clearer Khalsa identity.
• He wrote more than forty works, including Guru Nanak Prabodh and Guru Arjan Charittar, and accounts of the martyrdoms of Taru Singh, Subeg Singh and Bota Singh.

Caste: Malhotra notes that his Ravidasia background carried the stigma of an "untouchable" in his day, and that he met prejudice inside Sikh circles. When Bhai Takht Singh invited him to the girls' school at Ferozepur, the local Singh Sabha refused to share a meal with him. She records that Golden Temple priests opened the precincts to outcaste devotees only late in the afternoon and did not accept karah prasad prepared by lower castes, and suggests Ditt Singh was not exempt from such treatment. She also finds his own writing on caste ambivalent: sometimes he repudiated caste, at other times he treated it as central to social life.

Remembered for: his pen. He died at Lahore on 6 September 1901, months after his daughter's death on 17 June, and a memorial committee of fifteen was formed. A Tribune review of his collected works calls him the first modern prose writer and journalist in Punjabi.