Hafizabad sits in the old Sandal Bar between the Chenab and the Ravi, the country of Dulla Bhatti's revolt against Akbar in the 1590s. Pindi Bhattian, Dulla's town, is in this district.
The bar was grazing land held by pastoral communities until the Chenab Colony canals were cut from 1892, after which it became one of the most productive wheat and rice tracts in the world.
The district is now a rice-growing area supplying Pakistan's basmati exports.
The Lohri song children sing across Indian Punjab every January is about a man from this district.
The pastoral society of the bar, its law, its cattle-lifting code and its oral poetry, ended within a generation of the canals arriving and almost nothing of it was recorded on either side.
The Lohri song names Dulla Bhatti, a Rajput of the Sandal Bar executed at Lahore under Akbar for leading a revolt against the revenue settlement. The song remembers him for taking girls out of the hands of those selling them and arranging their marriages, which is the part that fits a winter festival.
Hafizabad was a tehsil of Gujranwala district and was made a district of its own in 1991. The Chenab Colony settlement moved cultivating families out of the crowded central districts onto measured squares here, and the pastoral communities who had used the bar were largely left out of the allotments.
The husking mills around the town work the basmati of the Chenab tract, most of it for export. The bar as a landscape is gone, and what stands in its place is one of the most intensively irrigated districts in Pakistani Punjab.