Ferozepur district

Ferozepur runs along the Sutlej and the border, with tehsils at Ferozepur, Zira and Guru Har Sahai. Fazilka was separated from it in 2011.

It holds Hussainiwala where Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were cremated; the Ferozepur headworks; Mudki, Ferozeshah and Sobraon, all three battlefields of the First Anglo-Sikh War; and the Zira distillery protest site.

Its land includes bet along the Sutlej and land beyond the border fence farmed under escort.

It has one of the largest cantonments in the region and a border economy with no hinterland to the west.

The 1947 award of Ferozepur, which kept the headworks and the town on the Indian side, is disputed.

What is not recorded: the Anglo-Sikh battlefields, none of which is surveyed, marked or protected on the Indian side beyond a memorial or two.

Ferozepur was a cantonment from 1838 and the arsenal there supplied the British armies in both Anglo-Sikh wars. The fields of Ferozeshah, Mudki and Sabraon are all within reach of the town.

The Ferozepur headworks on the Sutlej feeds the canals of the south west and of northern Rajasthan, and control of it was among the reasons the boundary line here was fought over in 1947.

Zira and Guru Har Sahai are the other tehsil towns. Fazilka and Abohar were taken out to form a new district in 2011, which removed the southern part of the old Ferozepur.

What we don't know

  • The exact locations of the Mudki, Ferozeshah and Sobraon actions on the ground, which have never been archaeologically surveyed.

Where to check this

  1. Punjab district records for Ferozepur. Punjab district gazetteers and settlement reports (Internet Archive) ↗

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How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 76 accounts in What the Land Holds, the chapter of this site covering the rivers, the soil, the weather and what lives here.