Lyallpur (Faisalabad)

Lyallpur, now Faisalabad in Pakistan's Punjab, was planned in the 1890s as the headquarters town of the Chenab Colony, the largest of the canal colonies the British opened on newly irrigated land. It was named for Sir James Broadwood Lyall, Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab from 1887 to 1892. Sources differ on its founding year (1890 and 1895 both appear) and on its renaming for King Faisal of Saudi Arabia (1977 in Pakistan's state news agency, 1979 in Wikipedia). Its centre was laid out round a clock tower, with eight bazaars.

The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism calls the Chenab Colony “mostly inhabited by Sikh ex-soldiers”. A Wikipedia summary of the allotments is more mixed: settlers from seven districts, among them Ludhiana, Jalandhar, Hoshiarpur and Amritsar, received over 60 percent of the land, and Muslim Arains held the largest share, 36 percent.

Key moments

• 1892: colonisation of the Chenab Colony begins.
• 1906 to 1907: the Colonisation Bill angers the colonists, and the first protests are organised in the Chenab Colony. In March 1907 a rally of several thousand at Lyallpur is addressed by Ajit Singh and Lala Lajpat Rai.
• 27 September 1907: Bhagat Singh is born at Banga village in Lyallpur district. His father Kishan Singh was in jail when he was born, over the agitation.
• 1908 and 1909: Master Sundar Singh Lyallpuri joins the Khalsa High School at Lyallpur as a teacher and, in 1909, starts the Punjabi paper Sachcha Dhandora from Lyallpur.
• 1947: the Punjab Boundary Commission's line leaves Lyallpur in Pakistan. The Encyclopaedia says the Sikhs of the canal colonies of Montgomery, Multan, Lyallpur and Shahpur “suddenly found themselves cut off from their ancestral homes”. UC Davis's diaspora archive records that Sikhs of the district fled to India, and Muslim refugees from East Punjab settled in Lyallpur.

What it means today. Lyallpur is shorthand for the canal-colony farmland that Sikhs left in 1947, and for the 1907 agitation whose first protests were organised on that land.