Modhera Sun Temple

The Sun Temple at Modhera is one of the great stone compositions of medieval India, built for Surya, the sun god, under the Chaulukya kings of Gujarat. An inscription dates the shrine to 1026–27, in the reign of Bhima I, and the open assembly hall in front of it was added later in the same century. Worship here stopped long ago, which leaves the building as a pure piece of architecture: a sequence of three linked elements laid out along a single east–west axis, on the bank of the little Pushpavati river.

The first is the kunda, a rectangular stepped tank roughly 54 by 37 metres, its four terraces descending in a fractal cascade of small steps and miniature shrines towards the water. It reads almost like a sculpture in its own right, and in still weather it doubles the temple in reflection. Above it stands the sabhamandapa, an assembly or dance hall with no walls at all, held up by 52 pillars carved from base to capital with dancers, deities and scenes in dense, crisp sandstone relief. Behind that rises the gudhamandapa, the enclosed hall in front of the sanctum, whose outer walls carry twelve niches showing Surya in his monthly forms, alongside figures of Ganesha, Saraswati, Vishwakarma and the guardians of the eight directions.

The design is tied to the sky. The temple sits close to the Tropic of Cancer and is oriented so that at the equinoxes the first light of the rising sun travels through the halls into the sanctum, where it once struck the image of the god; at the summer solstice the noon sun stands almost directly overhead. The style is the Maru-Gurjara manner of western India, here at its most refined, with perforated stone screens and a crowd of small figures that rewards slow looking. Every January, after the kite festival of Uttarayan, the temple becomes the backdrop to a three-day festival of classical dance, a tradition revived in 1992.

Getting there

The temple is in the village of Modhera in Mehsana district, Gujarat, about 15 km from the town of Chanasma. The nearest airport is Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport (AMD) in Ahmedabad, about 76 km away in a straight line; the usual way in is by road from Ahmedabad or Mehsana. The site is protected by the Archaeological Survey of India.