Bhai Veer Singh was a poet, scholar and exegete, a major figure in the Sikh renaissance and in the movement for the revival and renewal of Sikh literary traditions. His identification with all the important concerns of Sikhism was so complete that he came to be honoured as Bhai, the Brother of the Sikh Order, very early in his career. For his pioneering work in its several different genres, he is acknowledged as the creator of modern Punjabi literature.

Born on 5 December 1872, in Amritsar, Bhai Veer Singh was the eldest of Dr Charan Singh's three sons. The family traces its ancestry back to Diwan Kaura Mall (d. 1752), who rose to the position of deputy-governor of Multan under Nawab Mir Mu'in-ul-Mulk, with the title of Maharaja Bahadur. Baba Kahn Singh (1788-1878) was perhaps the first in the family to be initiated into Sikhi by Khandé-di-pahul. He turned a recluse when he was still in his early teens and spent his entire youth in Sikh centres at Hardwar and Amritsar acquiring training in traditional Sikh learning. His mother's affection ultimately reclaimed him to the life of a householder at the age of 40, when he got married. An adept versifier in Sanskrit and Braj as well as in the traditional system of medicine, Baba Kahn Singh passed on his interests to his only son, Dr Charan Singh. Apart from his sustained involvement in literary and scholarly pursuits, mainly as a Braj poet, Punjabi prose-writer, musicologist, prosodist and lexicographer, Dr Charan Singh took active interest in the affairs of the Sikh community, then facing a new threat from Christian missionaries and Hindu Arya Samajists, both supported by colonial Britishers.

To this patrimony of Bhai Veer Singh was added from his mother's side a living kinship with another rich tradition of scholarship in exegesis of the Giani school, going back to the times of Guru Gobind Singh. His maternal grandfather, Giani Hazara Singh, had compiled a lexicon of Guru Granth Sahib, and written a commentary on Bhai Gurdas' Varan. As a schoolboy, Bhai Veer Singh used to spend a great deal of his time in the company of Giani Hazara Singh under whose guidance he not only learnt Punjabi, Sanskrit, Persian and Braj languages but also received grounding, both theoretical and practical, in the science of Sikh exegesis.

Bhai Veer Singh was the child of an age in ferment. The extinction of Sikh sovereignty in the Punjab, the decline in the fortunes of Sikhs, the gradual emergence of urban middle classes, the dissipation of the national intellectual life of Punjab owing to the neglect and decay of indigenous system of educating people about their political and spiritual destiny aroused among the Sikhs concern for survival and for reasserting the aspects, under attack, of their faith. Parallel to these developments foreboding gradual appropriation of Sikhism by the Brahminical Hindu social order, emerged a powerful end towards Sanskrit classicism in the Sikh literary and scholarly tradition. Association of myths around the lives of Sikh Gurus, mixing of fiction with historical facts and interweaving of Vedantic and Vaisnavite motifs into the essential Sikh teachings were its typically regressive features. This forced the Sikhs to respond to these challenges and many Sikh movements emerged like — Nirankari movement (stressing strict adherence to Sikh principles in social life), Namdhari movement (aggressive opposition to the colonialists),Singh Sabha movement (fighting the attacks on Sikh principles at intellectual level while bringing awareness at mass level) and Panch Khalsa Diwan (aggressive opposition to attacks on Sikh principles).

Bhai Veer Singh had the benefit of both the traditional Sikh system of learning as well as of modern English university education. He learnt Persian and Urdu from a Maulavi in a mosque and was apprenticed to Giani Harbhajan Singh, a leading classical scholar, for learning intricacies of Sikh literature. He then joined the Church Mission School, Amritsar and took his matriculation examination in 1891. At school, the conversion of some of the students proved a crucial experience which strengthened his own religious convictions. From the Christian missionaries' emphasis on literary resources, he learnt how efficacious the written word could be as a means of informing and influencing a person's innermost being. Through his English courses, he acquired familiarity with modern literary forms, especially short lyric. While still at school, Bhai Veer Singh was married at the age of 17 to Chatar Kaur, daughter of Sardar Narain Singh of Amritsar. Unlike the educated young men of his time, Bhai Veer Singh was not tempted by prospects of a career in government service. He chose for himself the calling of a writer and created material conditions for single minded pursuit of it. An year after his passing the matriculation examination, he set up a lithograph press in collaboration with Bhai Wazir Singh, a friend of his father's. As his first work in the literary field, Bhai Veer Singh composed some Geography textbooks for schools.

Gradually, Bhai Veer Singh began taking active interest in the affairs of Singh Sabha movement. To promote its aims and objects, he launched in 1894 the Khalsa Tract Society. In November 1899, he started a Punjabi weekly, the Khalsa Samachar, which is still coming out regularly. He was among the principal promoters of several of the Sikh institutions, such as Chief Khalsa Diwan, Sikh Educational Society, and the Punjab and Sind Bank. Interest in corporate activity directed towards community development remained Bhai Veer Singh's constant concern, simultaneously with his creative and scholarly pursuits.

