A town laid out on a flag

ਲਾਇਲਪੁਰ

Lyallpur was founded in 1904 as a canal colony town. Its street plan is laid out on a Union Jack pattern, eight bazaars radiating from a clock tower.

The canal colonies were the largest engineering project in Punjab's history and remade the west of the province. The Lower Chenab Canal opened in 1892; the Sirhind Canal, off the Ropar headworks, dates to 1882.

The town was renamed Faisalabad in 1977. It is in Pakistan.

The great canal-colony towns are all on the far side of the line: Lyallpur, Sargodha, Montgomery, Toba Tek Singh, and the numbered chaks. Indian Punjab's canal story is the Sirhind Canal and the Sutlej Valley works.

The clock tower was built in 1903 out of a house tax on the townspeople and it still runs. Standing under it a person can see down all eight bazaars at once, which is true of no other planned town in the region, and that sightline is what the plan was actually for.

The town was named for Sir James Lyall, Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab. The families settled in the surrounding chaks came from Jalandhar, Amritsar, Hoshiarpur and Ludhiana, and their descendants are in Indian Punjab.

The Punjab Agricultural College at Lyallpur, founded 1906, is the direct ancestor of both Punjab Agricultural University at Ludhiana and the University of Agriculture Faisalabad. One institution, split in 1947, now feeds two national agricultures that are among the largest wheat producers in the world.

Britannica, on the Sirhind Canal.

What we don't know

  • Whether any register of the numbered chaks exists in machine-readable form. None was found.
  • What became of the college's pre-1947 records and collections in the division.

Where to check this

  1. Standard accounts of the Punjab canal colonies. Imran Ali, The Punjab Under Imperialism 1885-1947 ↗

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • Britannica, on the Sirhind Canal.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 122 accounts in Under the Company, the chapter of this site covering British Punjab, from annexation to the canal colonies.