46 – New Directions in Māhātmya Studies

October 2, 2025
11:00 am
H04
Māhātmya, lit. “greatness”, is a genre of South Asian narrative texts glorifying a particular subject. Sanskrit māhātmyas form part of the vast corpus of purāṇic literature. However, māhātmya-like texts were also composed in various other South Indian languages during the medieval and early modern periods. The māhātmya genre includes texts dealing with the origin stories of particular saced places, which are sometimes also called sthalapurāṇas, but māhātmyas also exists on a variety of other topics. Whereas previous scholarship has tended to disparage māhātmyas for their often local outlook and their perceived lack of literary qualities, there recently has been a surge in māhātmya studies. More and more scholars have realized the value of māhātmyas as sources for social and religious history as well as their continued relevance for contemporary traditions. Moreover, there has been an increasing awareness of the multilingual nature of the māhātmya genre, with texts in the transregional language of Sanskrit coexisting, in various different constellations, with similar compositions in various regional South Asian languages. This panel brings together scholars from different academic backgrounds working on māhātmyas, who will present their work on topics including, but not limited to, the following: 1) The relationship between local māhātmyas and transregional purāṇic literature, 2) māhātmyas as sources for religious history, 3) the relevance of māhātmyas for contemporary religious traditions, and 4) the relationship between Sanskrit māhātmyas and similar text in other South Asian languages.

Convenor

Dr. Jonas Buchholz

Presentations

The Essence of the Śāstras: The Bhagavad Gita Māhātmya in Vernacular North India
Ravishankar Akshara - Ghent Center for South Asian Studies, Universiteit Gent, Gent, Belgium
Generic Flexibility and Literary Innovation in the Tamil Talapurāṇam Genre
Peres Ofer - South Asia Institute, Heidelbderg University, Heidelberg, Germany
Kāñcīsthānamāhātmya: A Poetically Oriented Māhātmya Text
Mehta Paras - Ecole Francaise d'Extreme Orient, Ecole Francaise d'Extreme Orient, Pondicherry, India
The Greatness of Māhātmya as Poetry: Observations from the Pāṇḍuraṅga-māhātmyamu
Loewy Shacham Ilanit - Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
From City of Śiva to World of Śiva –Stock Expressions in a Māhātmya in the Brahmapurāṇa
Littunen Olli-Pekka Antero - LIAS, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands
Glorifying Banaras in Eighteenth-Century Persian Translations of Sanskrit Purāṇas
Kotler Ayelet - Leiden University, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands
Setting a legendary scene: An imagined topography of Pukār in the Paṭṭiṉappālai
Ferenczi Roland - Asien-Afrika-Institut, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
Old Patterns in New Contexts: Negotiating the Concept of the Nine Narasimhas of Ahobilam in Contemporary Visual and Textual Media
Debicka-Borek Ewa - Department of Languages and Cultures of India and South Asia, Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Krakow, Poland
From Sthalamāhātmya to Talapurāṇam: The Multilingual and Multimodal Transmission of Temple Legends in Kanchipuram
Buchholz Jonas - Research unit "Hindu Temple Legends in South India", Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Heidelberg, Germany
Kanchipuram’s Sthalamāhātmyas as literary maps of the city’s sacred geography
Ambach Malini - South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany
Contest and Coexistence: Exploring Sectarian Tensions in the Kāñcīmāhātmya (Śaiva)
Raghavan Aneesh - Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Heidelberg, Germany