Patronesses, Patronettes? DHARMA Panel at the Deutscher Orientalistentag, 2025
A blogpost by Daniel Balogh
At the 35th Deutscher Orientalistentag, held in Erlangen on 8-12 September 2025, Dániel Balogh convened a panel with the title Patronesses, Patronettes? The role of women in South Asian patronage and power networks. One of the DHARMA project’s key research lines is the study of primary sources documenting the patronage of religious institutions. While the bulk of such sources from the Indic cultural sphere commemorate patronage by men occupying positions of power, there are, at least from certain times and regions, also numerous records attesting to the involvement of women in patronage processes. The papers presented at the panel addressed some of the ways in which women could assert themselves through patronage in this male-dominated world.

Annette Schmiedchen (Humboldt University, Berlin) summarised the patronage patterns fostered by wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters of Rāṣṭrakūṭa, Śilāhāra, and Yādava rulers and their subordinates in the early mediaeval Deccan. Her discussion included grants commissioned by kings on the occasion of their queens’ coronation, and explored the ways in which female donors’ motivations were portrayed in contrast to their male counterparts.
Jae-Eun Shin (University of Tokyo) took us on an excursion to Northeast India, a liminal zone between South and Southeast Asia, in the early eighteenth-century heyday of the Ahom dynasty. Through a close reading of several written records, she demonstrated how a woman who had risen from a temple dancer to a queen played a key role in implementing the court’s pro-Brahmin policy of patronage.
Ryosuke Furui (University of Tokyo) scrutinised the channels of pious patronage utilised by elite women in the Pāla and Sena courts of early mediaeval Bengal. He argued that while their acts of patronage usually had to materialise through the intervention of male members of the royal family, the inscriptional sources imply that these acts were backed by wealth over which the women in question had personal control.
Christine Chojnacki (University of Toronto) explored literary and canonical texts of the Jaina manuscript tradition from the late fifth to the early twelfth century for references to influential nuns. Through their terminology and the actions portrayed in them, these texts document the influential roles played by nuns, for example through recommending to laymen the copying of this or that manuscript for spiritual merit.
Dániel Balogh (Humboldt University, Berlin) analysed references in copperplate grants of the Eastern Cālukya dynasty to the Paṭṭavardhinī family associated with the socio-religious rituals of kingship. The prominent members of this family were apparently women who did not marry, but associated themselves with powerful figures of the court and were in a position to solicit royal grants and to receive recognition of the status of their sons.
Samana Gururaja (Humboldt University, Berlin) investigated the life of Attimabbe, dowager queen of a subordinate of the Kalyāṇa Cālukyas through inscriptions and the literary work of the poet Ranna. At the nexus between the nascent Cālukya royal court, the patronage of Jaina institutions, and the composition of courtly literature, Attimabbe was positioned to become the epitome of the generous and devoted Jaina laywoman.

In the evening of the DHARMA panel’s day, Dominic Goodall (École française d’Extrême-Orient) presented a keynote address on echoes of Indian poets in the political poetry of Khmer Sanskrit epigraphs. He discussed how the extraordinary high-flown poetry of elaborate Khmer inscriptions alludes to the plots, deploys the tropes, and contains verbal echoes of a broad range of Indian Sanskrit works including those of Bhāravi, Māgha, Bāṇa and Daṇḍin.

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Emmanuel Francis (September 16, 2025). Patronesses, Patronettes? DHARMA Panel at the Deutscher Orientalistentag, 2025. DHARMA project ERC n° 809994. Retrieved November 13, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14o3l


