Karpokhar

Karpokhar lies near Sankoo in the Suru Valley, within the historical country of Purig. Here the lands of western Ladakh faced towards Kashmir and Baltistan as well as the Tibetan plateau. The nearby principality of Kartse had Buddhist rulers and an older heritage of monumental rock carvings. Muslim preachers arriving through Baltistan from the sixteenth century gradually brought a different religious tradition into the valley.

Karpokhar became associated with the scholar and saint Syed Mir Hashim, whose shrine preserved the memory of that teaching. Local accounts connect conversion with the patronage of the ruling family of Kartse, including a Balti royal wife. Political allegiance also changed: Deldan Namgyal's seventeenth-century campaigns brought Kartse and neighbouring principalities under Ladakhi control, while the wars involving Tibet and Mughal Kashmir unsettled that arrangement. In the eighteenth century Suru formed part of Purig, which was for a time assigned to a younger branch of the Ladakhi royal house. The valley's cultivated ground and settlements lay amid these intersecting loyalties, and Karpokhar's religious importance grew from the same connections that joined local courts to scholars and families beyond the mountains.