ਧੂਰੀਧੂਰੀ

Dhuri is a city and railway junction in Sangrur district of Punjab, India, in the Malwa region. Its station, opened in 1905, joins the Ludhiana to Jakhal and Bathinda to Rajpura lines. In 2022 its assembly seat elected Bhagwant Mann, who became Chief Minister of Punjab.

Where is Dhuri?

Dhuri is in Sangrur district, on the flat Malwa plain in the south of Indian Punjab, at about 236 metres above sea level. Its neighbouring towns are Sangrur, Malerkotla, Nabha and Barnala, and the villages around it look to Dhuri for their market, their railway station and their government work. The municipal council covers about 32 square kilometres. Dhuri is also a tehsil headquarters: the wider tehsil counted 261,247 people in 2011, most of them in villages, so the town's bazaars serve a countryside far larger than the town itself. Its PIN code is 148024 and its vehicles carry the PB 59 registration.

History: the railway made this town

Dhuri has no princely palace or famous battlefield. Its recorded story is the story of a market town that a railway turned into a junction. The Ludhiana to Jakhal line was built through here in the first years of the twentieth century, and Dhuri station opened in 1905. A second line, from Bathinda to Rajpura, was later laid through the town, and where the two lines crossed, Dhuri became a junction: trains, goods yards, commission agents and grain traders followed, and a qasba bazaar grew into a town.

The town kept growing with its countryside. The census counted 37,431 people in 1991 and 49,406 in 2001, before reaching 55,225 in 2011. The junction was modernised in stages: electrification of the Ludhiana to Dhuri stretch was completed in 2019, and in July 2020 trial runs followed on the newly electrified Dhuri to Jakhal stretch and on the Dhuri to Lehra Muhabbat stretch of the Bathinda to Rajpura line.

Geography and people

The 2011 census counted 55,225 people in the municipal council: 29,231 men and 25,994 women, with 6,169 children under seven. Literates numbered 40,067, and the effective literacy rate for people aged seven and above was 81.7 per cent, 86.4 per cent for men and 76.4 per cent for women. Scheduled Castes numbered 14,207, about a quarter of the town.

By faith, the census recorded Hindus as the largest community at 34,820 people, followed by Sikhs at 19,006, with smaller Muslim (932) and Jain (309) communities and a few Christians and Buddhists. Punjabi is the official and everyday language, spoken in the Malwa dialect of the region. Around the town, the tehsil's villages farm the wheat, paddy and cotton rotation of the Malwa plain, and Dhuri's grain market and shops are where that produce is traded.

The 2022 election that put Dhuri on every screen

Dhuri's assembly constituency, number 107 in the Punjab Legislative Assembly, was established in 1951 and sits inside the Sangrur Lok Sabha seat. For decades it changed hands among Congress, Akali, Communist and independent winners: Arvind Khanna won it for Congress in 2012, Gobind Singh Longowal took the 2015 by-election for the Akali Dal, and Dalvir Singh Goldy won it back for Congress in 2017. Then, in 2022, the Aam Aadmi Party's chief ministerial face, Bhagwant Mann, chose Dhuri for his assembly contest.

Mann won with 82,592 votes, 64.29 per cent of the valid votes, defeating Goldy by 58,206 votes in a constituency of 166,143 electors, and went on to become Chief Minister of Punjab. Overnight, a Malwa railway town most of Punjab knew as a junction became the Chief Minister's own constituency, a status it still holds.

Notable people

Dhuri's best known son in the arts is the painter Manjit Bawa (1941 to 2008), born here before studying fine art at the College of Art in Delhi from 1958 to 1963. He worked as a silkscreen printer in Britain, returned to India, and became known for canvases in strong Indian colours, with figures from myth and Sufi poetry, among them Ranjha and Krishna. He received the Lalit Kala Akademi National Award in 1980 and died in Delhi on 29 December 2008.

On screen, Dhuri gave Punjabi cinema one of its favourite comedians. Binnu Dhillon was born here on 29 August 1975, studied at Guru Teg Bahadur Public School, and took a postgraduate degree in theatre and television from Punjabi University, Patiala. He began as a Bhangra performer, moved through television from 1998, and rose to fame in films such as Carry On Jatta. The actor and writer Rana Ranbir, born in Dhuri in 1970, is the town's other familiar film name. Bhagwant Mann, the constituency's MLA, comes from Satoj village elsewhere in Sangrur district.

Getting there and Dhuri today

Dhuri Junction, station code DUI, sits in the Ambala division of Northern Railway, with five platforms. Trains on the Ludhiana to Jakhal line link it with Malerkotla, Sangrur and Ludhiana, while the Bathinda to Rajpura line links it with Barnala, Nabha and Patiala. By road, state highways connect the town with Sangrur, Malerkotla, Nabha and Barnala.

Today Dhuri is a working Malwa town rather than a visitor stop: a grain and goods market for its tehsil, a junction where two railway lines cross, and, since 2022, the seat of Punjab's Chief Minister. Its name is now familiar across the state for politics, but its daily life still runs on the older rhythms of the mandi, the station and the villages around it.