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

VEDIC MYTHS—THE MATUTINAL DEITIES. 325
to invent a new meaning for dasha and make Indra bite his
enemy on the battle-field. If we compare the phrase dasha-
prapitve with ahnaḥ prapitve occurring in IV, 16, 12, and bear
in mind the fact that both are used in connection with the
legendary fight with Shuṣhṇa, we are naturally led to suppose
that dasha-prapitve denotes, in all probability, the time of the
contest, as ahnaḥ prapitve does in the other passage, and that
dasha prapitve must be taken as equivalent to dashânâm prapitve
and translated to mean “On the completion of the ten,” which
can be done only by taking dasha-prapitve as a compound word.
The grammatical construction being thus determined, the only
question that remains is to decide whether dasha (ten) means
ten days or ten months. A comparison with ahnaḥ prapitve may
suggest “days,” but the fight with Shuṣhṇa cannot be regarded
to have been fought every ten days. It is either annual or daily;
and we are thus led to interpret dasha in the compound dasha-
prapitve (or dashânâm when the compound is dissolved) as
equivalent to ten months in the same way as the numeral
dvâdashasya is interpreted to mean “of the twelfth month,” or
dvâdashasya mâsasya in VII, 103, 9. The passage thus denotes
the exact time when the wheel of the sun, or the solar orb, was
stolen by Indra and utilized as a weapon of attack to demolish
the demons of darkness. This was done at the end of ten months,
or at the end of the old Roman year, or at the close of the
sacrificial session of the Dashagvas who with Indra are said to
have found the sun dwelling in darkness. The construction
of the passage proposed above is not only natural and
simple, but the sense it gives is in harmony with the mean-
ing of similar other passages relating to the fight of
Shuṣhṇa, and is far more rational than the current meaning
which makes Indra bite his enemy in a rustic and unpre-
cedented manner. It is the Pada text that is responsible
for the present unnatural meaning; for if it had not split