Hoshiarpurਹੁਸ਼ਿਆਰਪੁਰ

History

Hoshiarpur is one of the older towns of the Doaba. Tradition links its founding to the early fourteenth century and a local chief whose name the town is said to carry. The surrounding country was part of the old Katoch kingdom of Trigarta, and Chinese pilgrim accounts and later Rajput chiefs fill its medieval record. In 1809 Maharaja Ranjit Singh occupied the town, and his successors kept a considerable cantonment just outside it; after the British annexation of Punjab in 1849, the new rulers kept the cantonment up for several years.

Under the British, Hoshiarpur became a district headquarters and a centre of the Arya Samaj and educational reform movements — its Government College once served as a campus of Panjab University. The town's nineteenth-century manufactures were already famous: inlaid woodwork, lacquered ware, cotton goods and copper vessels, crafts that survive in the bazaars today.

Geography & people

The city stands at about 300 metres above sea level at the edge of the Shivalik hills, which give its northern skyline a blue ridge missing from the rest of the Doaba. The municipal council counted 168,653 people in 2011, making it the Doaba's second city after Jalandhar. Punjabi dominates, with Hindi and Dogri heard in the bazaars; the population is Hindu-majority with a large Sikh minority.

Hoshiarpur is sometimes called the 'Land of Saints' for its many deras and spiritual centres, and it is equally known for its lychee and mango orchards and for the Bhrigu Samhita tradition — old astrological manuscripts that draw visitors from across the world seeking readings of their past and future.

Places of interest

The old city's bazaars still sell the inlaid woodwork and lacquerware that made Hoshiarpur's name, and the colonial-era college buildings are worth a walk. The Takhni-Rehmapur wildlife sanctuary lies in the nearby Shivaliks, and the Kandi belt's forested country begins at the town's edge. Sheesh Mahal and the town's old temples and gurdwaras round out a day's sightseeing.

Notable people

Hoshiarpur's distinction is institutional and artisanal rather than personal: its colleges educated generations of the Doaba's professionals, its craftsmen carried the town's woodwork across India, and its astrologers' manuscripts gave it a peculiar global fame. The town belongs, in the end, to its teachers, artisans and the soldiers it has sent to the army in large numbers.