Attimabbe

The Story

Attimabbe was a queen of the Western Chalukya dynasty in the tenth century, the wife of the prince Nagavarma and a devout follower of the Jain faith. Her devotion expressed itself in the most public and generous form possible: the giving of her wealth for the dharma.

The inscriptions of her age record her great gift: she is said to have commissioned a thousand copies of the sacred Jain text and, weighing herself against gold, given the gold away — an act of total charity that became the standard of generosity in the Kannada tradition. She fed thousands daily and built the institutions of the faith.

She is honoured in the history of Karnataka as a saintly queen — a woman whose name stands for the ideal of giving. Her story is preserved in the ancient inscriptions and in the gratitude of the tradition she enriched.