Gallery: the Jantar Mantar in black and white

This is the most significant, most comprehensive, and the best preserved of India’s historic observatories. It is an expression of the astronomical skills and cosmological concepts of the court of a scholarly prince at the end of the Mughal period.

UNESCO listing for the Jantar Mantar in Jaipur

The Jantar Mantar in Jaipur is a group of nineteen astronomical instruments built in 1734 by the Rajput king Sawai Jai Singh, the founder of the city. But if when you think of ‘astronomical instruments’ we are visualising telescopes, or maybe small handheld devices, think again! These are dramatically large structures, most far taller than a person.

Among them is the world’s largest stone sundial, and a variety of instruments measuring things like the coordinates of celestial bodies, the time of sunrise and sunset, the altitude of the sun and other celestial bodies, and much more.

UNESCO also says of the observatory that:

It provides an outstanding testimony of the ultimate culmination of the scientific and technical conceptions of the great observatory devised in the Medieval world. It bears witness to very ancient cosmological, astronomical and scientific traditions shared by a major set of Western, Middle Eastern, Asian and African religions, over a period of more than fifteen centuries.

Source: https://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/3996/

For their time the instruments were all remarkably accurate. However subsidence has caused some movement in the structures and reduced that accuracy a little. But the huge sundial, known as Vrihat Samrat Yantra, is still accurate to within two seconds. That’s a precision that had never before been achieved. The small cupola on top, in the design of a Hindu chhatri, was used as a platform for announcing significant astronomical events such as eclipses and the timing of the arrival of monsoons.

Photographing the observatory

I confess I was more interested in the geometrical shapes and the patterns the instruments created than I was in the details of their functions. And although it is more than a decade since I visited, I have often thought of experimenting with black and white edits of the photos I took here. The geometric shapes, and clean lines and angles, lend themselves to such treatment. Finally today I have got around to testing the idea; here, for the Monochrome Madness challenge, are the results.

All these images were shot originally in colour. I converted them to monochrome with Nik Silver Efex Pro, using a slight copper tone filter and softening the edges to give an impression of age.

Rashi Valaya Yantra, a group of twelve instruments aligned with the twelve signs of the zodiac

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Another view of Rashi Valaya Yantra

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The Rashi Valaya Yantra group from a different angle

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Part of Jai Prakash Yantra which tracks the sun’s movements

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Nadivalaya Yantra, one of a pair (one facing north, one facing south), used to track local solar time and tell when the sun passes the celestial equator

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Vrihat Samrat Yantra, measures the time of day and declination of the sun

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The Hindu chhatri on Vrihat Samrat Yantra, used as a platform for announcing significant astronomical events

I visited Jaipur in October 2015