Lalitaditya Muktapida rules Kashmir: the Sun temple of Martand

The main source is the Rajatarangini (‘River of Kings’), written by the Kashmiri poet Kalhana in 1148–1149. Kalhana gives Lalitaditya a reign of 36 years, 7 months and 11 days, but his chronology of the Karkotas runs about 25 years too early; Chinese records, which say that the Tang invested Lalitaditya’s elder brother Chandrapida as king in 720, allow historians to date the reign to about 724/725–760/761. The New Book of Tang calls the king Muduobi. His envoy — the embassy is usually dated to 733 — told the emperor that Kashmir, together with the king of Central India, had blocked Tibet’s five great roads and won every battle, offered to supply provisions for a Tang army of 200,000 if it came to Bolü (Balur, on the upper Indus), and asked leave to build a shrine for the ‘Heavenly Khagan’ by the dragon lake Mahapadma; the emperor feasted the envoy and invested Muduobi as king. Tansen Sen argues that Lalitaditya’s real role beyond the mountains was that of an ally supporting the Tang campaigns against the Tibetans, and that their success later grew into legends of conquest.

Kalhana describes a ‘conquest of the quarters’ that took Lalitaditya across India and into Central Asia; M. A. Stein judged much of it legendary, although the victory over Yashovarman of Kannauj, the former capital of Harsha, is usually accepted as historical. Kalhana also credits him with the temple of the Sun at Martand, whose main shrine stood in a colonnaded courtyard surrounded by 84 smaller shrines, and with the new capital of Parihasapura, where his Tokharian minister Chankuna built a Buddhist monastery with a tall stupa. The Martand temple was destroyed under Sultan Sikandar at the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries. Of Lalitaditya’s end Kalhana reports conflicting stories: that he perished in untimely snow in a northern land, or that he burned himself so as to die a great king.