Faridkotਫਰੀਦਕੋਟ

A princely past

Faridkot was the seat of a Sikh princely state founded in the seventeenth century, which survived the upheavals of the eighteenth century and merged into the Patiala and East Punjab States Union in 1948. The state's Qila Mubarak still stands in the old town, and the district's villages remember the order of the princely darbar in their revenue records and old wells.

The district takes its name from Baba Farid, the great thirteenth-century Sufi saint of Pakpattan, whose verses are enshrined in the Guru Granth Sahib. The connection gives Faridkot a place in both Sikh and Sufi memory, and the town's old quarters grew around the fort and the shrines together.

Jaitu and the Akali struggle

The town of Jaitu, in this district, was the site of the Jaitu morcha of 1924, one of the great Akali agitations of the Gurdwara Reform Movement. Hundreds of Akali volunteers courted arrest marching to Jaitu, and the episode became a landmark in the Sikh struggle for control of their shrines. Gurdwara Tibbi Sahib at Jaitu commemorates those days.

The district today

Modern Faridkot district is compact, with about 617,000 people counted in 2011, and largely agricultural, growing wheat, paddy and cotton. Faridkot city is known across Punjab for its medical institutions, including the Guru Gobind Singh Medical College and the Baba Farid University of Health Sciences, which draw students from the whole Malwa belt.

Kotkapura, the district's second town, is a historic market centre with its own fort traditions. Village-level pages for Faridkot district are being added to the Kosh.