Ferozepurਫ਼ਿਰੋਜ਼ਪੁਰ

Where is Ferozepur district?

Ferozepur is a border district in the Malwa region of Punjab, India, on the east bank of the Sutlej river, with Pakistan along its western edge. Its headquarters is Ferozepur city, and it is best known for Hussainiwala, where Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were cremated in 1931.

The land is a flat alluvial plain sloping gently from the north east toward the south west, with the Sutlej along its northern and western sides. The district administration describes belts running parallel to the river: the low Bet land along the bank, called Hithar, with dark alluvial clay, and the lighter sandy Rohi and Mukhi plains inland, where well water can be brackish. About 69 percent of the soil is chestnut brown alluvial soil and the rest is desert soil. Pakistan lies to the west, Fazilka district to the south west, Muktsar to the south, and Faridkot and Moga to the east.

The climate is dry and sharp at both ends of the year. Summers are severe, June is the hottest month and daytime temperatures can reach about 47 degrees Celsius, while January nights can fall close to freezing. Around 70 percent of the rain arrives with the south west monsoon between July and the middle of September.

The headquarters is Ferozepur city, and the district is divided into three tehsils, Ferozepur, Zira and Guru Har Sahai, with six development blocks beneath them: Ferozepur, Ghall Khurd, Guru Har Sahai, Makhu, Mamdot and Zira. The district administration counts 689 villages and eight municipal towns, among them Zira, Guru Har Sahai, Makhu, Talwandi Bhai, Mudki and Mamdot, alongside Ferozepur City and Ferozepur Cantonment. Until 2011 the district was much larger: Fazilka, Abohar and part of Jalalabad tehsil were then separated to form Fazilka district, and the rest of Jalalabad became the new Guru Har Sahai tehsil.

A frontier town becomes a cantonment

Two traditions explain the name. One credits Firoz Shah Tughlaq, the Delhi Sultan who reigned from 1351 to 1388, and reads Ferozepur as the city of Firoz. The other credits a Bhatti chief named Feroze Khan in the sixteenth century. What is not in doubt is the pull of the place itself: a crossing town on the Sutlej at the edge of the Lahore kingdom, watched by every power that held Punjab or wanted it.

In 1763, troops of the Bhangi misl under Gujjar Singh crossed the Sutlej and took Ferozepur, and the town passed into the Sikh world of the misls. It later came to Dhanna Singh, who accepted British protection, a choice that kept Maharaja Ranjit Singh from expanding east of the river at this point. When Dhanna Singh's widow Lachhman Kaur died in 1835 without an heir, the Ferozepur jagir lapsed into direct British control.

The British turned the hexagonal fort into a garrison by 1839, on the orders of the Duke of Wellington, and Ferozepur grew into one of the oldest cantonments in India. The fort became an arsenal in 1858 and then a base depot supplying guns, ammunition and trained animals, a role it kept until the ammunition was moved to Kasubegu in 1941. The Army's Golden Arrow Division has now reopened the fort to the public for the first time in about 200 years, and the old walled city's ten gates still mark the headquarters town out from every other town in Punjab.

The First Anglo-Sikh War on Ferozepur soil

The First Anglo-Sikh War of 1845 and 1846 was fought mainly on this district's soil. After the Sikh Khalsa Army crossed the Sutlej in December 1845, the armies clashed at Mudki on 18 December 1845 and then at Ferozeshah on 21 and 22 December, where the British held on only narrowly. Fighting followed at Baddowal and Aliwal in January 1846, and the war was decided at Sobraon on 10 February 1846. The Treaty of Lahore in March 1846 reduced the Sikh army, imposed an indemnity and brought the land east of the Sutlej under British control.

The Punjab Government's Anglo-Sikh War Memorial at Ferozeshah, a three storey building near the Rajasthan Canal and the Sirhind Feeder, honours the Sikh soldiers of Mudki, Ferozeshah and Sobraon, and of Chillianwala in the second war of 1849. Its ground floor museum displays weapons of the wars. The village names of this plain, Mudki, Ferozeshah and Sobraon, are still the shorthand by which the fall of the Sikh Empire is remembered.

