Mansa was made a district in 1992 out of Bathinda. Its tehsils are Mansa, Budhlada and Sardulgarh.
It is the poorest district of Punjab by most measures, in dry cotton country on the old Ghaggar plain, at the tail of the canal system.
It holds Kishangarh, shelled by Patiala state forces in 1949 during the muzara movement, and a belt of villages central to that movement; Bhikhi; and Moosa.
It has among the highest landless Dalit population shares in Punjab and is the centre of the movement to enforce the reservation of a third of village common land for Dalit cultivation.
It produces a very large share of Punjab's kabaddi players and popular musicians.
What is not recorded: the muzara movement's own participants and villages, which are commemorated on village gates and nowhere else.
The muzara movement of the 1940s and early 1950s was a tenants' movement against the biswedars, the landlords of Patiala state, and its demand was ownership of the land the tenants worked. Kishangarh is where state forces fired on them in 1949.
The movement won. The Pepsu Tenancy Act of 1955 gave the muzaras occupancy rights and converted them into owners, which makes it one of the few land reforms in northern India that actually transferred land.
Mansa's kabaddi grounds and its singers are the district's national profile now. Its farm suicide figures, its landlessness and its water are the district as it is.