Rojhan: Indus landscapes, settlement and heritage

A place beside the Indus

Rojhan is a town and tehsil in Rajanpur district in southern Punjab, Pakistan. The district administration explains that the Rojhan area was separated from the former Rajanpur tehsil to form a third tehsil in the district. Town and tehsil are different geographic units: an account of villages across the tehsil should not be read as a description of every neighbourhood in the town. The Indus and the Sulaiman foothills both shape the wider district’s landscapes, though water reaches different places in different ways. The district lies in the southern part of Pakistan’s Punjab province.[1]

The 2023 census counted 474,077 people across Rojhan tehsil, a larger area than the town alone.[5]

A colonial description

The Imperial Gazetteer of India describes Rojhan as a centre of the Mazari Baloch and attributes its foundation to Bahram Khan around 1825. It mentions a courthouse, mosque and tomb associated with local leadership. This is a colonial-era account with its own vocabulary and administrative perspective, not an exhaustive history of the communities living in the area. Its approximate founding date and descriptions should be compared with local histories and other records. The buildings it names should not be assumed to survive unchanged without a current survey. The Gazetteer recorded 8,177 people in 1901 and described woollen rugs and horse nose-bags among local manufactures. Its population figure is tied to that census and settlement as recorded at the time; it is not an estimate for today’s town or the larger present-day tehsil.[2]

Water and heritage

The district’s flood account distinguishes flooding along the Indus from flash floods originating in the Sulaiman range. It describes the 2022 floods and water reaching the Indus in Rojhan and Rajanpur tehsils. A 2021 Dawn report described deterioration at the historic Mazari family graveyard at Rojhan and recorded researcher Ismail Mazari’s account of river erosion. An archaeology official described glazed tile, brickwork and painted interiors among the tombs, while reporting serious damage to several structures. These are dated accounts, not a current conservation survey.[3][4]