Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Sheikhupura

My city has a long histroy.The king Akbar called his beloved son Saleem as "Sheikhu". Sheikhupura, a neighboring district of Lahore, the heart of Punjab-province, has immense historical eminence. The history of Sheikhupura goes back to 100 B.CHistorical research has established the fact that Sangla or Sakala was the capital of Punjab and it was here that Alexander fought one of his most serious battles of his career. Its name is spoken of, firstly in the pages of Tuzke-Jahangiri
as Jahangirpura, after the name of Prince Salim Jahangir. The great Emperor Nor-u-Din Muhammad Jahangir laid the foundation of historical Sheikhupura. In 1607, Sheikhupura was constructed because of Jahangir order. The mother of Jahangir was Hindu and she lovingly calls him Sheikhubaba. Because of this suitability, the new city was named as Sheikhupura. During the reign of Emperor Jahangir (1605 to 1627), Sheikhupura had the status of royal hunting ground. In Tuzke-Jahangiri, Jahangir wrote during the events in the 1607: On the day of Tuesday, I reside in Jahangirpura, my hunting ground. According to my order, a Minar and a grave for my deer, Mansraj, were constructed here. History imparts that Mughal Emperor Jahangir granted the estate of Sheikhupura to Syed Usman, the father of Shah Bilal, a religious preceptor of the saintly line of Qadria. Tuzkarah-ul-Sheikh-ul-Kidham is that book which has described about the Hiran Minar. This book was completed in 1057 (Hijrih). Total numbers of verses in this book are 6188. The name of writer of this book was Khawajah Surut Sigh. Over the whole district, the period between the decline of Mughal Empire after the death of Aurangzeb and the rise of Sikh confederacies was one of the utter confusion and anarchy. The successive shocks of invasion from the northwest, and the devastation caused again and again by the invading armies of Nadir. Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah Abdali (1724-1773)almost completely ruined the prosperity of the tract. The Bhattis struggled for some time to maintain their independence against the Sikh and offered a guerilla resistance to Ranjit Singh's troops for some year. In 1877 when Ranjit Sigh entered the tract with the large army, the Bhattis offered a determined resistance and though defeated in the field they entrenched themselves in the fortified towns of Jalalpur and Pindi Bhatin. Most of the Bhattis leaders where killed and the survivors who fled for protection to the Sials of Jhang were outlawed and their possessions confiscated. When the power of the sikhs was broken in the 2nd Sikh war and the Punjab was annexed by the British in the 1849, they returned and were restored to most of their old possessions.