Maharaja Ripudaman Singh of Nabha was a Phulkian ruler who backed the Akali movement, kept up ties with nationalist politics, and refused the war effort in the First World War in the way the British expected of a Punjab state. In July 1923 he was forced to abdicate after a long-running dispute with Patiala was used as the occasion. He was removed to Dehradun and later to Kodaikanal, where he died in 1942.
The removal set off the Jaito morcha. Akali jathas of five hundred marched on Jaito, in Nabha state, to complete an akhand path that the administration had interrupted. On 21 February 1924 the state and British forces fired on a jatha. The morcha ran for nearly two years and thousands were arrested.
Jawaharlal Nehru came to Jaito in September 1923 to observe and was arrested and held in Nabha jail. He wrote about the conditions afterwards. It was his first imprisonment.
Nabha state ran its own postage, its own coinage and its own courts until it went into PEPSU in 1948. The Hira Mahal and the old fort are in the town.
The Namdharis, suppressed after 1872, found shelter in Nabha state at various points, which is part of why the British distrusted its rulers.
The Maharaja of Nabha was deposed by the British in 1923 after a dispute with Patiala, and the deposition produced the Jaito morcha and a year of agitation.
The state was one of the three Phulkian houses and its fort at Nabha is large, decayed and partly collapsed, with parts of it in institutional use.
Nabha also holds the Government Ripudaman College and a set of state period buildings. It is a small town with the physical remains of a state and no account of either.