Muhammad Tanveer Jhandir, a government servant, has revived the glorious tradition of British bureaucrats who wrote district gazetteers during their service in India from Khyber Pass to Bengal. These gazetteers written in the late 19th and mid 20th Century are still the best historical documents containing the district's detailed geographic aspects, agriculture, castes, their social and financial standings, languages, dialects and religions.
It is regrettable that our bureaucrats and district administrators added very little to such a large scale catalogue of the gazetteers and other scholarly works of the English bureaucrats that remain a work of reference to date.
Muhammad Tanveer Jhandir, who had served in Bahawalpur Division at various positions, had rewritten a comprehensive and very readable gazetteer of Bahawalpur Division, formerly a princely state located in-between the Punjab and Sindh provinces after more than a century. Earlier Malik Muhammad Din had written a Gazetteer of Bahawalpur State in 1904.
Muhammad Tanveer Jhandir's gazetteer titled Bahawalpur-the land of peace, prosperity and rich culture-is a geographical dictionary or directory used in conjunction with maps and atlas.
It typically contains information concerning the geographical makeup, social statistics and physical features of the region, including its location, topography, deserts, and waterways, population, GDP and literacy rate.
Jhandir has divided the gazetteer in ten chapters to provide first hand knowledge to the people visiting Bahawalpur, ie the glorious past, brief history of Bahawalpur State, introduction of Bahawalpur Division, divisional profile (Facts & figures) canal network, (Largest in the world), forests of Bahawalpur Division, progressive present, dazzling feature (Development in Bahawalpur Division), tourism in Bahawalpur division, Cholistan desert, famous shrines and palaces and forts.
The reading of this new genre of literature called 'gazetteer' is the record of the society, economy, culture, social norms that create nostalgia about our pre-Partition history, places, our forefathers, towns and villages we inhabit today.
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