The people of the Sutlej plain

The Census of 2011 was taken months before the split, and it counted the undivided district at 2,029,074 people across 5,305 square kilometres, a density of 382 people per square kilometre. Reckoned in today's boundaries, the district holds 1,001,931 people on 2,406.84 square kilometres, about 416 people per square kilometre. The district administration's tehsil table shows a strongly rural district, with about 71.5 percent of people in villages and 28.5 percent in towns.

The census put literacy at 68.92 percent, with male literacy at 75.44 percent and female literacy at 61.69 percent, and the sex ratio at 893 females for every 1,000 males. In the present district, Sikhs form the largest share of the population at 68.59 percent, followed by Hindus at 28.83 percent and Christians at 1.83 percent, and Scheduled Castes make up 42.85 percent of the people. Punjabi is the official language and the language of daily life here, spoken in the Malwa form of the south western plain.

Farming, the cantonment and the border

Farming carries the district. The Bet lands along the Sutlej are fertile alluvial fields, and wheat and cotton have long been the signature crops of this plain, watered by canals and tubewells. The Harike headworks, built in 1952 just below the point where the Beas joins the Sutlej at the district's northern edge, store and supply irrigation and drinking water to southern Punjab and to neighbouring Rajasthan. The grain markets of towns such as Zira, Makhu and Talwandi Bhai collect the harvest of the villages around them.

The cantonment is the second pillar of the local economy. Ferozepur Cantonment is a separate municipal town beside the city, and generations of soldiers have passed through its parade grounds, bazaars and churches. The border is the third pillar. Hussainiwala was once a working road crossing on the way toward Lahore; the crossing is closed to travellers today, but the daily flag lowering ceremony there, held jointly by India's Border Security Force and the Pakistan Rangers, keeps the frontier at the centre of the district's public life.

Places to see in Ferozepur district

Hussainiwala, a village on the Sutlej about a kilometre from the Pakistan border, holds the district's most sacred modern ground. On 23 March 1931, after Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev Thapar and Shivaram Rajguru were hanged in Lahore Central Jail, jail officials broke through the back wall of the jail and brought their bodies secretly to this riverbank, where they were cremated without any ceremony. The National Martyrs Memorial, built in 1968, marks the spot with statues of the three men. Batukeshwar Dutt, who had joined Bhagat Singh in the Assembly bombing and died in 1965, was cremated here at his own wish, as was Bhagat Singh's mother, Vidyawati. Every 23 March the Shaheedi Mela brings thousands to the memorial.

In Ferozepur Cantonment stands the Saragarhi Memorial Gurdwara, opened in 1904, with the names of 21 men carved on its walls. They were Sikh soldiers of the 36th Sikhs who, under Havildar Ishar Singh, held the signalling post of Saragarhi on the North West Frontier on 12 September 1897 against thousands of Afridi and Orakzai tribesmen, fighting to the last man rather than surrender. All 21 received the Indian Order of Merit, then the highest gallantry award open to an Indian soldier, and most of them hailed from this district. The Sikh Regiment still marks 12 September as Saragarhi Day.

The Anglo-Sikh War Memorial at Ferozeshah and the reopened hexagonal Ferozepur Fort carry the district's military centuries, from the Khalsa Army to the British arsenal. Nature keeps a memorial of its own at the northern edge, where the Beas meets the Sutlej. Harike Wetland, spread over about 8,739 hectares, was declared a wildlife sanctuary in 1982 and a Ramsar site of international importance in 1990. Winter brings large flocks of migratory birds from as far as Siberia, and rare Indus river dolphins have been sighted in its waters.

Getting to Ferozepur district

Trains serve Ferozepur Cantonment station, and roads link the headquarters town with Ludhiana and Chandigarh to the east and with Bathinda and Fazilka to the south. The district's sights make an easy circuit: Hussainiwala and the Saragarhi Memorial are in and around the headquarters town, Ferozeshah and Mudki lie a short drive out on the plain, and Harike sits at the northern tip where the two rivers meet. The nearest large airport is at Amritsar. Most visitors come for a morning at the martyrs' memorial and stay for the flag lowering ceremony at the border in the evening.