Place · observatory · India
Jantar Mantar, Delhi
The first of Jai Singh II's five observatories, built in 1724 at Connaught Place in Delhi — before the Jaipur one that perfected the design in 1734. The thirteen masonry instruments at Delhi include the Samrat Yantra, the Jaya Prakash Yantra, the Rama Yantra and the Misra Yantra, used to measure declinations and sidereal time. Jai Singh commissioned the observatories after the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah tasked him with correcting the Zij-i-Muhammad Shahi astronomical tables of 1727. The Delhi Jantar Mantar's instruments are smaller and less refined than those at Jaipur, having served as the prototype. It is on UNESCO's tentative list; conservation ongoing.
- Function
- Science & medicine
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 28.627, 77.217
Connections (3)
- Architectural modelJantar Mantar, Jaipur
Jai Singh built Delhi's Jantar Mantar first, in 1724, and then found its instruments too small for the accuracy he wanted; the Jaipur observatory of 1734 corrects that with larger versions of the same devices, including a sundial twenty-seven metres high that reads to two seconds. The sequence is visible as an engineering progression across five sites, which is why the set matters more than any one of them.
- Architectural modelUjjain observatory (Vedh Shala)
Five observatories were built to one programme — Delhi, Jaipur, Ujjain, Mathura and Varanasi — with the same instrument types in different sizes, because Jai Singh wanted simultaneous observations from several longitudes. Ujjain's was put on the meridian Indian astronomers had used as their prime reference for a thousand years, so an eighteenth-century instrument was sited on inherited theory rather than on convenience.
- Site withinDelhi
Jantar Mantar, Delhi sits inside Delhi 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.
On these journeys
Sources
Jantar Mantar, New Delhi — ASI
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