Malerkotla was made Punjab's twenty-third district in 2021, carved out of Sangrur, with tehsils at Malerkotla, Ahmedgarh and Amargarh.
It is the only Muslim-majority district in Punjab and the town is the only Muslim-majority town of any size in the state.
It was a princely state founded on a grant from Bahlol Lodhi in 1454 to the Sufi Haider Sheikh, whose shrine is still the centre of the town's religious life and is visited by Sikhs and Hindus as well as Muslims.
Nawab Sher Mohammad Khan's protest in 1705 against the order to kill the younger Sahibzade is remembered as the Haah da Naara and is the reason the town holds a particular place in Sikh memory. In 1872 the Kuka executions took place here.
In 1947 the town took in a very large number of refugees and its own account is that nobody was killed in it.
What is not recorded: an audited account of 1947 in the town, and the district's own Muslim institutional history, which is documented almost entirely from outside.
Malerkotla was made a district in 2021, carved out of Sangrur, and the town of Malerkotla is the only Muslim majority town in Indian Punjab.
The town was the seat of a Muslim state whose Nawab protested against the execution of the younger Sahibzade at Sirhind, and the protest is the reason usually given for why the town was not attacked in 1947.
Its trades were tonga and carriage building, badminton shuttlecock manufacture and embroidery, and the shuttlecock industry supplied most of India.