Everybody calls the Deosai Plateau the ‘land of giants.’ Even the Dawn correspondent in Gilgit wrote that it ‘is sometimes called the land of giants.’ But is it? And if it is, where does the title come from?
But before that, a bit of geography: the rolling, well-watered grassland sits at an average height of 4,000 metres above the sea, just south of Skardu in Baltistan division. Covering an area of roughly 4,500 square kilometres, it is hemmed in by peaks rising another 1,000 metres higher. It is home to a wide variety of mammals, the Tibetan brown bear being its signature species.
SPLICING IN HISTORY
The earliest reference we get to it, only by association, is from the Shah Jahan Nama, when we hear that, in 1637, the Lahori Arain Zafar Khan, then governor of Kashmir, led an army comprising 2,000 cavalry and 10,000 infantry to capture ‘Little Tibet’, as Baltistan was known. This was after an earlier attempt during Jahangir’s rule had ended in a disastrous retreat, with a huge loss of life.
The Shah Jahan Nama tells us that Zafar Khan took the ‘Gurach route’, which I have not been able to identify. However, we read of the Mughal army reaching Sadpara in a narrow gorge (such indeed is its situation), where locals had set up stout defences and where the earlier rout had taken place.
Everyone now calls it the ‘land of giants’, but the Deosai Plateau’s true name honours just one: a simple-minded giant who tried to farm at 4,000 metres above sea level and fled when winter came early. Travel writer Salman Rashid explains the etymology from Gujjar folklore to show how a plural error obscured a delightful singular tale
Zafar Khan, however, was able to push his way through to Skardu. Now, because the army fought at Sadpara, we know that, setting out from Srinagar, it would certainly have traversed Deosai, even though no mention of it is made. Two years later, in 1639, another incursion was mounted to oust invaders from Ladakh. And again, the army coming up from Srinagar would have come through Deosai.
In the summer of 1835, English traveller Godfrey Thomas Vigne (pronounced Vine) passed through ‘Deotsuh’, where he noticed several bears. He also met up with Ahmed Shah, the Raja of Skardu, who was in pursuit of a band of robbers. Vigne watched the outlaws being ambushed and every single one of them being dispatched either by musket or by sword.
Vigne wrote that, after the summer thaws, the entire plateau was so flooded that it becomes a virtual lake. In 1835, when Deosai would have had a regular winter cover of some five metres of snow, this might have been true, but it is no longer so.
And from the expanse of water that Vigne saw, he wrote that it was difficult to cross it during one month of the thaws and, therefore, its name meant ‘lake of the Deo.’ He was wrong about the meaning of the name and had no other story of the deo to tell his readers in his two-volume Travels.
IN SEARCH OF THE DEO
In mid-June 1990, I trekked for the first time across the Deosai Plateau and, because the thaws had swelled them up, my two porters and I had to walk to the headwaters of three streams to ford them. In the five days we spent on Deosai, the two men regaled me with tales of djinns and fairies that came out in the dark to do mischief to unwary travellers.
One of them even said that his maternal uncle and a friend, once benighted on a journey across the plateau, were so terrorised by the djinns that both fainted. When the uncle came to in the morning, he found that he had been rubbing his heels so hard against the frosty earth that his bones were exposed.
Sadly, and this despite the three of us being the only humans on the plateau at that time, we met with no evil djinns nor delectable pixies. Nevertheless, my 1995 book Between Two Burrs on the Map has a chapter titled ‘Through the Land of Djinns.’
Around the time of the publication of that book, I met with a Gujjar elder near Jhelum, who told me that his clan and their large herd of livestock spent the summers on Deosai. By his account, his ancestors had made Deosai their summer home many centuries earlier and, now, there were several groups of Gujjars who had allocated themselves areas where they grazed their cattle.
He also told me the story of the Dev (as he pronounced the word) or giant. Here, I have reproduced and paraphrased text from my book, Deosai: Land of the Giant, published in 2013:
“Such an immense wilderness that could have harboured a vast population, but being entirely devoid of human life was, naturally, the abode of spirits. This notion tickled their imagination and so, in their own image, the Gujjars invented the Dev or Deo — the giant. Simple of mind and uninitiated to the ways of nature, this itinerant giant chanced upon this vast flat grassland. Here, he thought, was farmland capacious enough to meet all his food needs. And so, as spring thaws began to erode the cover of snow and ice, he set about ploughing the land to sow his paddy.”
The book expands on the folklore to point out that on Deosai, the summer lasts barely eight weeks and along came a wily little fox to taunt the ignorant giant. ‘Fool, you wait here for your paddy to ripen while people in Skardu feast on the finest apricots. The blizzards will soon kill your fields. Begone, before you too are smothered by the snow!’
And sure enough, the snows came even before the giant could harvest his crops. He fled but, in Gujjar lore, the land where the Dev had set up his farming became Dev Vasai — their exact pronunciation — meaning land settled by the giant. Even today, Gujjars will pronounce it clearly as Dev Vasai.”
And so, my book on Deosai calls it ‘Land of the Giant’, in singularity with the simple-minded Dev of Gujjar lore. It is not the land of giants, which it became because of the national lack of reading. Very few have read my book but, somehow, the title got around and because its raison d’être was unknown to an unreading public, Deosai became ‘land of giants.’
This attempt to correct the title may please be heeded.
The writer is the author of several books and a fellow of The Royal Geographical Society.
X: @odysseuslahori
Published in Dawn, EOS, January 4th, 2026
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