Masroor Rock-cut Temple, Kangra

The Masrur Temples, also known as the Masroor Temples or Rock-cut Temples at Masrur, are an early 8th-century complex of rock-cut Hindu temples located in the Kangra Valley of Beas River in Himachal Pradesh, India. The temples face northeast towards the Dhauladhar range of the Himalayas and feature a North Indian Nagara architectural style, dedicated to Shiva, Vishnu, Devi, and Saura traditions of Hinduism. The surviving iconography is likely inspired by a henotheistic framework.

Despite being a major temple complex in its surviving form, archaeological studies suggest that the artists and architects had a more ambitious plan, and the complex remains incomplete. Much of the Masrur temple’s sculpture and reliefs have been lost and the site is heavily damaged, most likely due to earthquakes.

The temples were carved out of monolithic rock with a shikhara and were provided with a sacred pool of water, as recommended by Hindu texts on temple architecture. The temple has three entrances on its northeast, southeast, and northwest sides, two of which are incomplete. Evidence suggests that a fourth entrance was planned and started but left mostly incomplete, which was acknowledged by early 20th-century colonial-era archaeology teams but later ignored, leading to misidentification and erroneous reports. The entire complex is symmetrically laid out on a square grid, with the main temple surrounded by smaller temples in a mandala pattern. The main sanctum of the temple complex has a square plan, as do other shrines and the mandapa. The temple complex features reliefs of major Vedic and Puranic gods and goddesses, and its friezes narrate legends from the Hindu texts.

The temple complex was first reported by Henry Shuttleworth in 1913, bringing it to the attention of archaeologists. They were independently surveyed by Harold Hargreaves of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1915. According to Michael Meister, an art historian and a professor specializing in Indian temple architecture, the Masrur temples are a surviving example of a temple mountain-style Hindu architecture that embodies the earth and mountains around it.

Between the 12th and 19th centuries, the Indian subcontinent experienced religious wars and geopolitical instability. Literature from this era does not mention the Masrur temples or present any scholarly studies on any Hindu, Jain, or Buddhist temples. Rather, they mention iconoclasm and temple destruction. After the 12th century, the northwestern Indian subcontinent and India, in general, witnessed a series of plunder raids and attacks by Turko-Afghan sultan-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 the early 16th 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 archaeological surveys and heritage preservation efforts. The first known visits to study the Masrur temples occurred in 1887.