ABSTRACT

In the fifth and sixth centuries, the Gupta provincial rule of Puṇḍravardhana, the northern sub-region of Bengal, centred on an organisation called adhikaraṇa established at the diverse levels of administrative hierarchy. The state maintained its control over rural society through the collaboration and negotiation with local influential people who constituted the organisation, especially the dominant section of peasant householders. Their activities around the adhikaraṇa, on the other hand, show the contention among constituents of rural society and between them and the external authority like urban elites and state officials. Their relations were conditioned by the form of agrarian development limited to small-scale extension of cultivation by purchase of waste/fallow land and its management by family labour of peasant householders. Meanwhile, contemporary Samataṭa, the eastern sub-region, saw the growth of local kingship towards semi-independence under the Gupta suzerainty and intensive agrarian development in particular riverine tracts with less stratified rural society.