Place · Karkota sun temple ruin · India

Mārtānd Sun Temple

Function

Sacred site & pilgrimage

Tradition

Kashmiri Saura and Shaiva traditions

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

33.746, 75.220

Connections (7)

• Contemporary capital withShāradā Peeth

  Martand and Sharada are two of the three great Kashmiri Pandit sites, with Amarnath, and both belong to the Karkota period when Kashmir was an independent power with its own script, its own Sanskrit scholarship and a king, Lalitaditya, who campaigned across north India. The sun temple on its plateau and the learning centre in the Neelum valley are what survives of that state — one a ruin in Indian Kashmir, the other a ruin in Pakistani Kashmir.

• Teaching lineageAvantipora temples

  Avantivarman's paired Shiva and Vishnu temples at Avantipora, built in the ninth century, continue the Kashmiri order that Lalitaditya's Martand established a century earlier — the peristyle courtyard, the trefoil arch within a triangular pediment, the fluted columns that look Greek and are not. Both are ruins now, and between them they are most of what survives of an architectural tradition that has no parallel anywhere else in India.

• PatronageLalitāditya Muktāpīḍa

  The Martand temple is attributed to Lalitaditya by Kalhana and is the reference point for the whole Kashmiri style: a peristyle court, a trefoil arch inside a triangular pediment, and fluted columns that are usually traced to Gandharan and ultimately Hellenistic precedent. No other Indian regional style uses this vocabulary, which is what makes the valley's architecture a separate problem.

• AnalogueShankaracharya hill, Srinagar

  The Shankaracharya temple on the hill above Srinagar and the Martand sun temple on its plateau are the two surviving statements of Kashmir's stone architecture at either scale: a single cella on a circular plinth commanding the whole valley, and a colonnaded peristyle court with a trefoil arch that has no parallel anywhere else in India. Kalhana knows both.

• Architectural modelMulbekh Maitreya

  The Mulbekh Maitreya and the Alchi murals are Kashmiri work on the Ladakh side of the passes, and Martand is what Kashmir itself built in the same centuries. Between them they mark the period when Ladakh was Kashmir's Buddhist frontier rather than Tibet's — before the Gelug arrived from the east and before Islam arrived in the valley from the west.

• AnaloguePrahlādpuri & the Multan Sun Temple

  The two great sun temples of the north-west, and both are ruins. Mārtānd in Kashmir was built by Lalitāditya in the eighth century and pulled down, by most accounts, under Sikandar Būtshikan around 1400; its colonnade still stands on the Karewa plateau. Multan's Aditya temple was older and richer, and is known only from description — Xuanzang's, and al-Bīrūnī's account of a wooden idol cased in red leather and hung with jewels. Between them they mark how substantial solar worship was in the north-west before either survived to be photographed.

• Architectural modelMalot Temple

  Malot is Kashmiri architecture three hundred and fifty kilometres from Kashmir, across the Pir Panjal. The trefoil arch set within a gabled niche, the fluted pilasters, the pyramidal roof — these are the elements of Mārtānd and of the Kashmiri temple group generally, and at Malot they are executed in Salt Range sandstone instead of Kashmiri limestone. The Hindu Shahis who built it around 980 had ruled from Kabul and then from Hund on the Indus, and this is the clearest surviving statement of how far their architectural taste reached south.

On these journeys

• Kashmir

Sources

Wikipedia, “Martand Sun Temple” and “History of India”.

• Wikipedia — Martand Sun Temple