________________
150
to her husband, who in the end is forced to throw himself at her feet in an attempt to propitiate her.
1.3 The audience
It will be clear that the picture given of the life in the country-side is far from flattering. The text would thus most likely have been intended for people who were not themselves depicted in the Gathās and who, intelligent and living in completely opposite, i.e. better circumstances, could afford to have an interest in the situations described. This audience must have belonged to the cultured and refined leisure-class living in the cities and towns, which brings to mind the so-called Nāgaraka as described in Kāmasūtra I 4. The audience must also have included kings, as :) the ideal warrior, which appears from the descriptions of the gāmaņ1. For, these seem to have been intended for a more succesful member of the warrior-class, namely one who has no problems in having performed the proper rituals and who, furthermore, has established peace, thus having time and energy for things other than waging war, namely love and, as the existence of this text serves to show, enjoying literature.
It is evident that the text served in the first place to amuse the audience, which raises the question as to what the humour consisted of. It would seem that it was in any case based on a certain measure of contempt for the people living in the country-side. The main purpose of the text, though, would seem to have been that of providing an outlet for the audience's own frustrations, presumably caused by the painful but inevitable clash of their ideals and ambitions with the realities of life. The text may have acquired this function in that it projects the audience's problems onto a completely different world with different people and different customs. In this way these very problems could become objects for amusement. Whatever the precise nature of the perception of the text may have been, it contains numerous specimen of often crude humour, which is otherwise extremely rare in Indian erotic poetry. An instance of this humour may be found in Gathā 324, quoted above (p. 145), where the farmer's exhaustion which makes him unable to satisfy his wife's desires is attributed, of all things, to his having dragged the plough through thick wet mud. Another example may be
