A samadh is a memorial built over the cremation site of a person of standing: a domed square chamber on a plinth, often with painted interior plaster, standing alone in a field or at the edge of a village.
Sikh sardars, misl chiefs, Ranjit Singh Ji's officers and later landowners all built them. Ranjit Singh Ji's own samadhi at Lahore is the grandest. There are hundreds of smaller ones across both Punjabs.
They sit uneasily with Sikh doctrine, which does not prescribe memorials over the dead, and the reform movements opposed them. They were built anyway, in large numbers, for a century and a half.
They are the single most neglected building type in Punjab. They are on private agricultural land, they have no owner with an interest in them, they are not protected, and their painted interiors are being lost every year.
Nobody has counted them. Photographing the samadhs of one district would take a few weeks and has not been done.
A samadh is a domed structure raised over the cremation site of a sardar or a holy man, and there are hundreds across Punjab, in fields, at village edges and inside towns.
They carry painted interiors, carved brick and sometimes dated inscriptions, and they are the largest surviving body of Sikh period architecture outside the shrines.
Almost none is protected. They are being lost to collapse, to encroachment and to demolition for land, and there is no inventory of them at any level of government.