The making of the Punjabi society, a frontier society, for the last 3,000 years has been a fascinating story of complex paradoxes. If the Punjab served as a theatre of warfare, it has also been an abode of sages, seers and sant poets. Perpetual political and ideological contestation did not necessarily close the doors to meditative contemplations. Even if the established religions, including the new ones, could not avoid sectarian manifestations, the universal spirituality kept the doors open for egalitarian inclusiveness cutting across all divisive lines. If the rise of Sikhism as a new religious ideology was a popular expression of egalitarian urges and came to offer respectable space to the untouchables from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, it also degenerated to Brahmanical caste praxis by the mid-nineteenth century. Meanwhile, the Dalit sant poets, as part of the tradition, offer a seemingly paradoxical response of devotion and dissent. We have four major Punjabi Dalit poets emerging from the last quarter of the seventeenth century to the first quarter of the twentieth century who were soaked in the contemplative world of knowledge and spirituality, while seeking an egalitarian and just society. The Punjabi Dalit literary tradition begins with Bhai Jaita alias Jeevan Singh (c. 1655–1704), who became part of the guru's household as he had carried the severed head of Guru Teg Bahadur from Delhi to Anandpur, and in his late years, composed a devotional epic poem, Sri Gur Katha, around Guru Gobind Singh's life at the turn of the eighteenth century.