Gujranwala

• 1. Introduction

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  Gujranwala is Pakistan's fifth-largest city, sitting in the heart of the Rechna Doab, a strip of fertile land between the Chenab river to the north and the Ravi to the south. It carries the nickname the "City of Wrestlers," but that label barely scratches the surface of what this place has been. Here is a city that once served as the capital of a Sikh empire. A city where the future empire-builder Ranjit Singh was born in a busy market neighbourhood. A city that survived aerial bombardment, survived the bloodshed of Partition, and then reinvented itself as one of Pakistan's most productive industrial centres.

  How did a relatively young town, founded in the eighteenth century, come to matter so much so quickly? What forces shaped its streets and its people? And what does it mean that so much of the historical record was literally set on fire during a single week of riots in 1919?

• 2. A Name and Its Roots

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  Gujranwala's name carries its own origin story inside it. In Punjabi, the word means "abode of the Gujjars," a reference to the Gujjar tribe that has long inhabited northern Punjab. One tradition claims a local man named Choudhry Gujjar owned the Persian wheel that supplied water to the early settlement, and that the town took his name in gratitude. A competing account, supported by evidence, points to a village called Serai Gujran, meaning "inn of Gujjars," that once sat near what is now the city's Khiyali Gate.

  Locals have also long held that the original settlement bore the name Khanpur Sansi. Recent scholarship, however, suggests the earlier village was Serai Gujran, a place that appears in sources describing the 18th-century invasions of Ahmad Shah Abdali. The debate over names reflects a broader uncertainty: Gujranwala's exact origins are unclear, and it may have begun as a village as early as the middle of the 16th century. The city's relative youth sets it apart from Sialkot and Lahore, its ancient neighbours to the north and south.

• 3. Capital of a Rising Power

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  Charat Singh, ruler of the Sukerchakia Misl, built a fort in the Gujranwala area between 1756 and 1758, at a moment when Mughal authority was collapsing across Punjab. With the death of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in 1707, central power had weakened steadily, accelerated by Nader Shah's invasion in 1739 and then shattered by Ahmad Shah Abdali's repeated raids between 1747 and 1772.

  Maha Singh's son Ranjit Singh was born in 1780 in Gujranwala's Purani Mandi market. Rising to power in 1792, he kept Gujranwala as his capital until he seized Lahore from the Durrani Afghans in 1799. At that point the seat of power shifted to Lahore, and Gujranwala entered a period of relative decline. Ranjit Singh's most celebrated military commander, Hari Singh Nalwa, was given Gujranwala as a jagir sometime after 1799. Nalwa held it until his death in 1837, during which time he surrounded the city with a high mud wall and laid out the grid street-plan that still defines the old city today. By 1839, the city's bazaars contained an estimated 500 shops, and several pleasure gardens had grown up around it, including one created by Nalwa himself that was known for its exotic plants. Jind Kaur, Ranjit Singh's last queen and the mother of Duleep Singh, was born in Gujranwala in 1817.

• 4. Under British Rule

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  Britain captured the area in 1848, and what followed was rapid institutional change. Gujranwala was incorporated as a municipality in 1867, and the Brandreth, Khiyali, and Lahori Gates were completed in 1869, built directly atop the sites of the earlier Sikh-era gates. A new clocktower rose in the city centre in 1906 to mark Gujranwala's heart.

  Christian missionaries arrived during colonial rule, and their presence reshaped the urban fabric. The city's first Presbyterian Church was established in 1875 in the Civil Lines neighbourhood, a settlement built one mile north of the old city to house the European population. A theological seminary followed in 1877, and a Christian technical school in 1900. The North-Western Railway linked Gujranwala to the rest of British India by rail in 1881. The Gujranwala Guru Nanak Khalsa College was founded in the city in 1889, a major Sikh institution of higher learning that later relocated to Ludhiana. The Khanki Headworks, completed in 1892, irrigated three million acres across the province.

  The 1901 census of British India counted 29,224 people in Gujranwala. Then came April 1919. Riots erupted in response to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar, and Gujranwala's upheaval was among the most violent anywhere in British India. The city's railway station was damaged and its Tehsil Office, Clock Tower, Dak Bangla, and city courts were burned. Much of the city's historical record was destroyed in those fires. Protestors in the city, in surrounding villages, and in a procession arriving from Dhullay were fired upon with machine-guns mounted to low-flying planes. The Royal Air Force, under Reginald Edward Harry Dyer, carried out aerial bombardment over the city and its surroundings.

