The Takhts are the five seats of Sikh temporal authority, and together they are the institutional answer to the question of who exercises worldly authority once the line of living Gurus has ended.
A throne, and what it holds
A takht is a throne, and the institution locates authority in these seats rather than in any single office that a person could occupy. The first and highest, the Akal Takht at Amritsar, was raised by Guru Hargobind in 1606 facing the Harmandir Sahib, and from it are issued the injunctions, the hukamnamas, that bind the community, and before it Sikhs may be summoned to answer for conduct. The other four, at Anandpur, Damdama, Patna and Nanded, each carry their own history and observance.
Deliberately plural
The plurality is the design. Because authority is distributed among five seats rather than concentrated in one office, no individual can claim to speak alone for the whole community, and the seats outside Punjab are administered under their own arrangements rather than by the committee at Amritsar. The recognition of the fifth takht was itself a twentieth-century decision and was disputed when it was made, which shows that the institution continues to be defined and contested rather than fixed once for all, but its founding purpose, to put authority where no single person can hold it, has held.