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The Rural World of an Agricultural Text

This article aims at exploring the potential of the Krsiparāśara, a Sanskrit agricultural work, for understanding the rural society of early medieval eastern India through dense readings by refixing it into its social context. The structure shows the character of the text as an agricultural manual. The composer and intended audience of the text may have been local brāhmanas or similar local literate groups with a rural social background and involvement in agriculture, placed at the confluence of both local and supra-local knowledge. The image of a homogeneous agrarian society in the text is a constructed one. Though it is difficult to reconstruct the rural social structure directly from such an image, it is possible to access some aspects of social reality by detecting breaches within the text in which social diversity is recognizable. On the other hand, considering the logic of the construction of such an image, the intention of the composer to gloss over social diversity becomes discernible. It indicates the existence of such diver-sity, which corresponds to images deduced from other contemporary sources. The present case, thus, offers the prospect of a better understanding of rural society through a dense reading of the text.