History Of Mirpur

Mirpur is one of the principal sources of migration from Pakistan to Europe, and most especially to Britain, so much so that close to half a million migrants from this area now live in the UK. Although it is widely believed that the principal reason for this outflow was the construction of the Mangla Dam, this is only partially true. Whilst the construction of the dam undoubtedly reinforced the scale of the outflow, since the waters of the lake swamped most of the best land in the District, emigration from this region began long beforehand.

Since Mirpur lies at the point where the River Jhelum breaks out of the heavily forested foothills of the Pir Panjal mountains into the plains of the largely treeless Punjab, it was an ideal spot for the construction of the boats which have were used to carry goods down the five rivers of the Punjab to the river Indus, and thence down to the seaports in the Indus delta from which traders have been operating across the Indian Ocean for at least the past three thousand years.

In South Asian contexts, training as a boat-builder was a necessary prerequisite for becoming a boatman, and indeed a seaman. Hence most of the crewmen on the boats trading up and down the Punjab and Indus valley river system were drawn from Mirpur, where the boats were built. However this thriving river trade was decimated with the arrival of the British Raj, and the construction of railway lines from Bombay and Karachi into the interior of the Punjab. Moving goods by rail was both cheaper and quicker, and hundreds of Mirpuri boatmen found themselves out of a job.

Luckily a remedy emerged. This was just the time when long-distance ocean trade was shifting from sail to steam, with the result that there was a huge demand for men who were prepared to work in the hot, dirty and dangerous stokeholds of the new coal-fired steamers. European seamen avoided such jobs whenever the possibly could. They preferred to work on deck. But in the 1870s Mirpuri ex-river boatmen in Karachi were desperately searching for a new source of income. They were used to working on ships, and although unfamiliar with stoking coal-fired boliers, they were prepared to learn. Before long they gained a virtual monopoly of jobs as engine-room stokers on steamships sailing out of Karachi and Bombay, a position they retained until coal-fired ships were finally phased out of service at the end of the second world war. But just as this occurred, a new set of opportunities open up. Britain's economy was just setting off on what proved to be a long post-war boom, and there was an acute short of labour in the foundries of the Midlands, and the textile mills of Yorkshire and Lancashire. Now it was the turn of ex-seamen to become industrial workers in Britain. So when the Mangla lake filled up in 1966, depriving large numbers of Mirpuri farmers of their land, an alternative was readily available: to move overseas to join those of their kinsfolk who had established themselves in Britain.

Mirpur has never looked back since