Map - Sultanpur, Uttar Pradesh (Sultānpur)

Sultanpur is a city situated on the banks of holy river Gomti in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. It is the administrative headquarters of Sultanpur District and is a part of Faizabad division in Uttar Pradesh, India. It is situated 135 kilometres east of state capital Lucknow.

According to legend, In Sultanpur area beside the Gomti river it is said that kush the son of Ram was born with badh(बाध) so it was the birth place of Kusa, the son of Rama. This was identified with the Kusapura mentioned by Xuanzang, who said that Gautama Buddha taught here for six months and that it had a stupa built at the time of Ashoka which was then in disrepair.

The town was under Bhar rule until around 1200, when it was supposedly conquered by a Muslim army under Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khalji. It was said that when Muslims during the time of the Mamluk dynasty came to trade in this area of Kusapura, the then Bhar rulers of Kusbhawanpur executed them and the horses were seized. When it was heard to the Sultan Alauddin Khalji that this incident took place, he gathered an army and attacked them at once, on the opposite bank of the Gomti River from Kusbhawanpur. Then Alauddin Khalji settled Muslims in the area of Mahmudpur located in Sultanpur. The city of Kusbhawanpur was renamed after the Alauddin Khalji's title Sultan and a new city was founded on the site, called Sultanpur.

Old Sultanpur was originally located on the left bank of the Gomti, and is mentioned on several occasions by Muslim historians as the site of battles. It was a prosperous town with several mohallas, or wards. At some point, though, the British established a military station and cantonments on the opposite (right) bank of the Gomti, at a village then called Girghit, and this eventually took on the name Sultanpur instead while the old town declined. The old town was described in 1839 as being in a state of disrepair, without commerce or industry, and with a population of just 1,500 people. The only remains of the Bhar period were two brick wells on the south, "about a mile from the river", and a large mound or dih called Majhargaon in the middle of town, which was supposedly the remains of the old Bhar palace. Atop Majhargaon was a fort built by the sultan, then partly ruined, and containing houses belonging to the faujdar and his followers. Northwest of the fort was a mosque also built by the sultan, and there were also a couple of other mosques built by the Sayyid chaudhris of the pargana. The town then had "many old brick dwelling houses and a few new ones". Old Sultanpur was eventually razed to the ground by the British after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, in retaliation for the murder of two British officers in the town at the beginning of the uprising.

As for new Sultanpur, it was also called Chhaoni Sarkar by officials and Kampu, or "the camp", by locals. It was built up on the site of the old cantonment, which was removed in 1861. Sultanpur was made a municipality in June 1869, with a municipal committee; a municipal board was formed in September 1884. In 1890 the Victoria Manzil was built for the first agricultural exhibition, and it served as the town hall and the meeting place for the municipal board under British rule. At the turn of the 20th century, the town also had a police station and hospital, jail, poorhouse, leper asylum, and a dispensary which was rebuilt in 1895, at the same time as the Amethi female hospital was built in town, almost entirely funded by Raja Bhagwan Bakhsh Singh of Amethi. The town also had three markets: Perkinsganj, Shawganj, and Partabganj, the last of which opened in 1895 and was named after Partab Bahadur Singh, the raja of Kurwar.