Nawanshahr was renamed Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar in 2008, after Bhagat Singh, whose family village of Khatkar Kalan lies inside it. The district was carved out of Jalandhar and Hoshiarpur in 1995.
It sits in the Doaba, the country between the Beas and the Sutlej, which has the highest rate of emigration of any part of Punjab. Village after village here has a majority of households with a member abroad, and the remittance economy is visible in the houses, the gurdwaras and the empty schools. The Doaba is also the part of Punjab with the largest Dalit population share of any region in India.
Rahon, a small town in the district, is old. It appears in medieval records, has a mound, and was a mint town.
Banga is the market town of the belt, and the Desh Bhagat Yaadgar Hall at Jalandhar, built by the Ghadar returnees, draws its constituency largely from these villages.
The first sizeable Punjabi emigration out of the Doaba was in the 1900s to Canada and the United States, and it produced the Ghadar Party. The current one is to Canada again, on student visas.
Khatkar Kalan holds the family house, the memorial and a museum with Bhagat Singh Ji's effects, including the trial papers and a copy of the book he was reading.
The district was renamed in his name in 2008. It is one of the smallest districts of Punjab by population and one of the most heavily emigrated.
His family were farmers and the political tradition in it ran back a generation, through his uncle Ajit Singh and the Pagri Sambhal Jatta agitation of 1907.