Bhupinder Singh ruled Patiala from 1900 to 1938 and was the most conspicuous of the Punjab princes.
He captained the Indian cricket team, played first-class cricket, and financed Indian cricket substantially in its early years. He was the first Indian to own an aeroplane and had an airstrip built at Patiala.
He commissioned the Patiala Necklace from Cartier in 1928, at the time the largest single commission the firm had received, containing the De Beers diamond. It disappeared from the Patiala treasury after 1948 and parts of it have surfaced at auction since.
He built the Chail palace at the highest cricket ground in the world, chaired the Chamber of Princes, and represented India at the League of Nations and at the Round Table Conferences.
He also had a personal life that generated a considerable body of scandal writing, some of it well documented and some of it not.
His state was well administered by the standards of Indian princely states, with its own army, currency, courts and public works. The National Institute of Sports now occupies the old Moti Bagh Palace, and Punjabi University began in the Baradari Palace building before moving to a campus of its own.
The Patiala state forces fought in both wars. Its infantry served in Egypt, Palestine and Mesopotamia in the first and in Malaya and Italy in the second, and the state's contribution of men and money to the first war was among the largest made by any Indian state.
He used the Chamber as an instrument, arguing for the states as a single bloc through the constitutional negotiations of the 1930s. The federation that the Government of India Act of 1935 provided for depended on enough rulers acceding to it. Not enough of them did, and the federal part of that Act never came into force.
Moti Bagh palace, the Qila Mubarak in the old city, the Sheesh Mahal with its wall paintings and the long Baradari gardens are what the reign left standing at Patiala. The Sheesh Mahal holds a medal and order collection assembled by him that is one of the largest in the world and is almost never mentioned.