Place · Sikh royal samadhi · Pakistan
Samādhi of Ranjīt Singh, Lahore
The cremation memorial of the founder of the Sikh empire, begun by his son Kharak Singh on the spot where he was burned in 1839 and finished under Dalip Singh in 1848. It stands between the Lahore Fort and the Badshahi Mosque, and its gilded fluted dome, Bengali-curved eaves and Mughal pietra dura make it the clearest statement of what Sikh state architecture took from everyone around it. Inside, a marble lotus holds his ashes, with smaller urns set around it.
- Function
- Burial and funerary
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 31.589, 74.311
Worth knowing
The urns around the central lotus are for the four ranis and seven attendant women who burned with him, so the building is also the best-documented sati memorial in Sikh history — and it sits within sight of Aurangzeb's mosque.
Connections (3)
- Power passed toBadshahi Mosque, Lahore
Three buildings stand within a hundred metres of each other in the Hazuri Bagh and they record the handover of the Punjab. Aurangzeb's mosque of 1673 is the Mughal claim; Ranjīt Singh's samādhi, begun where he was cremated in 1839, is the Sikh one, and it borrows the Mughal vocabulary — pietra dura, fluted dome — while adding Bengali eaves and a gilded finish. In between, under Sikh rule, the mosque itself was used as a magazine and a stable. The British returned it to worship in 1852, after the Sikh state was gone.
- Samadhi atMahārāja Ranjīt Singh
Ranjīt Singh was cremated on this spot beside the Lahore Fort in June 1839, and his son Kharak Singh began the memorial over it; it was finished in 1848 under Dalip Singh, by which time the kingdom had one year left. A marble lotus holds his ashes. Smaller urns set around it are for the four ranis and seven attendant women who burned on the pyre with him, which makes the building the best-documented sati memorial in Sikh history as well as the tomb of the state's founder.
- Site withinLahore
Samādhi of Ranjīt Singh, Lahore sits inside Lahore and forms one piece of its layered sacred, royal or civic landscape. The city carries this entry as one of the sites that make its urban fabric legible — a shrine, monument, institution or craft tradition specifically anchored at this location — and the city's broader history reads better when the stop is seen in its context rather than in isolation. The surrounding streets, markets and other heritage ensembles around it belong to the same single city.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Samadhi of Ranjit Singh”. Punjab archaeology department records; J. S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab.
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