Bajwara Fort

Bajwara lies south-east of Hoshiarpur. It was once the great city of this part of Doaba, known for its cloth weavers and learned Brahmins, and is listed as a mahal in the Ain-i-Akbari. Later Hoshiarpur was founded and its prominence declined. Tradition says three immigrants from Ghazni founded it, and that one of them, the singer Baji Bawra, gave it his name. It is said to have been about 12 kos (roughly 18 miles) around before Akbar’s minister Todar Mal broke it up into small divisions. In the late 1700s the town was held by Sardar Bhup Singh of the Fyzullpuria Misl. In 1801 Raja Sansar Chand of Kangra drove him out and built a fort at Bajwara. Maharaja Ranjit Singh took the fort in 1825, and the town declined after that. Under the British the fort became a military prison. On 23 May 1857, during the Mutiny, the district’s prisoners were moved into it. It was fitted out as a jail and fortress and garrisoned by police. A conspiracy was found among the prisoners, and the five ringleaders were executed. The fort was destroyed by the British, and ruins were used as rubble for roads By the 1880s only two ruined bastions were left. In 2014 two multi-tiered bastions with tall arched gateways, joined by a thick wall, still stood. By 2025 barely one wall and a bastion remained, overgrown with vegetation, on a site of about six to seven acres. Houses stand around it and no conservation work has been done.