A bunga was a building put up beside the sarovar at Amritsar by a misl, a chief or a religious order, to house its people when they came to the shrine and to serve as its base in the town.
There were around seventy of them by the mid-nineteenth century, forming a continuous built edge around the tank. They were of different heights and styles, several with towers, and they made the complex an urban place rather than a plaza.
They also served as schools, libraries and courts, and some held substantial manuscript collections.
Nearly all were demolished, in phases from the 1940s to the 1970s, to widen the parikrama and create open space. The Ramgarhia bungas survive.
The demolition of the bungas is the largest single loss of Sikh architecture in the modern period and it was carried out by Sikh institutions, not by anybody else.
What was in them, particularly the manuscripts, was dispersed and mostly not recorded.
Each carried its founder's name, and the Ramgarhia, Bhangi, Ahluwalia, Kanhaiya, Majithia and Nihang bungas together made a directory of who mattered, readable by anybody walking round the tank. The order they stood in was itself a statement about precedence and was understood as one.
The nineteenth century photographs show what it was: a dense ring of unequal buildings with towers among them, a tank in the middle of a town rather than in the middle of a marble floor. Those photographs are the only record of the elevation and nobody has drawn it up from them.
The Ramgarhia bungas survive on the eastern side. What was removed was the physical record of who had held the complex and in what proportion.