Lalitaditya
The Karkota king Lalitaditya Muktapida ruled Kashmir in the eighth century, and the twelfth-century chronicle of Kalhana, the Rajatarangini, presents him as a world conqueror whose campaigns reached far across India and Central Asia. Historians accept that he was a powerful ruler who defeated Yashovarman of Kannauj and fought the Tibetans, while treating the wider conquests as exaggeration. Kalhana credits him with founding towns and many temples, among them the temple of Martanda, a name of the sun god.
His most ambitious foundation, by Kalhana's account, was a new capital, Parihasapura, near Srinagar, with temples of Vishnu, a great Buddhist stupa and a monastery built by his Central Asian minister Cankuna. Its ruins, at Paraspora, include the base of the stupa and of large temple platforms, and confirm that the king patronised Buddhist as well as Hindu foundations on a large scale.
The temple
The temple stands on a high plateau, the karewa, looking over the valley of the Jhelum. A central shrine, with an entrance porch and two side chapels, stands in a rectangular courtyard about eighty metres long, enclosed by a colonnade of eighty-four cells. The building is of large blocks of grey limestone laid without mortar. Its architecture is distinctive to Kashmir: fluted columns, trefoil arches set under triangular pediments, and steeply pitched roofs, now fallen. Writers of the colonial period compared its style with Greek and Roman architecture, a resemblance now explained through the long contact between Kashmir and the Gandharan and post-Gandharan art of the north-west.
The walls of the shrine carry sculptures of deities, including the sun god and the river goddesses Ganga and Yamuna at the entrance, now much worn. The courtyard was probably flooded with water for ritual purposes, fed by a channel from a spring.
Destruction
The temple is in ruins. Later chronicles, including the continuation of the Rajatarangini by Jonaraja, attribute the destruction of many temples in Kashmir to Sikandar Shah Miri (r. 1389–1413), who became known as Butshikan, the breaker of idols, and Martand is generally counted among them. Earthquakes and the removal of stone may also have contributed. The exact course of its ruin is not recorded in detail.
The ruin
The ruins were studied by colonial archaeologists from the nineteenth century, and Alexander Cunningham described them as among the finest monuments of ancient India. The site is protected by the Archaeological Survey of India. In 2022 a religious ceremony held at the ruin in the presence of the lieutenant governor of Jammu and Kashmir prompted debate about worship at protected monuments. The temple has also appeared in films and has become a symbol of Kashmir's pre-Islamic past.
Further reading
- Michell, George. The Hindu Temple: An Introduction to Its Meaning and Forms. University of Chicago Press, 1988
- Meister, Michael W. Encyclopaedia of Indian Temple Architecture. American Institute of Indian Studies, 1983
- Singh, Upinder. A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India. Pearson, 2008
See also
- Lalitaditya — Lalitaditya Muktapida (r. c. 724-760 CE) was a king of Kashmir's Karkota dynasty whose reign, known chiefly through Kalhana's 12th-century chronicle the Rajatarangini, is remembered as the most expansive and celebrated in the region's history.
- Karkoṭa dynasty — The Karkoṭas ruled Kashmir from the seventh to the ninth century CE, and under Lalitāditya the kingdom became briefly an imperial power and built the Mārtaṇḍ sun temple.
- Kashmir — Kashmir is a Himalayan valley in the northwestern subcontinent whose early history encompasses successive Buddhist and Hindu dynasties, the distinct philosophical tradition of Kashmir Shaivism, and a 14th-century transition to Muslim rule under the Shah Mir dynasty.
- Islamic rule in Kashmir — Islamic rule in Kashmir denotes the political and religious transformation of the Kashmir Valley that began with the Shah Mir dynasty's founding in 1339 and continued through the Sultanate, Mughal, Afghan, Sikh, and Dogra periods, along with the region's twentieth-century history of partition, insurgency, and the displacement of its Hindu minority.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.