origins of the kashmiri style 159
the chronicles of Ladakh, the ancient boundary between Ladakh and Kashmir
was at La-rtsa, and a ‘stone with holes’ was the boundary stone. The people of
Dras told me that their village was also known by the name of La-rtsa (‘Root
of the Pass’); but they did not know of such a stone”.23 If indeed at one time Dras
marked the border between Western Ladakh and East Kashmir, instead of the
Zoji pass as is now and for long has been the case, then the presence of these
sculptures along the crossroads or routes leading to and from Zangskar, Ladakh
and Kashmir would perhaps have had an explicit demarcating function. Local
chieftains—feudatories of the Kashmir kings, depicted wearing their own
style of dress—may have simultaneously proclaimed their political allegiance
and independence by employing Kashmiri artists to give the sculptures expres-
sion in the visual language of Kashmiri Buddhism and its aesthetic culture.
Peter van Ham, on the other hand, makes the intriguing suggestion that for-
eign merchants engaged in long-distance trade were the donors, motivated by
merit-making and thanks-giving.24 To be sure, it is the case that these images
are set up along trade routes, and that in both style and language of inscrip-
tion they reflect strong affiliations with Kashmiri culture. However, at the
period when the sculptures were made, before Tibetanisation of the local cul-
ture was far along much less complete, such was generally true of the inhabit-
ants: that their affiliations were with their dominant neighbour Kashmir and
with areas of Baltistan and Gilgit which placed themselves within Kashmir’s
cultural orbit. Even at the time of William Moorcroft’s travels there, in 1822,
before the Dogra invasion of 1834, the “lands of Dras are the joint property of
the Raja of Ladakh and the Malik, or chief landholder, of the neighbouring part
of Kashmir, in consequence of a grant, in perpetuity, made by an ancestor of
the Raja to a progenitor of the Malik,” an arrangement that may go back to the
seventeenth century, or even earlier.25
Unfortunately, the inscription does not resolve the question of who actu-
ally commissioned Kashmiri sculptors to make Buddhist images in a Kashmiri
idiom on the Eastern frontiers of Kashmiri political and/or soft power.
The many errors and irregularities of grammar and spelling seem to suggest
23 Francke, Antiquities of Indian Tibet, 106.
24 van Ham, Heavenly Himalayas, 22–23. Neelis deals briefly with examples of donative
inscriptions at South Asian Buddhist sites identifying “donors with commercial
backgrounds”; Neelis, Early Buddhist Transmission, 24–26.
25 Wilson, Horace Hayman, Travels in the Himalayan Provinces of Hindustan and the Panjab;
in Ladakh and Kashmir; in Peshawar, Kabul, Kunduz, and Bokhara; by Mr. William Moorcroft
and Mr. George Trebeck from 1819 to 1825, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1841), 41.