The architecture at Martand is not purely Indian. Scholars who have studied the ruins identify a blend of Gandharan, Gupta, Chinese, and possibly Syrian-Byzantine influences -- a fusion that reflects Kashmir's position as a crossroads of the ancient world. The temple's colonnaded peristyle, the largest in Kashmir, suggests Hellenistic or Roman influence filtered through Gandhara. Its pyramidal superstructure, now collapsed, followed the local Kashmiri tradition. The primary entrance on the western side matched the temple's full width, creating a grand approach that aligned visitors with the setting sun. Wall carvings in the antechamber depict a pantheon: Vishnu alongside Surya, river goddesses Ganga and Yamuna flanking doorways. This was a place where devotion drew from many traditions, built by a king whose empire briefly stretched from the Arabian Sea to Central Asia.

According to the fifteenth-century chronicler Jonaraja, as well as the historian Hasan Ali, the temple was destroyed during the reign of Sikandar Shah Miri, who ruled Kashmir from 1389 to 1413. Jonaraja attributed the destruction to Sikandar's chief counselor Suhabhatta, a Brahmin convert who enforced harsh policies against local Hindus. Later Muslim chroniclers framed the demolition as religious conviction. Modern scholars urge caution with both accounts. Chitralekha Zutshi and Richard G. Salomon argue that Sikandar's actions were driven less by religious zeal than by realpolitik -- an effort to consolidate state power over the wealth controlled by Brahminical institutions, much as earlier Hindu rulers had done for their own purposes. A stone sculpture of a four-armed Brahma, made by the son of a Buddhist Sanghapati and dedicated to Sikandar himself, complicates any simple narrative of religious persecution. The truth likely involves politics, power, and faith entangled beyond easy separation.

Destruction was not the end of the temple's decline. Earthquakes continued to damage the ruins over the following centuries, toppling columns and cracking walls that no one maintained. Yet enough survived to astonish the British surveyors who documented it in the 1870s -- photographer J. Duguid produced a restored impression of the temple in that decade, imagining the pyramidal roof rebuilt and the colonnade intact. The Archaeological Survey of India has since declared Martand a site of national importance, listing it as Kartanda (Sun Temple) among centrally protected monuments. In March 2024, the Jammu and Kashmir government initiated efforts to restore the temple, though the scale of the ruin makes full reconstruction unlikely. What draws visitors today is not restoration but the ruin itself: the way light moves through roofless chambers, the precision of carvings that have outlasted the civilization that made them.

The temple's location is part of its power. Built atop a plateau that drops away to the Kashmir Valley floor, Martand offers a panoramic view that explains why Lalitaditya chose this site for a sun temple. At dawn, light floods across the valley from the east and strikes the temple's western entrance directly. In winter, snow blankets the ruins and the surrounding Pir Panjal range, giving the broken columns an austere, almost abstract beauty. Bollywood filmmakers discovered the location decades ago -- the 1970 film Man Ki Aankhen and the 1975 classic Aandhi both used Martand as a backdrop, and in 2014 the film Haider, an adaptation of Hamlet set against the Kashmir conflict, filmed the song "Bismil" among the ruins. The temple has become a symbol that means different things to different communities in Kashmir, but for anyone standing on that plateau, the first impression is simpler than any politics: it is the view.