Sirhind was a Mughal administrative centre and the seat of the governor Wazir Khan.
Banda Singh Bahadur Ji took it in 1710. For a few years a Sikh state held the country between the Sutlej and the Yamuna. Banda was captured and executed at Delhi in 1716.
The Mughal ruins at Sirhind, and Rauza Sharif, are the surviving fabric.
The name is usually derived from sar-i-hind, the head of India, marking it as the frontier of the Delhi Sultanate's settled territory. It was a mint town, a serai stage on the imperial road, and the seat of a faujdar whose jurisdiction covered most of what is now eastern Punjab and Haryana.
The Aam Khas Bagh, a Mughal garden complex with a hammam and a sardkhana, a cooling chamber, survives in fragments beside the highway. So does the tomb of Mir Miran and a scatter of brick structures in the fields. The rest of the city is under cultivation and under the modern town, and it has never been excavated.
What the two destructions of Sirhind mean is that Indian Punjab's only Mughal provincial capital exists as an archaeological site with no archaeology. The bricks the Khalsa pulled down in 1710 and 1764 went into buildings across the district, which is a documented practice and has never been traced.