Masroor Temples, Kangra: History, Timings & Visitor Guide

Masroor Temples is open every day, usually from early morning to late evening with a break in the afternoon. Darshan and aarti timings change with the season and on festival days.

• MorningOpens early morning (around 5 to 6 AM)
• AfternoonShort break around midday at many temples
• EveningEvening aarti around sunset, closes by about 8 to 9 PM

Ask the temple office on arrival for the day's aarti schedule.

Dress Code & Temple Rules

• DressModest, traditional clothes covering shoulders and knees
• FootwearRemove before entering; use the shoe stand
• PhotographyNot allowed inside the sanctum
• Not AllowedLeather items, tobacco, alcohol, non-veg food
• QueueFollow queue lines and staff instructions on festival days

The period between 12th and 19th century was largely of religious wars and geo-political instability across the Indian subcontinent, and the literature of this era do not mention Masrur temples or present any scholarly studies on any Hindu, Jain or Buddhist temples for that matter, rather they mention iconoclasm and temple destruction. After the 12th century, first northwestern Indian subcontinent, then India, in general, witnessed a series of plunder raids and attacks of Turko-Afghan sultans led Muslim armies seeking wealth, geopolitical power and the spread of Islam. Successive Muslim dynasties controlled the Delhi Sultanate as waves of wars, rebellions, secessions, and brutal counter-conquests gripped Indian regions including those in and around Kashmir. The Mughal Empire replaced the Delhi Sultanate in early 16th-century. The Mughal dynasty ruled much of the Indian subcontinent through early 18th-century, and parts of it nominally through the 19th century. The Kangra valley region with Masrur in the Himalayas was ruled by smaller jagirdars and feudatory Hill Rajas who paid tribute to the Mughal administration for many centuries. The arrival of the colonial era marked another seismic shift in the region's politics. By the late 19th century, British India officials had begun archeological surveys, documented sites and charted out site plans. The first known visits to study the Masrur temples occurred in 1887.

A British empire officer Henry Shuttleworth visited and photographed the temples in 1913, calling it a "Vaishnava temple" and claiming in his report that he was the first European to visit them. He wrote a paper on the temples, which was published by the journal The Indian Antiquary. He shared his findings with Harold Hargreaves, then an officer of the Northern Circle of the Archaeology Survey of India. Hargreaves knew more about Hindu theology, noticed the Shiva linga in the sanctum and he corrected Shuttleworth's report. Hargreaves wrote up his tour and published his photographs and observations in 1915 as a part of the ASI Annual Report Volume 20. Hargreaves acknowledged the discovery that a draftsman in his office had already toured, measured and created temples plans and sections in 1887, and that some other ASI workers and Europeans had visited the temple in 1875 and after 1887. The Hargreaves report described the site as many temples, listed iconography at these temples from different Hindu traditions, mentioned his speculations on links with Mahabalipuram monuments and Gandhara art, and other theories. The Hargreaves text became the introduction to Masrur temples for guides by reporters with little to no background knowledge of Indian temple traditions or Hindu theology. According to Meister, these early 20th century writings became a source of the temple's misidentification and misrepresentations that followed.

The temple complex was carved out of the natural sandstone rock. In some places, the rock is naturally very hard, which would have been difficult to carve, but is also the reason why the intricate carvings on it have preserved for over 1,000 years. In other places the stone was soft or of medium quality. In some cases, the artists carved with a bit softer stone and this has eroded over time from natural causes. In other cases, the stone's hardness was so low that the artists cut out the stone and substituted it with better stone blocks. Then they added their friezes or sculptures. The substituted blocks have better resisted the effect of nature and time.

Architecture of Masroor Temples

All spires in the Masrur temple are of Nagara style, an architecture that was developed and refined in central India in the centuries before the 8th century. More specifically, these are what Indian texts called the latina sub-style, from lata. These are curvilinear spires composed of a rhythmic series of superimposed shrinking horizontal square slabs with offsets, each offset called lata or grape vine-like, in principle reflecting natural growth on a mountain in stone.

The superstructure towers embed styles that are found in Indian temples from the 7th and 8th-century such as in the Mahua Hindu temple and the Alampur Navabrahma Temples, but these are no longer found in temples that can be firmly dated after the 8th century. This supports dating the Masrur temple to about the mid-8th century. The spires show differences, but all spires that are symmetrically position in the temple mandala show the same design. The stairway spire is based on four turned squares, and features eight rotating lata spines that alternate with eight right-angled projections.