Page 289 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

76 SAMAGRA TILAK - 2 • THE ARCTIC HOME

sphere or the circum-polar stars, and these could be or rather
must have been termed 'days' by the inhabitants of the place. In
the first chapter of the Old Testamenl we were told that God
created the heaven and the earth and also light " on the first
day, " while the sun was created on the fourth " to divide the day
from the night and to rule the day. " Here the word' day' is used
to denote a period of time even before the sun was created; and
a fortiori, there can be no impropriety in using it to denote a
period of time before sunrise. We need not, therefore, affect a
hypercritical spirit in examining the Vedic expression in question.
If Sayapa did it, it was because he did not know as much about
the Polar regions as we now do. We have no such excuse and
must, therefore, accept the meaning which follows from the
natural construction and reading of the sentence.

It is therefore clear that the verse in question ( VII, 76, 3 )
expressly describes a dawn continuously lasting for many days,
which is possible only in the Arctic regions. I have discussed the
passage at so much length because the history of its interpretation
clearly shows how certain passages in the Rig-Veda, which are
unintelligible to us in spite of their simple diction, have been
treated by commentators, who know not what to make of them,
if read in a natural way. But to proceed with the subject in hand,
we have seen that the Polar dawn could be divided into periods
of 24 hours owing to the circuits it makes round the horizon. In
such a case we can very well speak of these divisions as so many
day-long dawns of 24 hours each and state that so many of them
are past and so many are yet to come, as has been done in the
verse (I, II, 3, 10) discussed above. We may also say that so
many day-long dawns have passed and yet the sun has not risen,
as in II, 28, 9, a verse addressed to Varup.a wherein the poet asks
for the following boon from the deity :-
Para ri7Jd savir adha mat-krit1ini
ma aham rc'ijan anya-kritena bhojam
Avyu~h(a in nu bhi'tyaslr u~hdsa
a no jivun Varu7Ja tdsu shddhi
Literally translated this means " Remove far the debts
( sins ) incurred by me. May I not, 0 King ! be affected by others'
doings. Verily, many dawns (have) not fully (vi) flashed forth.