In determining the basic parameters of the modern interpretation of Sikhism, Bhai Veer Singh stressed the autonomy of Sikh thought, nourished and sustained by an awakening amongst the Sikhs of the awareness of their distinct theological and cultural identity. Secondly, he aimed at reorienting the Sikhs' understanding of their faith in such a manner as to help them assimilate the different modernizing influences to their historical memory and cultural heritage. Education of the masses was the first requirement for the fulfillment of these objectives. In the meanwhile, the old educational system which had till then served as a channel for communication of the traditional knowledge to the Sikh youth, had broken down with the withdrawal under British dispensation of state patronage from the local institutions, To fill the vacuum as well as to build new channels of intra-community communication, Bhai Veer Singh, through his single-minded cultivation of Punjabi language as the medium of his theological, scholarly and creative work, resolved the cultural dilemma which the Sikhs faced at the turn of the century. On the one hand was the Sikh literary tradition in Braj language which had collected unmatched riches in multiple directions during the course of its three-centuries-long elitist unchecked career, on the other were the compulsions for mobilizing the common Sikhs through their own language. By drawing upon the Sikh tradition of Braj literature for his basic inspiration and cultural motivation and upon the Punjabi literary tradition for its linguistic components Bhai Veer Singh initiated a new literary idiom distinctly different from both. The tracts produced by the Khalsa Tract Society introduced a down to earth literary Punjabi remarkable for lightness of touch as well as for freshness of expression. In this writing lay the beginnings of modern Punjabi prose.

The Khalsa Tract Society periodically made available under the title Nirguniara lowcost publications on Sikh theology, history and philosophy and on social and religious reform. Through this journal Bhai Veer Singh established a living contact with an ever expanding circle of readers. He used the Nirguniara as a vehicle for self expression and some of his major creative works such as the epic Rana Surat Singh, the novel Baba Naudh Singh, and the lives of the Gurus Sri Guru Nanak Chamatkar and Sri Guru Kalgidhar Chamatkar were originally serialized in its columns.

In literature, Bhai Veer Singh started as a writer of Sikh romances which proved to be the forerunners of the Punjabi novel. His writings in this genre - Sundari (1898), Bijay Singh (1899), Satwant Kaur (published in two parts, I in 1900 and II in 1927)- were aimed at recreating the heroic period (18th century) of Sikh history. Through these novels he made available to his readers typical models of courage, fortitude and human dignity.

Subhagji da Sudhar Hathin Baba Naudh Singh, popularly known as Baba Naudh Singh (serialized in Nirguniara from 1907 onwards and published in book form in 1921) shares with Rana Surat Singh (which he had started serializing two years earlier) Bhai Veer Singh's fascination with the theme of a widow's desperate urge for a re-union with her departed husband. But in Baba Naudh Singh this search is situated in a more mundane setting. This makes all the difference. The narrative here is more realistic in tone, and almost contemporary in its appeal. Bhai Veer Singh weaves into the narrative numerous motifs of social reforms moral teaching and religious preaching and depicts several situations of intercommunal and urban-rural confrontation. In 1905, Bhai Veer Singh started serializing through tracts Rana Surat Singh, the first Punjabi epic, written in blank verse of Sirkhand variety. This long narrative of over 14,000 lines is a striking imaginative evocation of the situation of the Sikhs through a symbolic tale of a widowed queen in quest of her lost paradise. The spiritual voyage of Rani Raj Kaur, the main protagonist of the poem, from external factuality to internal essence has been described by Bhai Veer Singh in the form of a fantasy of spiritual ascension. Apart from living out her earthly destiny of suffering and pain, she symbolizes the total ethos of the Sikh people at that historical moment when they were emerging out of their sense of defeat and despair into an era of a fresh beginning.

Bhai Veer Singh's quest for new forms of expression continued. Soon after the pubtication of Rana Surat Singh in book form in 1919, he turned to shorter poems and Lyrics. In quick succession came Dil Tarang (1920), Earel Tupke (1921), Lahiran de Har (1921), Matak Hulare (1922), and Bijlian de Har (1927). In 1953, appeared Méré Sayian Jio (1953). In this poetry, Bhai Veer Singh's concerns were more aesthetic than didactic, metaphysical or mystical. Bhai Veer Singh also naturalized in Punjabi the Rubai which he borrowed from Persian. By grafting Soratha and Sirkhandy forms on English blank verse, he paved the way for emergence of secular Punjabi poem. As it happened, the first play written in Punjabi, Raja Lakhdata Singh (1910) also came from the pen of Bhai Veer Singh. Tentative in form, the play did reveal the author's powers of constructing crisp and witty dialogues. Return from Braj Bhasa to Punjabi as the main medium of Sikh literary and scholarly expression created the need for new materials such as glossaries, lexicons, encyclopaedias and exegetical works. Bhai Veer Singh himself provided several of the tools. He revised and enlarged Giani Hazara Singh's dictionary, Sri Guru Granth Kosh, originally published in 1898. The revised version, published in 1927, gave evidence of Bhai Veer Singh's command of the science of etymology and of the classical and modern languages. He published critical editions of some of the old Sikh texts such as Sikhan di Bhagat Mala (1912), Prachin Panth Prakash (1914), Puratan Janam Sakhi (1926) and Sakhi Pothi (1950).

Monumental in size and scholarship was his annotation of Bhai Santokh Singh's magnum opus, Sri Gur Pratap Suraj Granth, published from 1927 to 1935 in fourteen volumes covering 6668 pages.

No sooner was the Sri Gur Pratap Suraj Granth completed than Bhai Veer Singh launched on an even more arduous task. This was a detailed commentary on the Guru Granth Sahib. In a way, exegesis had been his lifelong occupation. Early in his career he had annotated selections from the Holy Book published in 1906 under the title Panj Granth Steek, and as he himself declared, all of his writing was an exposition of the Sikh Scripture. He devoted himself unsparingly to the commentary, but it remained unfinished. A lifetime of unrelieved hard work and the weight of advancing years at last began to tell. In early 1957 signs of fatigue and weakness appeared. He was taken ill with a fever and died in his home in Amritsar on 10 June 1957. The portion of the commentary- nearly one half of the Holy Book- he had completed, was published posthumously in seven large volumes