Besides Patiala, Nabha and Jind, the Cis-Sutlej country held a scatter of smaller Sikh chiefships: Kaithal, Ladwa, Thanesar, Buria, Chhachhrauli or Kalsia, Faridkot, Malerkotla, Nalagarh, Ambala, Shahabad, Radaur and others.
The Treaty of Amritsar in 1809 placed them all under British protection, which stopped Ranjit Singh Ji from absorbing them.
Most were then absorbed by the British instead, through lapse on failure of heirs or through confiscation after 1845 and 1857. Kaithal lapsed in 1843. Ladwa was confiscated after its ruler joined the Sikh side in the First Anglo-Sikh War.
Ludhiana, Ferozepur and Ambala districts were assembled out of confiscated chiefships, so a British district in this country is a set of former states stitched together rather than a unit that was ever planned.
Their territories were scattered in blocks rather than contiguous, which is why the map of pre-1947 east Punjab is a patchwork and why district boundaries here are as irregular as they are.
Almost nothing has been written about the small states, and their records are dispersed across Punjab, Haryana and Himachal archives.
Each ran its own revenue, courts and police under a British political agent, and the smaller ones were administered by that agent directly for long stretches when a ruler was a minor. That is how most of their paperwork came to be in British hands.
Most were absorbed by lapse and escheat during the nineteenth century, and what survived to 1947 was a small remainder of what had been there in 1809.
Their records, where they survive, are in the Punjab and Haryana archives and are almost entirely unstudied. Each was a working administration with revenue, courts and police.