Phul, a village in what is now Bathinda district, is the origin of the Phulkian houses. Chaudhary Phul, a Sidhu Jat, is the ancestor from whom Patiala, Nabha and Jind all descend.
The tradition holds that Guru Har Rai Ji passed through, saw the boy Phul striking his stomach because he was hungry, and blessed the family that its descendants would never go hungry.
From that village came three princely states that lasted until 1948, held territory across what is now southern Punjab and much of Haryana, and were Sikh-ruled states loyal to the British, as Kapurthala and Faridkot also were.
Phul itself is a small town in the Rampura Phul tehsil of Bathinda district, in cotton and grain country.
Three states, a hundred and eighty-five years of rule, the Patiala treasury, the Chail palace and the Patiala Necklace, all trace to a hungry boy in a Malwa village, and the village has a bus stand and a mandi.
The inheritance divided and the branches divided again. Patiala descends from his son Rama, through Ala Singh who took Barnala and then Patiala; Nabha and Jind descend from the elder brother Tilok Singh. The three houses were cousins and spent two centuries quarrelling with each other over precisely that.
They were merged in 1948 into PEPSU, the Patiala and East Punjab States Union, with Patiala as its capital, and PEPSU was itself absorbed into Punjab in 1956. The line stopped governing anything nine years after independence and two hundred and fifty years after the village.
The village is in Bathinda district and is an ordinary settlement with a gurdwara. Three of the largest princely states of northern India begin there and nothing on the ground says so.