Fazilka was founded in 1844 by J. H. Oliver, a British officer, who laid out a town on land that had belonged to Mian Fazil Wattu and named it after him. The Second Anglo-Sikh War began four years later, in 1848, when Patrick Vans Agnew was killed at Multan.
The town sits on the Sutlej close to the border. Before 1947 it was a market for the whole of the Bahawalpur riverain and its trade ran south and west. After 1947 the roads it lived on ended at a line about ten kilometres away and it became a terminus.
In December 1971 the Pakistani advance toward Fazilka was held at the Sabuna drain and the Beriwala bridge. The Asafwala memorial outside the town holds the dead of that fighting, most of them of the 4 Jat and 3 Assam.
The Sadqi crossing near Fazilka was a working border post for goods and passengers into the 1960s. It has been shut since.
Fazilka is known across Punjab for one thing that has nothing to do with any of the above, the tonga, which the town kept running long after the rest of the state gave them up.
The town was founded in 1844 and named for a local headman, which is recorded, and the man himself is not.
It was laid out as an administrative and market centre for the tract between the Sutlej and the desert, and the cotton and wool trade of that belt ran through it.
Its road to Bahawalnagar closed in 1947 and the town lost its hinterland. It became a district headquarters again in 2011, a hundred and sixty-seven years after it was founded.