Jantar Mantar in India : World's largest sundial built three hundred years ago

Created 300 years ago, Jaipur's Jantar Mantar is an outdoor complex filled with gargantuan astronomy tools designed to be used by the naked eye – noted for their accuracy in the present time as well.

India's mysterious gateway to the stars

Jantar Mantar Jaipur: Guide To The World's Largest Sundial

Built by the Indian king Sawai Jai Singh II in 1734, Jantar Mantar, Jaipur is an astronomical observatory, which features the world’s largest stone sundial. India has five of them, and the largest one is in Jaipur. This Jantar Mantar observatory is also a UNESCO World Heritage site.

The site is a 300-year-old collection of 20 scientific sculptures called yantra that can measure the positions of stars and planets, and precisely tell the time. They are ingenious architectural solutions to understanding the mechanics of astronomy, as well as key tools for traditional Hindu astrologers to craft birth charts and forecast auspicious dates.

In 1727, when the region's king, Sawai Jai Singh, conceived Jaipur as his capital and as the country's first planned city, he wanted to design it based on the principles of Vastu Shastra, which draw on nature, astronomy and astrology to inform architecture and placement. He realised that to perfectly align Jaipur with the stars, aid in astrological practices and predict key weather events for crops, he would need instruments that were accurate and accessible.

However, after sending research teams across Central Asia and Europe to collect data based on the knowledge of Islamic and European scientists, Sawai Jai Singh found discrepancies among the readings of the brass instruments that were widely used at the time. To increase accuracy, he scaled up the size of the tools, stabilised them by reducing moving parts and made them resistant to wear and weather by fashioning them out of marble and local stone. Then he used these innovations to build five outdoor observatories in the Indian cities of Jaipur, Delhi, Ujjain, Varanasi and Mathura.

In Sanskrit, jantar means instruments, and mantar denotes calculator, so each of the yantra in the complex has a mathematical purpose: some are sundials to tell the local time and pinpoint the sun's position on the hemisphere; while others measure constellation and planetary movements to detect zodiac signs and guide forecasts.

 

This sounds so beautiful! I'd so love to walk all around it and see it working!