162 linrothe
officials doing so. Finally, we can depend on the fact that the Maitreya and
Avalokiteśvara Buddhist sculptures, along with others originally created near
Dras, would have been highly visible markers of the outpost of and gateway
to Kashmir, long the dominant power in the region. For traders, missionaries,
emissaries, and other travellers, whether they could read the inscriptions or
not, they would have been reminders of the Kashmiri centres of power, wealth,
sophisticated culture, and faith beyond the eleven-thousand five-hundred foot
(3505 m) pass, at the foot of which they now stood.
3 Kartsé
Frederic Drew, who travelled the territories administered by the Mahārāja of
Kashmir for ten years in various official capacities between 1862 and 1872, was
surely among the first to publish an image of the Kartsé (also called Kartsé
Khar) Maitreya in the Suru Valley (figs. 5.6–5.9).31 Drew and Fontein suggest
it is around twenty-five feet (7.62 m) tall, and Peissel insists it is twenty-eight
(8.5 m).32 Sonam Phuntsog’s estimate of the height is thirty-seven feet (11.27
m), not far from Snellgrove and Skorupski’s “approximate height 10 metres [i.e.
nearly thirty-three feet]”.33 In that case it would be nearly five times the size of
the Dras Maitreya.
It is now, quite frankly, in the back of the beyond. The hamlet of Kartsé (Tib.
dKar rtse), or Kartsé Khar, is a few kilometers up a tributary of the Suru River
joining it from the East near the village of Sanku (variously spelled Sanko,
Sankoo, etc.). A distant view of the sculpture is blocked by a row of trees quite
close to the cliff on which it is carved, and a wide irrigation canal is dug directly
in front of it, making it impossible to see until one is right below it. The two-
armed Maitreya looks out over the trees to placid barley fields below, tilled by
non-Buddhists, for as in Dras, the Suru Valley inhabitants are now all Muslim.
The Maitreya stands within a niche that is shaped to his body. No other
sculptures, carvings or inscriptions are in the immediate vicinity of the
31 Drew, Frederic, The Jummoo and Kashmir Territories: A Geographical Account (London:
Edward Stanford, 1875), 257. A GPS reading for the location of the Kartsé sculpture is:
N 34° 16.382’; E 075° 59.859’; alt. 8,722’.
32 Fontein, Jan, “A Rock Sculpture of Maitreya in the Suru Valley, Ladakh,” Artibus Asiae
41.1 (1979): 5; Peissel, Michel, The Ants’ Gold: The Discovery of the Greek El Dorado in the
Himalayas (London: Harvill Press, 1984), 91, 134. Dorjay writes that it is more than seven
metres tall; Dorjay, “Embedded in Stone,” 42.
33 Phuntsog, Ladakh Annals, 245; Snellgrove, David L., et al., The Cultural Heritage of Ladakh,
Volume Two: Zangskar and the Cave Temples of Ladakh (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing,
1980), caption to figure 7.