Fazilka was made a district in 2011 out of Ferozepur. Its tehsils are Fazilka, Abohar and Jalalabad.
It is Punjab's south-western corner, against Rajasthan and Pakistan, in dry country with a shallow saline water table in places and waterlogging in others.
It holds Abohar with its kinnow orchards and its blackbuck sanctuary in Bishnoi villages, the Asafwala memorial to the 1971 fighting, the closed Sadqi border crossing, and Fazilka's tongas.
Its agriculture is cotton, kinnow and wheat, with an inland shrimp farming sector on saline land that is unusual anywhere.
Its speech is Bagri and Punjabi mixed, and its cultural links run into Rajasthan as much as into the rest of Punjab.
What is not recorded: the district's Bagri-speaking population and its own traditions, which fall between Punjab's and Rajasthan's accounts and are recorded in neither.
Fazilka town was founded in 1844 by a British officer and named for a local headman, which makes it one of very few towns in Punjab with a documented founding date and no earlier settlement beneath it.
The boundary here was disputed in 1947 and the Sulaimanki headworks went to Pakistan, which left the Fazilka canals dependent on releases negotiated afterward.
The kinnow belt around Abohar is the largest citrus area in northern India, built up from the 1950s. Its problems now are ageing orchards, price crashes and the absence of processing capacity inside the state.