Jind was one of the three surviving Phulkian states. Raja Gajpat Singh took the town in 1763 and the family held it until 1948. From 1827 the rulers lived not at Jind but at Sangrur, ninety kilometres north-west, which they made their capital and built up. The state was named for one town and governed from another for the last hundred and twenty years of its existence.
Jind, Patiala and Nabha all sided with the British in 1857 and sent troops to the siege of Delhi. That decision preserved them as states for another ninety years and is the reason the Phulkian houses survived when so much else did not. It is also why they are treated coolly in a good deal of nationalist writing.
The state was not contiguous. Its territory lay in scattered blocks across what is now Haryana and southern Punjab, a pattern common to the Cis-Sutlej chiefships and a product of how the land was taken, village by village, rather than as a province.
Jind town went to Haryana in 1966. Sangrur stayed in Punjab. The state's records and its palace are therefore split across two states.
The state ran its own mint, its own postal service with its own stamps, and a small army, all out of a town of a few thousand people.
Ranbir Singh, the last ruler, took the state into PEPSU in 1948, and the family's position was settled by privy purse until that was abolished in 1971.
Banasar Bagh, the clock tower and the state offices at Sangrur are what is left of the administration. Most are in government use and none of them is interpreted.