01 — The record
The history of Raheem pur
What follows is only what can be shown from published records: district gazetteer material, census returns, Wikipedia entries for the settlements of this belt, and national press reporting. Where something is local tradition rather than record, it says so.
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Mughal era
Jehangirnagar on the Chenab
The settlement that district records call Jehangirnagar stood on the left bank of the Chenab. It was later renamed Takht Hazara — hazara for the thousand acres it was said to cover — and local tradition holds that a Mughal king who stopped here had his throne, his takht, set up on the spot.
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1766
Waris Shah writes Heer
Waris Shah composes his Heer, the epic that fixes Takht Hazara in Punjabi literature forever as the home of Dhido Ranjha.
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1757 – 1799
Durrani raids, then the Sikh Empire
A Durrani force crosses the Jhelum at Khushab in 1757 and lays waste to the largest towns of the area. The Sikh Misls take the country afterwards, and by 1799 all of Punjab is under Ranjit Singh.
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c. 1785
The town is resettled
After the town on the bank had been emptied, families begin to settle here again around 1785. What had been a city comes back as a village.
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1893 – 1914
Shahpur District, then Sargodha
The British create Shahpur District in 1893. Sargodha is founded as a canal-colony town on 22 February 1903, and in 1914 the district headquarters move there, although the district keeps the name Shahpur.
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1947
Pakistan
At independence Shahpur District passes to Pakistan. The kaddhi villages along this stretch of the Chenab — Raheem pur among them — become part of West Punjab.
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1960
The Indus Waters Treaty
Under the treaty signed in 1960 the waters of the Chenab are allocated to Pakistan. For a village that farms the bank, no single document since Partition has mattered more.
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1960 – 1961
Sargodha District is formed
Sargodha District is created and Shahpur is reduced to one of its tehsils. Sargodha also becomes the headquarters of the division. This is the administrative shape the village still sits inside.
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2003
Kot Momin becomes a tehsil
On 21 June 2003 Kot Momin is declared a tehsil of Sargodha District. Raheem pur and the whole Takht Hazara belt now answer to Kot Momin rather than to Bhalwal or Sargodha directly.
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2017
The census
The 2017 census records 4,073 people in Takht Hazara across an area of 2.69 square kilometres, at an elevation of about 200 metres.
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2020
The people leave
National press reports that the historic town on the bank has lost roughly two thirds of its people in twenty years — from about 15,000 to about 5,000 — as families move away for work. There is no bridge over the Chenab here, and that isolation is part of the reason.
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2023
The district today
The 2023 count puts Sargodha District at 4,334,448 people over 5,854 square kilometres, roughly 63 per cent of them rural. Raheem pur is one village in that rural majority.
What is not in the record
There is no published, village-level history of Raheem pur itself since 1947 — no separate census table, no gazetteer entry, no archive of its own. Almost everything above is the history of the ground it sits on: Takht Hazara, the Midh Ranjha cluster, Tehsil Kot Momin and District Sargodha.
That gap is normal for a village of this size in Punjab, and it is exactly the gap this site exists to close. The register below is the frame. It is filled in from what people send.
The village register — open entries
- Year the village was founded, and by which families
- The jama masjid: year built, imams, rebuildings
- The government school: year opened, first headmaster
- Electricity, the metalled road, the first tube well
- Numberdars, union council members, and their years
- Floods of the Chenab, and what each one took
- Families who left, and where they went
Every claim, sourced
Nothing on this page is invented. The list of sources is public.
See the sources