Bahawalpur was a princely state under the Abbasi Nawabs, Daudpotra by origin, holding the desert and riverain country south of the Sutlej. It was in treaty relations with the Company from 1833 and remained a state until it acceded to Pakistan in 1947 and was merged into West Pakistan in 1955.
The state's language was Saraiki rather than the Punjabi of the central districts, and its orientation was as much toward Sindh as toward Lahore. Punjab's history usually leaves it out, which loses about forty-five thousand square kilometres and one of the region's oldest settled landscapes.
Uch Sharif, in the state, holds a cluster of tomb shrines of the Suhrawardi and Bukhari lineages, tiled in blue and white, several of them collapsed on one side. Jalaluddin Surkh-Posh Bukhari settled there in the thirteenth century.
Cholistan, the desert of the state, holds the fort of Derawar and the dry bed of the Hakra, which is the same channel that runs through Indian Punjab and Haryana as the Ghaggar and is identified by many with the Saraswati of the Rig Veda. Hundreds of settlement mounds line it.
The Nawab of Bahawalpur paid the salaries of the government of Pakistan in its first months. That is repeated often in Pakistan and less often examined.
The state was the largest princely state of the Punjab and it faced south into Cholistan and the Sutlej rather than north into the province.
Its rulers built a set of palaces at Bahawalpur and the Noor Mahal and Sadiq Garh are the largest of them, and Derawar fort in the desert was the family's older seat.
It acceded to Pakistan in 1947 and was merged into West Pakistan in 1955. Its library and its records are substantial and are almost entirely unstudied.