Page 407 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

192 SAMAGRA TILAK- 2 II THE ARCTIC HOME

Aditi's sons, and the tradition about the sacrificial sessions of
the Navagvas and the Dashgvas also pointed to the same
conclusion. Our case does not therefore, depend on an isolated
fact here and an isolated fact there. We have seen that the half-
year long day and night, the long dawn with its revolving
splendours, the long continuous night matched by the corres-
ponding long day and associated with a succession of ordi-
nary days and nights of varying lengths and the total annual
period of sunshine of less than twelve months are the principal
peculiar characteristics of the Polar or the Circum-Polar calendar;
and when express passages are found in the Vedas, the oldest
record of early Aryan thoughts and sentiments,~ showing that each
and every one of these characteristics was known to the Vedic
bards, who themselves lived in a region where the year was made
up of three hundred and sixty or three hundred and sixty five
days, one is irresistibly led to the conclusion that the poets of the
~ig-Veda must have known these facts by tradition and that their
ancestors must have lived in regions where such phenomena were
possible. It is not to be expected that the evidence on each and
every one of these points will be equally conclusive, especially
as we are dealing with facts which existed thousands of years ago.
But if we bear in mind that the facts are astronomically connected
in such a way that if one of them is firmly established all the others
follow from it as a matter of course, the cumulative effect of the
evidence discussed in the previous chapters cannot fail to be
convincing. It is true that many of the passages, quoted in support
of the Arctic theory, are interpreted, in the way I have done, for
the first time; but I have already pointed out that this is due to
the fact that the real key to the interpretation of these passages
was discovered only during the last 30 or 40 years. Yaska and
Sayap.a knew nothing definite about the circum-polar or the Arctic
regions and when a Vedic passage was found not to yield a sense
intelligible to them, they either contented themselves with barely
explaining the verbal texture of the passage, or distorted it to suit
their own ideas. Western scholars have corrected some of these
mistakes, but as the possibility of an Arctic home in pre-glacial
times was not admitted 30 or 40 years back, the most explicit
references, whether in the Avesta or the ~ig-Veda, to a primeval
home in the extreme north, have been either altogether ignored,
or somehow or other explained away, eve~ by Western scholars.