ਖਮਾਣੋਂ ਤਹਿਸੀਲਖਮਾਣੋਂ ਤਹਿਸੀਲ

Where is Khamanon Tehsil?

Khamanon Tehsil is a tehsil of Fatehgarh Sahib district in the Malwa region of Punjab, India, headquartered in Khamanon town on the Chandigarh to Ludhiana road. The smallest tehsil of its district by villages, it had 91,038 people in 76 villages and one town at the Census of 2011.

Fatehgarh Sahib is a small district in eastern Punjab, in the Patiala division, created on 13 April 1992 and named for Sahibzada Fateh Singh, the younger son of Guru Gobind Singh Ji. The district is divided into four tehsils: Amloh, Bassi Pathana, Fatehgarh Sahib and Khamanon. Khamanon holds the district's northern side, toward Rupnagar and Ludhiana districts, in flat, fully farmed Malwa plain country, and its headquarters town stands at 30.82 degrees north and 76.35 degrees east, at an elevation of 254 metres. Sanghol, the tehsil's best known village, lies about 40 kilometres west of Chandigarh on the same Chandigarh to Ludhiana road.

The tehsil total used on this page is 91,038 people in 17,323 households over about 200 square kilometres, a density of 455 people per square kilometre, made up of 80,903 rural people and the 10,135 people of Khamanon town. A census based tehsil listing gives the same rural and urban split. One conflict is left open: the Wikipedia page for the town carries 80,991 in its summary box, a figure that matches neither the tehsil total of 91,038 nor the rural total of 80,903, while its own body text gives the town correctly as 10,135. This page uses 91,038 for the tehsil and 10,135 for the town, and does not use the 80,991 figure.

How Khamanon Tehsil was formed

Khamanon Sub Division came into being on 13 April 1992, the Baisakhi day on which Fatehgarh Sahib district itself was created. A block profile carried by SikhiWiki describes how it was assembled from its neighbours: villages came from the Morinda and Chamkaur Sahib sides of what was then Ropar district, from Khanna Sub Division in Ludhiana district, and from the Kum Kalan area. The same profile says the sub division then stood at 76 villages including three bechirag, or uninhabited, mauzas, although its group numbers do not add up to 76 on their own, so this page reports the present count without pretending the older arithmetic reconciles. Khamanon Kalan, Khamanon Khurd and Khamanon Kamli were clubbed together to form the Nagar Panchayat town that serves as headquarters.

The place is older than its tehsil. The same profile records a local account of 1763: after the Sikh misls defeated Zain Khan, the Subedar of Sirhind, and took Sirhind, the fort of Hayatpur, where the present village of Khamanon Khurd stands, and 62 adjoining villages were handed to the Dallewalia misl. The account goes on that the town took its name from Begum Khemo, a niece of the Subedar whose husband was held at Hayatpur and who was escorted with honour to Behlolpur, with a second view that, as a Khan's wife known as Khano, her name survives in Khamanon. This page gives that story as the tradition the profile records, not as a documented origin, because no second source opened for this page confirms it.

The headquarters town of Khamanon

Khamanon town is a Nagar Panchayat of 11 wards, and it is the only town in the tehsil. At the Census of 2011 it counted 10,135 people, 5,402 men and 4,733 women, in 2,085 houses over 7.27 square kilometres, up from 8,842 people in 2001. Its sex ratio was 876 women per 1,000 men, below the Punjab average of 895, its child sex ratio was 888, and Scheduled Castes made up 34.06 percent of the town, with no Scheduled Tribe population recorded. Of its people, 3,418 were recorded as workers, and 91.72 percent of those workers were in main work.

The town is literate by Punjab standards. Its effective literacy rate, counting only people aged seven and over, was 84.59 percent at the census, with male literacy of 87.87 percent and female literacy of 80.84 percent, each above the state average of 75.84 percent. One census aggregator lists 76.25 percent instead: that lower figure is the same 7,728 literate people divided by the whole population including young children, so the two numbers describe one count two ways, and this page uses the standard effective rate. Its recorded commodities in one town directory, electricity, polished rice and cattle feed, fit a market town serving paddy villages, not an industrial centre.

