Jantar Mantar
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- Despite its precision claims, the sun's blurred shadow edge can be about 30 mm wide, making the great sundial's 1 mm markings of little practical use.
- The astronomical handbook produced under Jai Singh leaned mostly on existing tables by Ulugh Beg and Philippe de La Hire rather than on fresh observations.
- During a restoration finished in 1876, Ram Singh had lead set into the scale lines and replaced some plaster instruments with stone.
- The Shastansh Yantra uses a darkened chamber where a pinhole image of the noon sun lets an observer measure the sun's diameter.
- The Nadi Valaya Yantra has two dial faces, one representing the northern celestial hemisphere and one the southern.
- The bronze Yantra Raj astrolabe is said to have been used only once a year, to calculate the Hindu calendar.
- Subsidence of the foundations over the centuries has pulled some of the masonry instruments slightly out of alignment.
- A small Bhairav temple stands within the observatory complex, added in the late 18th century under Pratap Singh.
- The observatory doubled as a surreal maze in the 2006 film The Fall.
- Julio Cortázar photographed the instruments for his 1972 book Prosa del Observatorio, and Storm Thorgerson later photographed the sundial for a Shpongle DVD cover.
Why it is worth it
Jaipur's Jantar Mantar looks at first like a playground of giant abstract sculptures: ramps, bowls, arcs and walls of masonry and marble spread across a courtyard next to the City Palace. Each shape is in fact a precise astronomical instrument. Nineteen of them were built by Sawai Jai Singh II, the Rajput ruler who founded Jaipur, with construction from before 1728 until the 1730s. The name comes from Sanskrit words for instrument and calculation.
Jai Singh built it because the astronomical tables in use in his day did not match what he saw in the sky. He founded five observatories in different cities to produce better tables, and Jaipur became his principal one; in the mid-1730s at least 23 astronomers worked here. The resulting tables were used in India for about a century. The instruments work with the naked eye, belong to the tradition of positional astronomy shared by many civilisations, and cover all three classical coordinate systems: horizon, equatorial and ecliptic. Some, like the Kapali Yantra, allow a position to be read in one system and converted directly into another.
The star of the site is the Vrihat Samrat Yantra, a giant sundial whose triangular gnomon rises about 27 m, its slope set at 27 degrees, the latitude of Jaipur. Its shadow moves across the quadrants at about a hand's breadth every minute, and the instrument is said to give local time to within about two seconds; a small cupola on top was used to announce eclipses and the arrival of the monsoon. Nearby, the Jai Prakash Yantra consists of two sunken hemispherical bowls lined with marked marble, in which an observer could move around to read the position of a shadow; the Rashi Valaya Yantra is a set of twelve instruments, one for each sign of the zodiac; and the Yantra Raj is a large bronze astrolabe about 2.4 m across.
The observatory declined after Jai Singh's death in 1743, was used at one point as a gun factory, and and was restored in 1876 and again from 1901, including work supervised by the engineer and amateur astronomer Arthur Garrett. UNESCO inscribed it in 2010 as the most significant and best preserved historic observatory in India.
Getting there
The observatory is in Jaipur's old walled city, beside the City Palace and close to the Hawa Mahal. Jaipur International Airport (JAI) is about 11 km away, and taxis and auto-rickshaws cover the rest.
Plan your visit
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Nearby places
- Hawa Mahal 0.2 km · palace
- Amber Fort 7.2 km · fortress
- Panna Meena ka Kund 7.8 km · stepwell
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Jantar Mantar is a collection of 19 astronomical instruments built by the Rajput king Sawai Jai Singh, the founder of Jaipur, Rajasthan, India. The monument was completed in 1734. It features the world's largest stone sundial, and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is near City Palace and Hawa Mahal. The instruments allow the observation of astronomical positions with the naked eye. The observatory is an example of the Ptolemaic positional astronomy which was shared by many civilizations.
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