Barnala was the seat of the Phulkian chiefs before Patiala existed. The house traces itself to Phul, a Sidhu Jat of the Malwa, whose descendants split into the lines that became Patiala, Nabha and Jind. Baba Ala Singh, born at Phul in 1691, held Barnala and moved his seat when he built the fort at Patiala in 1763.
The Malwa chiefs took land in the vacuum left by the collapse of Mughal authority in the Sirhind province and the repeated Afghan invasions. Ala Singh's position was made by playing the Marathas, the Afghans and the Delhi court against one another, and he took the title of raja from Ahmad Shah Abdali, which the Khalsa in the Majha never forgot.
Barnala became a district of Punjab in 2006, carved out of Sangrur. Its country is cotton and wheat, in the belt where the Ghaggar's old flood plain gives out into the dry Malwa.
Gurdwara Nanaksar at Jagraon and the dera network of the Malwa are within an hour of the town. So is Kila Raipur, and so is Sangrur.
The Phulkian houses lasted until 1948, when they and five other princely states of the region, one of them the Muslim state of Malerkotla, were merged into the Patiala and East Punjab States Union. That is a longer continuous run of one family in one district than almost anything else in the province.
The town was the Phulkian seat before Patiala was founded, and the fort quarter still carries the name, though almost nothing of the fort itself survives.
It became a district in 2006 and is one of the smaller ones, in cotton and wheat country with a large textile and paper works and a set of grain markets.
Its literary and political weight is out of proportion to its size: the Punjabi left, the peasant unions and a set of major Punjabi writers all come from this small district.