Villages, the block and ancient Sanghol

Below the tehsil sits the Khamanon development block, one of five blocks in the district alongside Amloh, Bassi Pathana, Sirhind and Khera. The block profile calls Khamanon the smallest block of the district, with an area of 19,593 hectares, a little below the roughly 200 square kilometres of the census tehsil frame, and describes it as devoid of any major industry and purely rural based. The Jugti tehsil directory lists the same 76 village pages for Khamanon. The villages are gram panchayat villages of the Malwa plain, most of them between a few hundred and about two thousand people.

The largest village is Sanghol, with 5,850 people in 1,132 households over 854 hectares, about 6 kilometres from the headquarters, with a sex ratio of 944, Scheduled Castes at 39.57 percent, and government schools from primary to senior secondary in the census village directory. Sanghol is also the tehsil's claim on deep history. Locally called Ucha Pind for its high ancient mounds, it is an archaeological site maintained in the record of the Archaeological Survey of India, excavated over roughly two decades from 1968, with evidence of habitation from late Harappan times, around 2000 BCE, to medieval times. In the Kushana period it was a prosperous town on the ancient Uttarapatha route, with a Buddhist stupa on a dharmachakra, or spoked wheel, plan and a monastery beside it, and its fame rests on the 117 Mathura school sculptures of the first to second century CE, found here in 1985 and now the heart of the Sanghol museum. The Sutlej once flowed beside the site and has since shifted about 10 kilometres away.

People, faith and language

Khamanon is the most strongly Sikh tehsil of its district. The census religion table for the tehsils of Fatehgarh Sahib district gives Khamanon 85.23 percent Sikh, 12.97 percent Hindu, 1.52 percent Muslim and 0.28 percent others at the Census of 2011, a higher Sikh share than any other tehsil of the district. Across the whole tehsil, Scheduled Castes numbered 36,157 of the 91,038 people, about two in five, children aged 0 to 6 numbered 8,832, literate people numbered 65,265, and the sex ratio was 898 women per 1,000 men, better than the district ratio of 871. The headquarters town is less one sided: Sikhs were 68.77 percent there with 6,970 people, Hindus 27.25 percent with 2,762, and Muslims 3.53 percent with 358.

Punjabi is the language of the tehsil. At district level, labelled here as district and not a tehsil count, 89.92 percent of Fatehgarh Sahib district spoke Punjabi as a first language at the Census of 2011 and 9.15 percent spoke Hindi. The town's own sources name its native speech as Puadhi, the Punjabi variety of the Puadh country toward the Shivalik side of eastern Punjab, a reminder that this Malwa labelled corner sits close to a dialect border and its everyday speech leans Puadhi.

Farming, work and getting there

Farming carries this tehsil. The block profile names paddy and wheat as the main crops, with adequate irrigation facilities, and the village directory shows fully irrigated sown land in village after village: at Sanghol, all 762 hectares of net sown area were irrigated, and its recorded commodities were sugarcane and gur. With no major industry in the block, work beyond the fields runs through the headquarters town: its markets, rice polishing and cattle feed trade, schools, banks and the tehsil and block offices the 76 villages use. Politically the tehsil sits inside the Bassi Pathana assembly constituency, a reserved seat built from Bassi Pathana and Khamanon tehsils, within the Fatehgarh Sahib Lok Sabha constituency.

The Chandigarh to Ludhiana road is the tehsil's spine, running through the headquarters town and past Sanghol. Town directories put Khamanon about 50 kilometres from Chandigarh, about 25 kilometres from the district headquarters at Fatehgarh Sahib, about 50 kilometres from Ludhiana and about 18 kilometres from Khanna, although village level records give district headquarters distances of about 15 to 28 kilometres by village, so treat any single figure as the town's, not the whole tehsil's. On rail, village level sources name Khamanon station, code KMNN, serving villages a few kilometres from the town, while one older town directory names Morinda, about 15 kilometres away, as nearest: both claims are left visible here rather than merged. VillageInfo puts the nearest airport for the tehsil at Ludhiana, about 34 kilometres by air, and buses on the highway and the district roads are the everyday transport of the tehsil.