Konark, Odisha: a guide sets his finger against the hub of a stone wheel carved in the thirteenth century, and reads the time from its shadow
A guide takes a visitor to one of the great stone wheels at the base of the temple, nearly ten feet across. He sets a finger at the centre of the axle, level with the ground, and waits for its shadow to settle on the rim. Then he counts along the carved spokes and beads and tells you the time. Check your phone, and he is usually close.
The Sun Temple was built as a clock as well as a chariot. That, at least, is how Konark reads it now.
The chariot
The temple was built in the middle of the thirteenth century by Narasimhadeva I of the Eastern Ganga dynasty, on the coast of Odisha. It was made in the shape of the chariot of Surya, the sun god, drawn by seven horses. Twelve pairs of wheels were carved along its platform, twenty-four in all.
The tradition preserved in Odisha is precise about the work. Some 1,200 craftsmen are said to have laboured for twelve years, ten months and fourteen days. The temple was consecrated on Magha Saptami, the sun’s festival, when it fell on a Sunday, which happens only once in about seven years. Historians have dated that day to 27 January 1258.
The great tower over the sanctum has since fallen. What stands is the porch, filled with sand and sealed by the British in 1903 to stop it collapsing too, and the platform with its wheels.
He counts along the spokes and beads and tells you the time. Check your phone, and he is usually close.
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Reading the wheel
Each wheel has eight thick spokes. A day and night has twenty-four hours, so the gap between two thick spokes stands for three hours, one prahar, the old Indian watch of the day.
Between each pair of thick spokes runs a thin one, halving the gap into ninety minutes. Around the rim, between a thick spoke and a thin one, sit thirty carved beads. Ninety minutes over thirty beads makes three minutes a bead. The beads are slightly elongated, so a shadow can fall on the middle of one or on either edge, and a practised reader can split the three minutes finer still.
The clock runs anticlockwise. And because the wheels are carved on walls, each gets the sun for only part of the day. The guides use a wheel on one face of the temple in the morning and another in the afternoon, when the light has moved round.
The numbers
Nobody at Konark left a key to what the wheels mean, and people have been filling that gap ever since. The twelve pairs, some say, are the twelve months. The twenty-four wheels are the hours of the day, or the fortnights of the year, or the twenty-four syllables of the Gayatri mantra, the prayer to the sun. The seven horses are the days of the week. The eight spokes are the eight prahars.
Some may be what the builders meant; some are what later visitors have seen.
What is not in doubt is where the temple points. It is laid out along an east–west line, and the name itself is usually read as kona, angle, and arka, sun. Around the spring and autumn equinoxes, the rising sun would have reached through the porch door to the image of Surya inside.
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The people who made it
The best-known story about the builders is a legend. It tells of Dharmapada, the twelve-year-old son of the chief craftsman, who came looking for the father he had never met. He found the workers unable to set the crowning stone on the tower, with the king threatening all 1,200 of them with death. The boy set the stone himself in a single night, and then, so the king would never learn that a child had done what the masters could not, he threw himself into the sea.
The story was first written down in the nineteenth century, and its most familiar names were added later still. But when the Swiss scholar Alice Boner studied old palm-leaf manuscripts about the temple, she found that a Dharma Mahapatra really was there. He was the son of Sadashiva Samantaraya, the master architect, and the manuscripts credit him with completing the crowning stone.
The same leaves name others. Narayana Mahapatra was the master sculptor, Gadadhara Mahapatra the chief executive architect, and Ganga Mahapatra the head of the craftsmen. They are some of the few named hands behind any great Indian temple.
Nobody at Konark left a key to what the wheels mean, and people have been filling that gap ever since.
Still telling time
Seven and a half centuries later, their wheels still turn up in unexpected places. Replicas stand in Rashtrapati Bhavan, and a Konark wheel formed the backdrop when India hosted the G20 summit in Delhi in 2023.
At Konark itself the tower is gone and the porch is full of sand. But on a clear morning a guide can still put his finger to the hub of a wheel that Narasimhadeva’s craftsmen carved, and read the hour from its shadow.
