As early as 1881, Mr. Blanford, then Meteorological Reporter to the Government of India, recommended "the improvement of the work of solar observations in order to obtain accurate measures of the sun’s heating power at the earth’s surface and its periodic variations".

[2] In May 1882, the government astronomer at Madras, Norman Robert Pogson, proposed the need for photography and spectrography of the sun and the stars using a 20-inch (51 cm) telescope, which could be at a hill station in South India.

On 20 July 1893 following a famine in Madras Presidency, which underscored the need for a study of the sun to better understand monsoon patterns, a meeting of the U.K. Secretary of State, Indian Observatories Committee, chaired by Lord Kelvin, decided to establish a solar physics observatory at Kodaikanal, based on its southern, dust free, high altitude location.

A 12 m solar tower with modern spectrograph was established in 1960 by Amil Kumar Das and used to perform some of the first ever helioseismology investigations.

The 20 cm refractor is used occasionally for cometary and occultation observations and sometimes made available to visitors for night sky viewing.

Twin spectroheliographs giving 6 cm diameter full disc photographs of the sun in K-alpha and H-alpha spectral lines are in regular use.

A Grubb Parson 60 cm diameter two-mirror fused quartz coelostat mounted on 11 m tower platform directs sunlight via a flat mirror into a 60 m long underground horizontal 'tunnel'.

A large format CCD system is being procured to enhance the coverage of spectrum especially for the broad resonance lines and the nearby continuum.

The converging solar beam from the objective can be diverted to a high dispersion spectroheliograph with Littrow arrangement using a 3.43 m achromat.

A high frequency Doppler radar was built indigenously and made operational to study F-region Skywave dynamics.