Yamunanagar’s Khizrabad town is now Pratap Nagar

Shiv Kumar Sharma

Tribune News Service

Yamunanagar, January 19

The state government has renamed Khizrabad town of Yamunanagar district as Pratap Nagar. The town is located on the Himachal Pradesh-Uttar Pradesh border.

The gazette notification made by the Haryana Government on December 28 reads, “The Governor of Haryana is pleased to change the name of Khizrabad village as Pratap Nagar in Yamunanagar district, Haryana.”

The development is widely welcomed by residents of the town, which has a gram panchayat. The Khizrabad gram panchayat had passed a resolution to rename Khizrabad as Pratap Nagar last year and sent it to the Haryana Government.

“We wrote for this noble cause of renaming Khizrabad as Pratap Nagar to Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar last year. We are very grateful to him,” said Praveen Aggrawal, sarpanch of Pratap Nagar.

Biram Bharti, a local journalist, said, “Pratap Nagar has a gram panchayat, but the government should now make a municipal committee here for its fast and all-round development.”

He said the population of the town was about 5,000 and the government could include nearby villages to form a municipal committee.

In February 2018, the state government had changed the name of Mustafabad town of the district to Saraswati Nagar, which is situated on the bank of the Saraswati river.

Mention in history

Dr Virender Dhillon, professor of history at Maharaja Agrasin College, Jagadhri, says Khizrabad town probably got its name from someone known as Khizr Khan, one of the servants of Mahmud of Ghazni. “Shamsuddin Siraj, the author of Futuh-us-Salatin, mentions Khizrabad while writing about the transportation of Ashokan Pillar to Delhi from Topra village of Yamunanagar by Firuz Shah Tughlaq,” says Dr Dhillon. As mentioned in Ain-i-Akbari by Abul Fazl, Akbar’s court historian, Khizrabad ‘qasba’ was one of the important mahals of the Sirhind sarkar of the Subah of Delhi. “Text Nigaranama-i Munshi of the Mughal era also states that the ‘qasba’ was a famous timber mart during the Mughal period,” he adds.