हिंदीOn this day
Standing

Haripur

The town Hari Singh Nalwa founded in 1822 when Ranjit Singh made him governor of Hazara, with a fort to hold the hill country between the Indus and Kashmir. It was the headquarters of Hazara until the British took the Punjab.

Built: 1822, Hari Singh Nalwa, with the fort of HarkishangarhWhere: Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (Pakistan), Pakistan33.99° N, 72.93° E
  1. 1822
  2. 23 December 1835
  3. 1848
  4. 1947
Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author · Public domain

01Nalwa’s town

Hazara, the hill country north of the Margalla range, had resisted the Sikh governors; the first, Amar Singh Majithia, was killed there. Ranjit Singh sent Hari Singh Nalwa, who in 1822 laid out a new town in the open plain and gave it his own name, Haripur, with the fort of Harkishangarh and a walled bazaar. He settled traders, dug water channels and kept the hill tribes in check from it. The German traveller Baron Charles von Hügel came through on 23 December 1835 and found the town busy and thriving. Nalwa went on from here to Peshawar and the Khyber, where he died at Jamrud in 1837.

02After the Sikh empire

Haripur stayed the seat of Hazara until 1848–49. In the second Anglo-Sikh war the Sikh governor Chattar Singh Attariwala rose against the British, and an obelisk in the town marks the grave of Colonel Canora, a European gunner in Sikh service killed in 1848 defending his guns. After annexation the British moved the district headquarters to the new town of Abbottabad. In 1947 Haripur went to Pakistan and its Hindu and Sikh traders left. Today it is a district town some 65 km north of Islamabad, and little of Nalwa’s fort remains.

The life of this place

  1. 1822Hari Singh Nalwa founds Haripur and its fort.
  2. 23 December 1835Baron von Hügel visits and finds the town thriving.
  3. 1848Fighting at Haripur in Chattar Singh’s rising.
  4. 1947Haripur goes to Pakistan; its Hindus and Sikhs leave.

People

Hari Singh NalwaWarrior
1791–1837 CE

Hari Singh Nalwa

Sikh general who held the Khyber

Nearby

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Janapadas and the Rise of Magadha

Takshashila (Taxila)

The great city of learning of Gandhara, where Chanakya taught, Jivaka studied medicine and, says the Mahabharata, Vaishampayana first recited the Bharata to Janamejaya. Its three excavated cities, Bhir Mound, Sirkap and Sirsukh, lie outside Rawalpindi.

Waihind (Udabhandapura, Hund)Ruined
The long resistance: Sindh to Tarain

Waihind (Udabhandapura, Hund)

Udabhandapura, the Waihind of the Arab writers, on the right bank of the Indus above Attock, was the capital of the Hindu Shahi kings Jayapala and Anandapala. Near it in 1008–09 Anandapala’s allied army fought Mahmud of Ghazni and lost.

Attock FortStanding
Maratha ascendancy and the Sikh empire

Attock Fort

The fort over the Indus crossing where Maratha horsemen watered their horses in 1758 and the Sikh army beat the Afghans in 1813. To say a thing ‘reached Attock’ became a Marathi way of saying it reached the farthest frontier.

Peshawar (Purushapura)Standing
Shungas, Satavahanas, Kharavela and the Sangam Kingdoms

Peshawar (Purushapura)

Purushapura, the city at the foot of the Khyber, was Kanishka’s capital and later a city of the Hindu Shahis, before whose walls Jayapala fell to Mahmud in 1001. Hari Singh Nalwa governed it for the Sikh empire in the 1830s.