Harinder Singh Mehboob

Harinder Singh Mehboob (1937 to 2010) was a Punjabi poet and writer on Sikh thought. He was born on 1 October 1937 in Chak No. 233, Lyallpur district, now in Pakistan, into a Sikh farming family that settled at Jhoonda in Sangrur district after Partition. He held master's degrees in Punjabi and English and taught for most of his life at Khalsa College, Garhdiwala, where he was known as Professor Mehboob. He retired in 1995 and lived quietly, reading and writing.

Key works

• Sahije Rachio Khalsa (1986): a systematic study of Sikhism in seven books and his best-known prose work. Gurpreet Kaur, a Punjabi University lecturer who wrote her M.Phil. on him, notes that it has drawn criticism for its archaic prose and what some call a fundamentalist outlook.
• Jhanaan Di Raat: a collection of poems that won the Sahitya Akademi Award. The Akademi's list, as given on Wikipedia, dates the prize to 1991.
• Ilahi Nadri De Painde: an epic on the lives of the Sikh Gurus, begun in 1991 and left unfinished when he fell ill.

Honours and views: the SGPC gave him the Giani Ditt Singh Puruskar in 2002, and he received the Shiromani Kavi Award for 2008. Kaur writes that he held Sikhism to be the purest form of monotheism, and that he rejected parts of the Dasam Granth that did not fit his reading.

Death and tributes: he died on 15 February 2010 and was cremated at Jhoonda. Professor Gurtej Singh called him one of the best contemporary poets in the world, the writer Jaswant Deed called his death the biggest loss in the contemporary intellectual field, and the scholar Ajmer Singh compared it to the end of an era.

Remembered for: writing Sikh thought and poetry in a demanding, learned Punjabi, from outside the universities' mainstream, and for Sahije Rachio Khalsa, which readers still argue over.