Sheikhupura is named for a nickname. Akbar called the boy Salim “Sheikhu.” Sheikhu became Jahangir and put a hunting reserve on the scrub west of Lahore: a minar for a pet antelope, a tank, later a fort. The town grew under that name. Industry grew later, without asking the antelope. Nankana Sahib was cut from this gazette so the janam asthan could have its own file. What remains is still one of Punjab’s heavy districts — four million people, a UNESCO-tentative tower, the village where Waris Shah is buried, and the sheds that feed Lahore’s appetite for grain, steel and cheap labour.
The 2023 census counted 4,049,418 people in 593,260 households on 3,744 km². Urban 1,550,793. Rural 2,498,625. Literacy 68.88 percent — 72.09 among men, 65.46 among women, a women’s row stronger than most of the south. Punjabi first for about 3.78 million. Phone 056.
Five tehsils. Sheikhupura — 1,780,837 people, literacy 70.72 percent. Headquarters, fort, Hiran Minar, Farooqabad. Ferozewala — 997,246, 66.55 percent, dense, the Lahore-facing crush. Muridke — 721,192, 69.10 percent, G.T. Road mandi. Safdarabad — 320,851, 67.55 percent. Sharaqpur — 229,292, 65.05 percent, rice and a shrine town of its own.
Hiran Minar, 1606: a tower over Mansraj, the emperor’s antelope. Shah Jahan added the tank and the pavilion in the water. Ramps for game. A hunting park close enough to Lahore that the court could pretend at wilderness. The site sits on UNESCO’s tentative list. School buses treat it as a picnic. It is a Mughal sentence about love and the hunt, not a playground. Sheikhupura Fort, finished around 1619, later became a jagir of Datar Kaur, Ranjit Singh’s wife, mother of Kharak Singh. She lived there until 1838 and left fresco work. The British took the keys in 1849 with the rest of the Punjab.
A few kilometres from the minar, Jandiala Sher Khan is the village the Punjabi language already filed. Waris Shah wrote Heer there; the tomb is the literary address this district can put against any factory chimney. Read the poem on this page’s terms: a bar that produced a classic and then produced a ring-road. The mausoleum is new stone over an old claim. The claim is older than the industrial estate.
Ferozewala and Muridke are not suburbs in the brochure sense. They are where Lahore’s work overflows: workshops, rice mills, steel, the labour that sleeps cheaper and commutes inward. Sharaqpur still sells rice as a mandi fact. Safdarabad is the quieter square. The parent district once held Nankana; the child took the world’s Sikh map. Sheikhupura kept the deer and the sheds.
Assembly houses rotate with the usual central-Punjab biradari map. This page will not invent film stars. The names that belong without argument are Jahangir, Datar Kaur, Waris Shah, and the anonymous shift that keeps Muridke lit after midnight.
Census 2023. Minar and fort from the published Mughal and Sikh record. Waris Shah from the Jandiala claim every Punjabi school already teaches.