• 5. Partition and Its Aftermath

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  The 1941 census recorded 269,528 non-Muslims among the 912,234 residents of Gujranwala District. In the city itself, 54.30% of residents were Muslim before Partition, though non-Muslims controlled a disproportionate share of the local economy: Hindus and Sikhs together owned two-thirds of Gujranwala's properties. Sikh communities were concentrated in localities including Guru Nanak Pura, Guru Gobind Garh, and Dhullay Mohallah. Hindu residents dominated areas around the Sheikhupura Gate and Hakim Rai, as well as the Hari Singh Nalwa Bazaar. Muslims were largely settled in Rasul Pura, Islam Pura, and Rehman Pura.

  After the independence of Pakistan in 1947, Gujranwala became the site of some of Punjab's worst Partition violence. Large parts of Hindu and Sikh neighbourhoods were attacked or burned. The city's Muslim Lohar community of blacksmiths was singled out in accounts of the violence for particular brutality. On the 22nd of September, Sikh rioters attacked a train of refugees at Amritsar railway station, killing 3,000 Muslims over three hours. The following day, on the 23rd of September, rioters from Gujranwala attacked a train of Hindus and Sikhs heading toward India, killing 340 refugees in the nearby town of Kamoke. The scale and pattern of the attacks led later observers to describe what happened in Gujranwala as potentially constituting ethnic cleansing by modern definitions.

  By March 1948, over 300,000 refugees had been resettled in Gujranwala District. Many of the new arrivals settled in formerly non-Muslim localities like Gobindgarh, Baghbanpura, and Nanakpura. Refugees from Ludhiana brought hosiery manufacturing with them; refugees from Patiala took over the jewellery trade that had previously been run by Hindus. The number of registered factories jumped from 39 in 1947 to 225 by 1961.

• 6. Industry and the Golden Triangle

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  Gujranwala's industries employ up to 500,000 people, and the city's output accounts for 5% of Pakistan's national GDP. Together with Sialkot and Gujrat, Gujranwala forms what is called the Golden Triangle, a cluster of export-oriented industrial cities in northeastern Punjab. The city ranks as Pakistan's third-largest industrial centre, behind only Karachi and Faisalabad.

  An estimated 6,500 small and medium enterprises and 25,000 cottage units operate in and around the city, as of 2002. Gujranwala is Pakistan's leading centre for sanitary fittings, with over 200 producers based there. More than 60 auto-parts manufacturers are found in the city. The electric-fan industry draws on roughly 150 small and medium enterprises. The city also holds third place nationally in iron and steel manufacturing, a position that traces back to the migration of Lohar blacksmith communities during the colonial period.

  In 2010, the World Bank rated Gujranwala sixth among Pakistan's top 13 cities for ease of doing business and second-best nationally for construction permits. Electricity shortages during the 2010s hit hard: industrial units in the city lost an average of 2,872 hours per year to outages in 2012. Improved power supply by the end of 2017 contributed to the country's double-digit rise in exports in the second half of that year. The Sialkot International Airport, Pakistan's first privately owned commercial airport, built in 2007, serves the entire Golden Triangle region. Construction began on the Gujranwala Mass Transit System on the 6th of December 2025, with expected completion by the end of 2026.

• 7. A City's Living Fabric

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  Hari Singh Nalwa's grid street-plan, devised after Ranjit Singh established his capital here in 1792, still organises Gujranwala's oldest precincts. Bazaars intersect at 90-degree angles, some blocks are rectangular, and the old city retains its polygonal shape. At its centre sits the Shahi, or Royal, Bazaar.

  The old city holds places of worship from communities that are now largely absent. The Hindu Devi Talab temple, once known for its large water-tank, remains in good condition, though a family that fled Patiala now lives inside it. Nearby is the Sikh Gurdwara Damdama Sahib, which is important in Sikhism for its association with Baba Sahib Singh Bedi. Gujranwala also sheltered a Jain community, and at the town's heart stands the Lala Mubdas Jain Mandir. The samadhi of Jain Acharya Atmaramji, also known as Acharya Vijayanandsuri, who died on the 20th of May 1896, is located there and was visited on the 28th of May 2023 by Jain Acharya Dharmadhurandar Suri, the first such visit in more than 75 years.

  Gujranwala's population today stands at 2,511,118, with a literacy rate of 79.39%. At the time of the 2023 census, 88.72% of residents spoke Punjabi as their first language, with Urdu spoken by 9.7% and Pashto by 1.11%. The population growth rate has averaged 3.0% since the 2000s, though projections suggest that rate will slow to 2.51% by 2035, as the city continues outward expansion driven largely by unplanned development.