वेदों की प्राचीनता एवं काल-निर्णय / ओरायन (लोकमान्य बाल गंगाधर तिलक - खगोलीय वैदिक शोध)

field at present. But it is so manifestly inadequate that if a
better theory could be found which will explain most of, if not
all, the incidents in the legend, no one would hesitate to aban-
don the Storm theory in favour of the latter.
It is, in my opinion, a mistake to suppose that the strug-
gle between Indra and Vritra originally represented the con-
flict 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 Brâhmaṇa (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 Ṛig-Veda, where, without any reference to the
Vṛitra fight, Indra is said to have found the light (III, 34, 4;
VIII, 15, 5; X, 43, 4) in the darkness (I, 100, 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 pass-
ages 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 Vṛitra 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
Vṛitra,—is undoubtedly the burden of the whole story; but no
explanation has yet been found by which the simultaneous re-
covery of light and waters could satisfactorily be accounted