Jhelum is a river name that became a district name. The town sits where the Grand Trunk Road meets the Jhelum, on the step down from the Potohar plateau toward the Punjab plain. North of the water is the old crossing country. South and west the Salt Range begins. That is why one short drive can take a student from a British cantonment church to a Suri fortress, a jogi hill and a salt mine that still works.
PBS 2023: 1,382,308 people in 229,064 households on 3,587 km². Density about 385 per km². Urban 541,318 (about 39 percent). Rural 840,990. Literacy at age ten and above is 80.65 percent — 86.55 percent for men, 74.53 percent for women. That is a high Punjab sheet, in the same band as Chakwal and Gujrat. Under-tens: about 285,000. Major occupations on the district profile are still written as armed services, civil service, overseas work and farming. Official site: jhelum.punjab.gov.pk.
Jhelum — 586 km², 507,788 people, literacy about 83.5 percent. City municipal count about 291,022 plus the cantonment about 21,400. River town, GT Road, DHQ.
Dina — 678 km², 277,182 people, literacy about 84.8 percent. Highest literacy tehsil. Rohtas Fort sits a few kilometres off this town. Dina municipal count about 84,629.
Pind Dadan Khan — 1,176 km², 371,971 people, literacy about 74.0 percent. Salt Range tehsil. Khewra town about 36,552. Pind Dadan Khan town about 28,197. Nandana and the old salt road belong here.
Sohawa — 1,147 km², 225,367 people, literacy about 80.4 percent. Potohar upland, thinnest density. Sohawa town about 37,488. Domeli is another named settlement.
Mangla Cantonment (about 19,129 people) sits on the Punjab bank of the reservoir; the dam wall itself is administered from the AJK side. Do not treat the whole Mangla lake as this district.
The river is older than any state that taxed it. In 326 BCE Alexander of Macedon fought Raja Porus on the Hydaspes — the Greek name for this river. The usual placing puts the battle a few miles from today’s city, on the monsoon-swollen water. Greek and Roman writers say Alexander founded a settlement named for his horse Bucephalus after the fight. Whether that camp sits exactly under the present cantonment is a scholar’s argument. The river crossing is not. Every later army that used the north-south road still had to deal with the same water.
The Salt Range above Pind Dadan Khan was already a fortress line in the Hindu Shahi centuries. Nandana, on a 460-metre ridge near Baghanwala, became a Shahi capital after Mahmud of Ghazni took Udabhandapura (Hund) in 1001. Mahmud took Nandana itself in 1014. Al-Biruni is recorded as measuring the earth’s circumference from this hill in the same century. Mongol and Delhi Sultanate fights washed over the same ridge in the 1200s. The stones are ruined. The ridge is still the ridge.
Sher Shah Suri ordered Rohtas Fort in the 1540s after he had pushed Humayun out of Hindustan. The job on the ground is credited to Raja Todar Mal. The point was to hold the Gakhar country of the Potohar and to lock the road north. The walls run about four kilometres. Humayun’s son Akbar later used the same road; the Gakhars made their own bargains. Sikh rule in the early nineteenth century put Jhelum back on a military map. The British made it a district headquarters and a cantonment on the GT Road. Pind Dadan Khan had been an earlier headquarters when the district was drawn larger. The present four-tehsil shape is the reduced map.
Recruitment into the British Indian Army, then into Pakistan’s army, is the modern chapter people in Sohawa and Jhelum tehsil still live. Overseas work is the other chapter. Farming on the river bench and the barani Potohar is the quiet one.
Rohtas Fort (Qila Rohtas). About seven kilometres from Dina, off the GT Road. UNESCO-listed. Mid-sixteenth-century Suri garrison fortress: massive stone walls, gates including Sohail Gate, baolis, the kabuli mosque. Built to overawe the Gakhars, not to look pretty for a school trip. It is the one monument on this district that already has an international file. A photograph of the rampart is not the whole district.
Tilla Jogian. Highest point of the eastern Salt Range, about 975 metres, some 25 kilometres west of Jhelum city and west of Khukha. A jogi pilgrimage hill for centuries, with ruined monasteries and a view that takes in Rohtas to the east. The name is the place. The climb is the visit.
Nandana Fort and temple. Hilltop ruins near Baghanwala in Pind Dadan Khan tehsil: Shahi fort, a worn Shiva temple with a domed chamber, traces of a mosque, the ridge Al-Biruni used. Restoration talk has come and gone. The site is still a ruin students can stand on.
Khewra Salt Mine. Working mine and show-mine in Khewra town, Pind Dadan Khan tehsil. One of the oldest industrial salt workings in the world still in use. Tunnels, a small mosque carved in salt, a tourist train. It is a factory first. Treat the postcard as extra.
Jhelum cantonment and riverfront. British-era layout, old bridges and the GT Road crossing. CMH and the army presence are living institutions, not monuments. The riverfront changes with the spill from Mangla.
Other marked sites on heritage lists: the Malot temple/fort group on the Salt Range road (red sandstone, often dated around the tenth century), the Murti hill Buddhist/Jain remains in Pind Dadan Khan tehsil, and the two old temples near Bhaganwala. Katas Raj is in Chakwal, not here. Do not borrow it.
Salt, a little cement and mining around Khewra, river-bench farming, army pensions, Gulf remittances. This is not Gujranwala’s workshop floor. Literacy is high because of cantonment schools and a long habit of sending sons into uniform and then into tuition. Pind Dadan Khan’s 74 percent literacy is the tehsil that still lags.
The district profile lists about 791 schools and a dozen public colleges. There is no heavy university campus on the UAF or UoG scale. Students use Rawalpindi, Islamabad and sometimes Lahore. DHQ Jhelum is the public hospital. THQs cover other tehsils; six RHCs and about 49 BHUs are the rural net. CMH serves the cantonment. Khewra industrial health is a local occupational file of its own.
Punjabi is the household language. Pothwari shades appear toward Sohawa. Urdu in the cantonment and the college. A Pashto row follows army and labour movement.
Jhelum city, Jhelum Cantonment, Dina, Rohtas, Sohawa, Pind Dadan Khan, Khewra, Tilla Jogian, Baghanwala / Nandana, Khukha, Domeli, Mangla Cantonment (Punjab bank).
Sources: Pakistan Bureau of Statistics 2023; Government of Punjab, District Jhelum profile; UNESCO / Suri-period notes on Rohtas; published descriptions of Tilla Jogian, Nandana and Khewra; classical placing of the Battle of the Hydaspes. Checked September 2026.