A jathera is the shrine of a clan ancestor, usually a low platform or a small domed structure standing in a field outside the village, belonging to one got or one family line.
Families go to it after a marriage and after a birth. A new bride is taken there. Offerings are made and a lamp is lit. The rite has no place in Sikh doctrine and Sikh reform movements have opposed it for a hundred and fifty years, and it continues in a very large number of villages.
The ancestor is generally a named man several generations back, sometimes a founder of the village, sometimes a man who died in a particular way. Many jatheras have no story left at all, only a name and a platform.
Alongside them are the shrines of local pirs, often Muslim by origin and maintained by Sikh and Hindu families after 1947, where the saint's name is remembered and his religion is not thought about.
The jathera and the field pir are the oldest religious layer in rural Punjab and the least documented. Almost none of them is on any list.
Some are maintained by a whole got across many villages and draw an annual gathering, which makes them the closest thing rural Punjab has to a clan institution with a physical address.
The family goes, makes an offering, and asks the ancestor's sanction for what is being done. It is done by Sikh, Hindu and formerly Muslim families of the same got.
It sits outside anything the reform movements approve of and it has continued anyway. It is the most persistent non-scriptural practice in the Punjabi countryside.