Mirpur Khas: History
=== Early ===
The Mirpur Khas region has been inhabited for millennia, as evidenced by the excavation of the Buddhist-era settlement of Kahoo Jo Daro and various hindu temples.The remnants of them still remain. The famous
Bronze of hindu believed god brahma from gupta dynasty (5th or 6th century bronze) has been excavated from here It is the earliest known metallic image of Brahma, and the only known representative of the school it represents. It has been described as "an immense artistic creation" of the Gupta period.
In 712 CE, the region was conquered by the armies of Muhammad Bin Qasim.
The Talpur dynasty conquered Sindh in 1784, and under Mir Fath Ali Khan, Sindh was divided into three smaller regions to be ruled by members of the Talpur family. The three regions were centred around Hyderabad, Khairpur, and Mirpur Khas. The Mankani branch of the family under Mir Ali Murad Talpur inherited the region around Mirpur Khas in 1801, and founded the new city of Mirpur Khas in 1806 to serve as the new capital.
Mir Sher Muhammad Talpur (1829-1843) succeeded Mir Ali Murad, and built a fort in the city when he declared the ruler of the state, and ran a kutchery from within the fort. Elaborate graves for the local rulers were built at Chitorri, and feature a syncretic architectural style that combines elements of Islamic and Rajasthani architecture.
Mirpur Khas remained the capital of the Talpur Mirs of Mirpurkhas until 1843, when Sindh was annexed to British India under the East India Company following the conquest of Sindh by Charles James Napier and defeat of Mir Sher Muhammad Talpur on 24 March 1843 at the battleground of Dubbo. His battle for the Sindh state earned him the moniker "Lion of Sindh."
Later Sindh was made part of the colonial Bombay Presidency and Mirpurkhas was a part of it. Umerkot was made the district's headquarters of town of Thar and Parkar district and Mirpur Khas was ignored until the advent of the Luni-Hyderabad branch of the Jodhpur-Bikaner Railway, a subsidiary of the Scinde Railway to the town. The opening of the Jamrao Canal in 1900 made Mirpur Khas stand out of the rest of the towns in the district. It was constituted a municipality in 1901 and the district headquarters was shifted from Umerkot to Mirpurkhas in 1906.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the population of the town was 2,787 persons with a density of 82 persons per square mile.
After the independence of Pakistan in 1947, because of its proximity with the Indian border, Mirpur Khas became the first city to welcome refugees to Pakistan. It served as a primary railway junction for the first trains to across the Rajasthan into the Sindh province. The Partition of British India resulted in the large-scale exodus of much of the city's Hindu population, though like much of Sindh, Mirpur Khas did not experience the widespread rioting that occurred in Punjab and Bengal. In all, less than 500 Hindu were killed in
all of Sindh in 1947-48 as Sindhi Muslims largely resisted calls to turn against their Hindu neighbours. Hindus did not flee Sindh en masse until riots erupted in Karachi on 6 January 1948, which sowed fear in Sindh's Hindus despite the fact that the riots were local and regarding Sikh refugees from Punjab seeking refuge in Karachi. …