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Results
#1. Which dynasty ruled Odisha during the construction of the Konark Sun Temple?
#2. What is the approximate diameter of each of the 24 carved stone wheels at Konark?
#3. What do the seven stone horses pulling the chariot represent besides the seven days of the week?
#4. How many total spokes are found on each wheel of the Konark Sun Temple?
#5. In the ancient Indian system of time, how long does each “prahar” last?
#6. How are the 24 wheels distributed across the sides of the temple platform to represent the Uttarayana and Dakshinayana?
#7. What type of stone was primarily used to carve the wheels of the Konark Sun Temple?
#8. In which year was the Konark Sun Temple inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site?
How do the Konark Sun Temple wheels function as sundials?
Each wheel has eight primary spokes that divide it into eight equal segments corresponding to the eight prahars, the time divisions of the ancient Indian day. When sunlight falls on the wheel, the shadow cast by the spokes onto the rim indicates which prahar has been reached. The wheels are positioned and angled so that this shadow calculation works accurately at the temple’s specific geographic location on the Odisha coast.
Why are there exactly 24 wheels at the Konark Sun Temple?
The number 24 was chosen because it carries multiple layers of meaning simultaneously within the Indian intellectual tradition. There are 24 hours in a day, 24 fortnights in a lunar year and 24 letters in the Gayatri Mantra, the Vedic verse that is itself an invocation of the sun. The number connects the temple’s architecture to time, to the cosmic calendar and to the deepest layer of Vedic solar worship.
Who built the Konark Sun Temple and when?
The temple was built by King Narasimhadeva I of the Eastern Ganga dynasty of Odisha, around 1250 CE. The Eastern Ganga dynasty was at the height of its political and military power during this period, having successfully resisted invasion from the northwest. The temple was both a religious monument and a declaration of dynastic power and civilizational confidence.
What happened to the main tower of the Konark Sun Temple?
The main sanctuary tower, called the deul, collapsed at some point after the temple’s original construction. The exact cause and timing of the collapse are debated, with theories ranging from structural instability in the original design to damage from later military activity. What survives today is primarily the jagamohana or assembly hall, which still stands to its full height, along with the chariot platform and its 24 wheels.
Why did UNESCO inscribe the Konark Sun Temple as a World Heritage Site?
UNESCO inscribed the Konark Sun Temple in 1984 on the basis of its outstanding universal value as an exceptional example of medieval Indian temple architecture, its integration of astronomical and mathematical knowledge into architectural form, and the quality of its sculptural decoration. The temple is recognized as one of the finest surviving examples of the Odishan architectural tradition and as a monument of global significance in the history of human creative achievement.
Sources & References
Susanta Bahinipati, Dipti Ranjan Biswal and Damodar Suar, “The Konark Temple’s Construction: A Critical Review of the Historical, Cultural, and Scientific Evidence,” F1000Research 13:1540 (2025) — the consecration date, twelve years of work, the 1903 sand filling, the east–west alignment, the Dharmapada legend and Boner’s palm-leaf evidence for named artisans, and the reading of the wheel.
Alice Boner, “Economic and Organizational Aspects of the Building Operations of the Sun Temple at Konarka,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 13 (1970), and Boner, Rath Sarma and Das, New Light on the Sun Temple of Konarka (1972).
Thomas E. Donaldson, Konarak (Oxford University Press, 2003), and Anil Dey, The Sun Temple of Konark (Niyogi Books, 2016) — cited in the review above for the consecration date.
thekonark.in, “Konark Wheel” — dimensions, spokes, beads, and how guides read the time with a finger at the axle.
S. Nayak, “Wheels of Time: Reading the Konark Sun Temple’s Stone Sundials,” The Mathematical Intelligencer 48 (2026), pp. 89–92.
Insights IAS, “Konark Wheels” (2024) — the replicas at Rashtrapati Bhavan.
UNESCO World Heritage listing, “Sun Temple, Konârak” (1984).
