Jhang

Jhang is Heer's country. The Sials of Jhang are her family in the qissa, and the tomb attributed to Heer and Ranjha is at Jhang and is visited, particularly by young people, which local clergy have periodically objected to.

Sultan Bahu was from Shorkot in this district and his shrine at Garh Maharaja draws very large numbers at the urs.

The district sits on the Chenab in the old Sandal Bar country and was pastoral before the canals.

Its speech is on the Punjabi and Saraiki boundary and the classification is argued.

Abdus Salam, Pakistan's only science Nobel laureate, was born at Jhang in 1926.

A district that produced the setting of the greatest Punjabi poem, one of its greatest Sufi poets and a Nobel physicist is known outside Pakistan for none of those things.

The tomb attributed to Heer at Jhang is maintained and draws visitors. The qissa is Waris Shah's, written in the eighteenth century, and the geography in it is this tract.

Jhang was a Sial chiefdom before the Sikh conquest and the town has a Mughal period core. Its Sikh and Hindu population, small to begin with, left in 1947.

Abdus Salam's schooling was at Jhang. His standing in Pakistan has been contested since 1974 and public commemoration of him there has been intermittent.

What we don't know

  • Whether the tomb at Jhang has any relation to the story.

Where to check this

  1. Waris Shah, Heer. Waris Shah, Heer - full Gurmukhi text (Internet Archive) ↗
  2. Punjab district gazetteer material for Jhang. 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.

  • Nobel Prize biographical material.

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 62 accounts in What the Voice Carried, the chapter of this site covering the poetry, the music and the oral tradition.