Jaranwala Before 1947
In 1941, one person in three across this district was Hindu or Sikh. Within a year of August 1947, almost none were. This page is for their descendants, and for the families who arrived to take their place.
If your grandparents or great-grandparents left this land in 1947, you may not have been given a village name. You were probably given a number. A family in Ludhiana or Delhi or Southall does not say "we were from Jaranwala". They say Chak 105, or Chak 353, and then the conversation stops, because nobody knows what the number means any more.
The number still means something. It is still in use. Almost every one of those chaks is a real, inhabited village today, under the same number it was given more than a century ago, and it is very likely findable. This page explains how the numbering works, who lived here before 1947, and what is still standing.
This is a community website, not an archive and not a government record office. What is written here is assembled from published census and colony records, and it is offered to help people start looking. Where we are unsure, we say so.
How to Read a Chak Number
The single most useful thing on this page. If you know your family's chak number, you already hold the address.
A worked example
Chak No. 105 GB Banga
Assigned to a square of land by British surveyors before anyone lived on it. The land was mapped, numbered, then settled. The number came first.
Which branch of the Lower Chenab Canal watered it. GB is the Gugera Branch, RB the Rakh Branch, JB the Jhang Branch. Jaranwala tehsil contains both GB and RB chaks.
Added later by the people who moved in, and very often the name of the village or district they had come from in east Punjab. This one is Banga, in the Doaba.
Why the third part matters most
Chak 105 GB was where Bhagat Singh was born in 1907. His family had been granted land there, and they named their new village after Banga, the area they had left behind in Jalandhar district. That pattern repeats across the whole colony.
So the name of your family's chak may tell you where they came from before they came here. If the chak carries the name of a village in Amritsar, Jalandhar, Hoshiarpur or Ludhiana, that is very likely the family's older home, the one they left in the 1890s or 1900s to take a canal grant. In 1947 many of those families went back toward the districts their chak was named after.
Who Lived Here
Lyallpur district, which is what this area was called until 1977, counted by religion at every census of the colonial period.
| Group | 1901 | % | 1941 | % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Muslim | 484,657 | 61.2 | 877,518 | 62.8 |
| Sikh | 88,049 | 11.1 | 262,737 | 18.8 |
| Hindu | 210,459 | 26.6 | 204,059 | 14.6 |
| Christian | 8,672 | 1.1 | 51,948 | 3.7 |
| Total | 791,861 | 1,396,305 |
Census of India, 1901 and 1941, Punjab volumes. These are district figures, covering the Lyallpur, Samundri and Jaranwala tehsils together, not Jaranwala tehsil on its own. Hindu totals from 1931 onward include Ad-Dharmis. The four groups do not quite reach the total because a small number of people were recorded under other religions.
The Sikh population tripled
From 88,049 in 1901 to 262,737 in 1941. That is the canal colony filling up. Land grants in the Chenab Colony went heavily to cultivators from the central and eastern Punjab districts, and Sikh Jat families took a large share of them. They were not ancient inhabitants of this bar. They were settlers, one or two generations deep, exactly like their Muslim neighbours.
One in three
Hindus and Sikhs together were 466,796 people in 1941, a third of the district. Jaranwala town itself had a Hindu trading community, a Sikh landholding population in the chaks around it, and gurdwaras and temples in daily use. By late 1948 that population was gone, and Muslim families from Jalandhar, Ludhiana, Ambala and Karnal were living in their houses.
Where the Settlers Came From
Nobody is originally from here. Before 1892 this was the Sandal Bar, grazing country with no canal and very few permanent villages. Everyone who farmed here arrived.
The colonisation records assigned grantees by home district, which is why so many chak names in this tehsil are east Punjab village names. If you are tracing a family, the chak name is often a better clue than the number.
What Happened
The boundary announced in August 1947 placed Lyallpur district in Pakistan. Over the following months the Hindu and Sikh population of this district, a third of everyone living here, left for India. Moving in the opposite direction, Muslim families from Jalandhar, Ludhiana, Ambala, Karnal and Hisar arrived in Lyallpur and were allotted the land and the houses that had just been emptied.
Both movements were the same event seen from two sides. A family that lost a house in Chak 353 GB gained one in Ludhiana; a family that lost a house in Ludhiana gained one in Chak 353 GB. Very often the two families never met, and each spent the rest of their lives describing a home the other one was now living in.
It is worth saying plainly that the crossing was violent, that a great many people on both sides did not survive it, and that this page is not the place to argue about why. What it can do is help someone find a number on a map.
The man who laid out this town did not stay in it
Jaranwala was planned in 1908 by Sir Ganga Ram, a Hindu engineer born at Mangtanwala. He built the horse-drawn train at Gangapur, Chak 591 GB, which still runs. He died in 1927, twenty years before the partition, and the community he belonged to left the town he had drawn. The street grid in the middle of Jaranwala is still his.
What Survives
The numbers
Nearly every chak still carries the number it was given by the survey. Nothing was renumbered in 1947. This is the single strongest thread between a family's memory and a place on the ground.
The canal
The Gugera and Rakh branches of the Lower Chenab Canal run where they were cut in the 1890s. The watercourses that define each chak's boundary are largely the original ones.
The street grid
Ganga Ram's 1908 layout for the town centre, straight streets around a central bazaar, is still the plan of central Jaranwala.
The horse train
The horse-drawn tram at Gangapur, Chak 591 GB, built in 1898. It still operates and there is nothing else like it left in Punjab.
Some buildings
A number of pre-partition gurdwara and temple buildings survive in the tehsil in other uses, as schools, stores and homes. Others are gone. We are documenting these and would welcome corrections.
What does not survive
Revenue records for individual holdings are not published and are not held by this site. Personal property claims from 1947 were filed in India, not here. We cannot look up a title deed.
Tell Us Your Chak Number
If your family came from somewhere in Jaranwala tehsil before 1947, write to us and we will try to find the place.
Send whatever you have
- The chak number, if you know it, with GB or RB if that was ever mentioned
- Any name attached to it, even a half-remembered one
- The family name, and the district they went to in 1947
- Anything remembered about the place: a well, a school, a shop, a neighbour's name
What we will do
- Try to match it to a chak that exists today, and tell you where it is
- Say honestly when we cannot, rather than guessing
- Publish what we learn on this site, with your permission, so the next family searching finds it
- Never charge for any of it, and never pass your details to anyone
Write to [email protected], or use the message button at the bottom of this page. Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi and English are all fine.
One honest limit: every search here is done by hand, against published records rather than a database anyone can query. A reply may take a while, and some searches will simply come back empty. We would rather say so at the start than promise something we cannot deliver.