ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the inscriptions recording donations to religious centres as a basis for understanding gender relations in society, especially the role of women as patrons. It re-examines the data taking gender as crucial component for analysis to arrive at conclusion on various social, religious, economic issues. The male authors of the classical Buddhist texts have continually downplayed the involvement and agency of the female Buddhist patrons. In Madhya Pradesh, early Buddhist institutions apparently enjoyed a great vitality of womens participation they, respectively, represented 43 per cent of the total clerics in inscriptions and 38 per cent of the laity. The most numbers of records of royal women making grants at the Buddhist sites come from Nasik and Ngarjunakonda. The Buddhist landscape very often overlapped with existing inland routes like the Dakshinapatha and the Uttarapatha. The Buddhist society was kinship-based rather than caste-based.
