Kapurthala district

Kapurthala is a small district of the Doaba, formed around the princely state of the same name, with tehsils at Kapurthala, Sultanpur Lodhi, Phagwara and Bholath.

Phagwara is separated from the rest of the district by Jalandhar territory, which is an inheritance of the princely state's scattered holdings.

It holds the Jagatjit Palace and the Moorish mosque at Kapurthala, Sultanpur Lodhi with the Kali Bein, the Rail Coach Factory, and Kanjli wetland.

Its agriculture includes a large seed potato area. Its industry is the coach factory and Phagwara's mills.

The Kali Bein restoration by Sant Balbir Singh Seechewal is the most successful river cleanup in Punjab and it happened here.

What is not recorded: the Kapurthala state records and the condition of its buildings, and the Bein's water quality over time in any accessible public series.

Sultanpur Lodhi is where Guru Nanak Sahib Ji lived and worked as a storekeeper before the udasis. The 550th anniversary in 2019 brought a large programme of construction to the town.

Kapurthala state was ruled by the Ahluwalia house, descended from Jassa Singh Ahluwalia Ji. Its territory was scattered and included a block in Awadh granted for services in 1857.

The Kali Bein was choked with weed and sewage until the cleaning begun in 2000. It is the case most often cited in India of a river restored by volunteers rather than by a department.

What we don't know

  • Where the Kapurthala state archive is held and in what condition.

Where to check this

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

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • Reporting on the Kali Bein restoration.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

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.