Patti in Tarn Taran district is an old town, a pargana headquarters under the Mughals, and one of the market centres of the Majha before Amritsar existed.
Bibi Rajni, whose story is attached to the founding of the sarovar at Amritsar, was a chaudhary of Patti's daughter.
It was a Bhangi misl holding and later part of the Lahore state's territory.
It sits in the belt between Tarn Taran and the border, in country that produced a very large share of the Ghadar recruitment and later of the emigration.
It is now a tehsil town in a border district, which is a fair description of what has happened to a lot of places in the Majha that used to be somewhere.
Patti was a pargana headquarters and a market town for the tract between the Beas and the Ravi, and its size in the Mughal revenue records is out of proportion to what it is now. Its decline is the ordinary decline of an inland market town when the trade routes and the administrative geography move.
The town's Mughal period fabric, a serai, tombs and the line of a wall, is still traceable in the street pattern, and none of it is protected or recorded.
The town is a tehsil headquarters now in a border district, with a grain market and little else. The border cuts the tract it served, and the villages on the far side of it were its natural hinterland until 1947.