Bassi Pathana in Fatehgarh Sahib district was a substantial Mughal-period town in the hinterland of Sirhind, settled by Pathans, with a Mughal core and old brick fabric.
It was among the towns taken during the campaigns of Banda Singh Bahadur Ji, and it declined with Sirhind.
Amloh and Khamano, the other tehsil towns of the district, have similar histories: Mughal or Sikh-period market towns in the shadow of a provincial capital that was destroyed twice.
The whole district is a landscape of destroyed and diminished towns, with Sirhind's ruins in the middle of it and Mandi Gobindgarh's steel furnaces at the edge.
There is no archaeological survey of the district's historic towns and no inventory of what remains of their pre-modern building fabric.
The name records a settlement of Pathans and the town's Mughal period population was substantially Muslim. That population left in 1947 and the town was resettled by refugees from the west, which is the history of most of this district.
What stands is fragmentary: parts of a sarai, tombs, a stepwell or two, mostly unprotected and mostly built into or around by later construction. None of it is signed and none of it appears in any guide.
The district was created in 1992 around Fatehgarh Sahib and its public identity rests on the events of 1704 and 1705. The Mughal period fabric of its towns, which is what is physically left, sits outside that story and gets no attention because of it.