India’s Great Clocks and the Passage of Time

When the English ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, arrived at the court of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir in 1616, he carried gifts Europeans imagined would dazzle an oriental monarch — glassware, mechanical curiosities, and, most tellingly, a clock: a precision object from Europe, and a symbol of its mastery over the measurement of time. Colonial-era accounts tell us that Jahangir received it with polite indifference — an episode read by generations of historians as evidence that Indian civilisation lacked interest in precise timekeeping, or that ‘scientific’ notions of time arrived only with Europe’s mechanical clock.

Nothing, however, could be more incorrect. Long before mechanical clocks entered Indian courts, the subcontinent had evolved some of the world’s most spectacular traditions of monumental timekeeping. India went beyond measuring time through portable instruments to studying it through architecture itself: giant observatories, temple alignments, stone wheels, shadow-casting towers and geometrically calibrated sacred spaces. If Europe miniaturised time into the ticking clock, India monumentalised it into landscapes of stone.

To understand India’s relationship with time, one needs to begin not with a monument but with a city. Ujjain, the ancient Avantika, served for centuries as the Greenwich of India. In classical Indian astronomy, the prime meridian passed through Ujjain. Even Ptolemy acknowledged “Ozene” as a pivotal reference point, and even today all traditional Hindu almanacs are computed with reference to Ujjain time. Long before Greenwich was a village of any consequence, Indian civilisation had established its great centre of timekeeping on the banks of the Kshipra (or Shipra) river.

The Jantar Mantar — a collection of astronomical observation sites built by the 18th-century Rajput ruler, Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II — have pride of place in India’s history of timekeeping. He built his Vedh Shala — the Jantar Mantar of Ujjain — around 1725, honouring a tradition that stretched back two millennia. Its instruments were used to compile the Panchang, the annual almanac that schedules everything from festivals and harvests to weddings and cremations. This was astronomy that regulated an entire civilisation’s daily life.

Ujjain, however, was not the first. Jai Singh commissioned the first of his five great observatories in Delhi in 1724, followed by Jaipur, Ujjain, Varanasi and Mathura. They were the most sophisticated astronomical instruments of their era, and in certain respects outperformed their European contemporaries. The Delhi Jantar Mantar was built to correct what Jai Singh saw as dangerous inaccuracies in existing astronomical tables. In an age when the timing of eclipses governed both religious ritual and political authority, a calendar error could unleash a crisis of legitimacy. Jai Singh, who had studied Hindu, Islamic and European texts with equal appetite, decided that the only solution was to build instruments so large that human error in reading them would become negligible.

The key principle of the Jantar Mantar is simple enough: the larger the instrument, the finer the measurement. In Delhi, the Samrat Yantra can determine time to within two seconds. In Jaipur, too, the Vrihat Samrat Yantra — a right-angled stone triangle 27.5 metres high and 45 metres long — can work within two seconds. It is not a monument, but a clock itself, working and precise, carved from stone and marble, and astronomers still use it to predict the monsoon’s arrival in Rajasthan. The observatory also houses the Jai Prakash Yantra, a set of two complementary, concave hemispherical bowls that act as a walkable map and inverted mirror image of the sky, enabling precise celestial measurements.

If the Jantar Mantar is science made manifest in architecture, the Sun Temple at Konark, built on the Odisha coast in the 13th century by King Narasimhadeva I, weaves the spiritual and the scientific together, tightly and inseparably. The temple is designed as a colossal stone chariot of the Sun God, Surya. Seven stone horses represent the days of the week. Twenty-four elaborately carved wheels, each 10 to 12 feet in diameter, were long admired purely as masterpieces of sculpture. But in the modern era, many scholars have interpreted them as functional sundials of remarkable precision. According to them, the eight major spokes and eight minor spokes of each wheel divide the day into segments of three hours and 90 minutes respectively. The spokes cast calculable shadows, and beads carved into the rim allow time to be read down to the minute.

Perhaps the most extraordinary example of all is the Brihadisvara Temple in Thanjavur. Built by the Chola emperor Rajaraja I between 1003 and 1010 CE, the tower is a granite colossus rising 216 feet above the Tamil Nadu plains. At certain times of the year, the tower’s midday shadow becomes so short and compressed near the base that it appears almost shadowless to casual observers, giving rise to the popular belief that this was designed as a cosmological statement informed by classical astronomical texts like the Surya Siddhanta and the mathematics of Aryabhata, who, in the fifth century, had already calculated the earth’s circumference, proposed its axial rotation, and modelled planetary motion. At any rate, there is little doubt that Chola architects possessed a sophisticated knowledge of ritual astronomy, solar orientation, and cardinal alignment.

These are the landmarks, but not the full map. The 11th-century Modhera Sun Temple in Gujarat, positioned on the Tropic of Cancer, is oriented so that the first rays of the equinox sun travel its halls to strike a golden image of Surya twice a year, with the punctuality of a well-set clock. The 14th-century Vidyashankara Temple at Sringeri, Karnataka, contains twelve massive pillars corresponding to the 12 signs of the zodiac. It is popularly believed that the pillars are aligned in such a way that sunlight falls on each in the precise sequence of the Hindu solar calendar — a full year encoded in stone. However, some scholars contend that the pillars carry religious symbolism rather than functional astronomical significance.