Jalapana is a large village and union council in the

Sargodha District Sargodha District (Punjabi and ur, ), is a district of Punjab, Pakistan. The capital of the district is Sargodha. It is an agricultural district, wheat, rice, and sugarcane along with Kinno being its main crops. The Sargodha district and reg ...

Pakistani Punjab Punjab (; , ) is one of the four provinces of Pakistan. Located in central-eastern region of the country, Punjab is the second-largest province of Pakistan by land area and the largest province by population. It shares land borders with the ...

. Its original name (with diacritics) is Jalpāna. The village gets its name from the

Jalap Jalap is a cathartic drug, largely obsolete in Western medicine, consisting of the tuberous roots of ''Ipomoea purga'', a convolvulaceous plant growing on the eastern declivities of the Sierra Madre Oriental of Mexico at an elevation of above ...

tribe, who were said to be founders of the village. This was a very small settlement with uncultivated surroundings. In 1860s when India was under the British Raj, they started selling uncultivated lands of different areas of this region under they colonization policy, Khan Mohammed Sarfaraz Khan from Isakhel

Niazi Niazi (; , ps, نيازي; ur, نیازی) Niazai, Nyazi, Nyazai, Niyazi or Niyazai is one of the largest Pashtun tribes which resides in Afghanistan and northwestern part of Pakistan. The earliest work which provides the details about ...

Pathan clan bought this land with his brothers with a total area of 200 squares (5000 acres) for the sum of Rs.18,000. Khan began to encourage settlers from the local tribes. The village was now home to a number of

Jat The Jat people ((), ()) are a traditionally agricultural community in Northern India and Pakistan. Originally pastoralists in the lower Indus river-valley of Sindh, Jats migrated north into the Punjab region in late medieval times, and su ...

clans. Then came the process of getting this area cultivated. For cultivation, water is necessary, and thus the first ever canal of Punjab was dug from river Jahlum to Jalpana by the Khan himself. The land on which a canal was dug was also bought by Khan from the local land owners. He dug out a canal on his personal expense to irrigate barren lands of not only this village but surrounding villages also. The farmers of these surrounding villages paid one-fourth of their agricultural produce to Khan M. Sarfaraz Khan in lieu of irrigation water used from this canal. This privately owned and managed irrigation system worked successfully for almost a century when Punjab government under CM Mumtaz Doultana nationalized all privately owned irrigation systems in Punjab in 1950s. Subsequently, the management of this canal was handed over to Irrigation department of Punjab by Shahnawaz Khan Niazi in 1970s. Throughout the 1960s, the village was subject to a number of studies by the anthropologist Saghir Ahmad of

Simon Fraser University Simon Fraser University (SFU) is a public research university in British Columbia, Canada, with three campuses, all in Greater Vancouver: Burnaby (main campus), Surrey, and Vancouver. The main Burnaby campus on Burnaby Mountain, located ...

, who studied the society and culture of Punjabi villages.

References

Populated places in Sargodha District {{Sargodha-geo-stub