Page 288 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

THE VEDIC DAWNS 75

sunrise, and this difficulty seems to have been experienced even
by Western scholars. Thus Prof. Ludwig materially adopts Saya~a's
view and interprets the verse to mean that the splendours of the
dawn were numerous, and that they appear either before sunrise,
or, if prachinam be differently interpreted' in the east' at the rising
of the sun. Roth and Grassmann seem to interpret prachinam
in the same way. Griffith translates ahdni by' mornings' and prllch£-
nam by 'aforetime.' His rendering of the verse runs thus:-" Great
is, in truth, the number of the mornings, which were aforetime at
the sun's uprising; since thou, 0 Dawn, hast been beheld repair-
ing as to thy love, as one no more to leave him. " But Griffith
does not explain what he understands by the expression, " a
number of mornings which were aforetime at the sun's up-
rising''
The case is, therefore, reduced to this. The word ahan, of
which ahdni (days) is a plural form, can be ordinarily interpreted
to mean ( 1 ) a period of time between sunrise and sunset ; ( 2 )
a nycthemeron, as when we speak of 360 days of the year; or ( 3 )
a measure of time to mark a period of 24 hours, irrespective of the
fact whether the sun is above or below the horizon, as when we
speak of the long Arctic night of 30 days. Are we then to aban-
don all these meanings, and understand ahani to mean ' splend-
ours ' in the verse under consideration ? The only difficulty is to
account for the interval of many days between the appearance
of the banner of the Dawn on the horizon and the emergence of
the sun's orb over it; and this difficulty vanishes if the description
be taken to refer to the dawn in the Polar or Circum-Polar regions.
That is the real key to the meaning of this and similar other pass-
ages which will be noted hereafter; and in its absence a number of
artificial devices have been made use of to make these passages
somehow intelligible to us. But now nothing of the kind is necess-
ary. As regards the word 'days' it has been observed that we often
speak a' night of several days', or a 'night of several months' when
describing the Polar phenomena. In expressions like these the
word 'day' or 'month' simply denotes a measure of time equivalent
to 'twenty-four hours' or 'thirty days', and there is nothing
unusual in the exclamation of the ~ig-Vedic poet that " many were
the days between the first beams of the dawn and actual sunrise. "
We have also seen that, at the Pole, it is quite possible to mark
the periods of twenty-four hours by the rotations of the celestial