The Patiala and East Punjab States Union was formed in July 1948 by merging eight princely states, Patiala, Nabha, Jind, Faridkot, Kapurthala, Malerkotla, Nalagarh and Kalsia. Its capital was Patiala and the Maharaja of Patiala was Rajpramukh.
It lasted eight years. In 1956, under the States Reorganisation Act, it was merged into Punjab.
Its short life contained the muzara movement, in which tenant farmers in the Patiala territories refused to pay batai to the biswedars, the landlords to whom the state had granted the land. It was organised by the Lal Party and the Kirti tradition and it turned into armed confrontation. Kishangarh in Mansa was shelled by state forces in March 1949.
The PEPSU Occupancy Tenants Act and the legislation that followed gave the muzaras ownership of the land they worked. It is the most substantial land reform ever carried out in Punjab and it happened in a princely union that existed for eight years.
Very little has been written about it. The men and women who did it are named on village gates in Mansa and Sangrur and in no history taught in the state.
PEPSU held its first election in 1952. No party took a majority, a coalition government formed and fell inside a year, and President's rule followed in March 1953, which makes it one of the earliest Indian states to be governed directly from Delhi.
The union ran its own High Court at Patiala, its own secretariat, its own police and its own road transport undertaking. PEPSU Roadways still runs buses across the Malwa under that name, which is the only part of the union most Punjabis have heard of.
Its papers are the papers of eight administrations folded into one and then into another. They sit in the state archives at Patiala, uncatalogued, and no account of the union as a working government has been written out of them.