The Arctic Home in the Vedas c12.31

c12.31

It is, in my opinion, a mistake to suppose that the struggle between Indra and Vritra originally represented the conflict between the thunder-god and the rain-cloud. It is really a struggle between the powers of light and darkness, and we find traces of it in the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa (IV, 5), where Indra alone of all gods is described as having undertaken the task of driving out Asuras from the darkness of the night. That Indra is the god of light is also evident from many other passages in the Rig-Veda, where, without any reference to the Vritra fight, Indra is said to have found the light (III, 34, 4; VIII, 15, 5; X, 43, 4) in the darkness (I, 108, 8; IV, 16, 4), or to have produced the dawn as well as the sun (II, 12, 7; 21, 4; III, 31, 15), or opened the darkness with the dawn and the sun (I, 62, 5). It was he, who made the sun to shine (VIII, 3, 6), and mount in the sky (I, 7, 3), or prepared a path for the sun (X, 111, 3), or found the sun in ‘the darkness in which he resided’ (III, 39, 5). It is evident from these passages that Indra is the winner of light and the sun, and this character of his was well understood by scholars, for Indra as *apavaryan*, or the recoverer (fr. *apa-vṛi*) of light, is compared by Max Muller with Apollon in the Greek mythology. But scholars have found it difficult to explain why this character of Indra should be mentioned in conjunction with other exploits, such as the conquest of Vritra and the liberation of the waters. In fact that is the real difficulty in the explanation of the legend either by the Storm or by the Dawn theory. Indra liberated the waters and brought about the dawn by killing Vritra,—is undoubtedly the burden of the whole story; but no explanation has yet been found by which the simultaneous recovery of light and waters could satisfactorily be accounted for. We have seen that by the Storm theory we can account for the release of waters, but not the recovery of the dawn; while if the legend is taken to represent a struggle between light and darkness, as implied by the Dawn theory, we can account for the recovery of the dawn and the sun, but not for the release of waters. Under these circumstances it is necessary to examine the nature and character of waters as described in the Vedas, before we accept or reject either or both of the above-mentioned theories.