Randhawa is a Jat got concentrated in the Majha, particularly in Gurdaspur and Amritsar districts, and in the Bari Doab across the line.
M.S. Randhawa, an ICS officer, was among the most consequential Punjabis of the twentieth century and is barely known. He was Deputy Commissioner of Delhi during the 1947 refugee influx and organised the resettlement; he was later the first Chief Commissioner of Chandigarh, where he directed the planting of the city's trees and gardens; and he was Vice-Chancellor of Punjab Agricultural University during the Green Revolution.
He also wrote extensively on Kangra painting, on Punjabi agriculture, on the history of Indian agriculture in four volumes, and on the flowering trees of India, and he collected Pahari painting for the Chandigarh museum.
One man ran the Delhi resettlement, built Chandigarh's landscape, led the agricultural university through the Green Revolution and wrote the standard work on Kangra painting.
Randhawa villages in Gurdaspur and Amritsar are numerous and several carry the name directly.
Got names do not follow religion. Randhawas are Sikh, Hindu and Muslim, and a Randhawa in Sheikhupura and a Randhawa in Gurdaspur make the same descent claim and have not met since 1947. The got outlived the partition of everything else about the families carrying it.
The rose garden at Chandigarh was laid out under him, along with the flowering trees along the sector roads, chosen so that something is in flower in every month of the year. A city known for its concrete was planted by a man who wrote the standard book on the flowering trees of India.
A got dense in one district produces exactly this: a name that appears repeatedly in the district's institutions, its army lists and its literature, for the ordinary reason that there are a lot of them there.