Sheikhupura

• 1. Introduction

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  Sheikhupura carries a name rooted in a Mughal emperor's childhood nickname. The city in Pakistan's Punjab province was founded in 1607 by Emperor Jahangir, who had been called "Shekhu" by his own mother, the wife of Akbar the Great. That affectionate name outlasted empires, survived a Sikh renaming, and is still what more than 600,000 people call their home today. How did a royal hunting ground west of Lahore become one of Punjab's ten largest cities? What happened here in those two desperate weeks at the end of August 1947? And what does the monument Jahangir built for a pet deer tell us about the man who built this city?

• 2. A Name With Layers

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  Before Jahangir arrived, the land around this settlement belonged in spirit to the Virk Jats, the dominant rural tribe of the area, and the town was known as Virkgarh. Jahangir recorded the city's earliest name himself, in his autobiography the Tuzk-e-Jahangiri, where he called it Jehangir pura. The name that stuck, however, came from something more personal: the nickname his mother gave him. "Shekhu" became "Sheikhupura," the town of Shekhu. Under Sikh rule the city was briefly called Singhpuria, a name connected to Nawab Kapur Singh, the key figure of the Sikh Confederacy and founder of the Singhpuria Misl, who was himself from the area. After Sikh rule ended, the city returned to the name it still holds. The older name Qila Sheikhupura, meaning the fort of Sheikhupura, also persists, pointing toward the structure Jahangir laid at the city's centre in 1607.

• 3. Jahangir's Hunting Ground

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  Jahangir chose the site of Sheikhupura near the older town of Jandiala Sher Khan, which had been an important provincial town during the early-to-middle Mughal era. He founded the city in 1607, laying down both the fort at its centre and the nearby Hiran Minar. The Hiran Minar is Sheikhupura's most renowned site, and Jahangir built it as a monument to his beloved pet deer, Mansiraj. Construction stretched from 1607 to 1620, spanning more than a decade. The whole surrounding territory served as a royal hunting ground for the Mughal emperor, and the minar marking the grave of a favourite animal gives a clear sense of how personally Jahangir regarded this landscape. The fort, now situated in the city's centre, stands as the other anchor of that founding moment, and both structures predate the formal district history by centuries.

• 4. Colonial Redrawing

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  Under British colonial rule, the area fell under the authority of Raja Dhayan Singh, and Bhatti possessions that had been seized during Sikh rule were restored when British administration took hold. The British initially consolidated the large area between the Chenab and Ravi rivers into a single district, with Sheikhupura as its first headquarters; that arrangement held until 1851. The area did not gain formal District status again until 1919, when M.M.L. Karry served as its first administrator under the new designation. That administrative history shaped the physical boundaries that would matter enormously just decades later, when Partition forced the question of which new nation each district would belong to.

• 5. Partition's Trapped Population

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  On the eve of Partition in 1947, Sikhs made up 19% of Sheikhupura district's population. Despite the Muslim majority, many Sikhs had hoped the boundary commission would assign the district to India, largely because Sheikhupura sits close to Nankana Sahib, revered as the birthplace of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism. That hope led to a fateful delay. Unlike Lahore, which was engulfed in large-scale rioting earlier that year, Sheikhupura was initially spared. Sikhs in the city had not made arrangements to leave, and many remained when the Radcliffe Line was announced, fixing the border between Pakistan and India. The city's Sikh population found itself trapped. By the 31st of August 1947, the Sacha Sauda refugee camp in the city was sheltering upwards of 100,000 Sikh refugees who had fled from Gujranwala and other nearby areas. Between the 16th of August and the 31st of August, an estimated 10,000 people were killed in Sheikhupura in communal violence between Sikhs and Muslims. Waris Shah, the celebrated Punjabi Sufi poet connected to the region, had written of Punjab's grief in an earlier era; the events of those two weeks gave that grief a modern dimension that Sheikhupura has not forgotten.

• 6. Growth and Industry

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  The 1998 Pakistan Census recorded Sheikhupura's population at 280,263. By the 2017 census that figure had reached 473,129, a rise of 68.82% in nineteen years. Estimates for 2026 place the population above 602,000, counting the city and its surrounding suburban areas. In the 2023 census, 88.96% of residents spoke Punjabi and 9.88% spoke Urdu, with Pashto, Saraiki, and Sindhi accounting for the remainder. The city functions as an industrial centre and satellite town roughly 38 km northwest of Lahore, bordering Sialkot, Gujranwala, Nankana Sahib, and Kasur districts. Two industrial areas are currently under development: Quaid-e-Azam Business Park, which the government of Pakistan has designated a special economic zone, and Rachna Industrial Park. The overall literacy rate stands at 43.6%, and the city is home to institutions including Hajvery University and a campus of the University of Central Punjab. Cricketer Aaqib Javed, who played as a fast bowler for Pakistan, is among the city's notable figures, as is Sufi saint Sheikh Salim Chishti of the Chishti Order, whose presence during the Mughal period adds another thread to Sheikhupura's long spiritual and literary history.