Page 484 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

VEDIC MYTHS-THE MATUTINAL DEITIES 265
stalest the wheel of Surya and didst destroy calamities (or, ace ..
ording to Oldenberg, manifest manly works ). " The passage thus
becomes intelligible, and we are not required to invent a new
meaning for dasha and make lndra bite his enemy on the battle-
field. If we compare the phrase dasha prapitve with ahnah prapitve
occurring in IV, 16, 12, and bear in mind the fact that· both are
used in connection with the legendary fight with Shu~h:pa we are
naturally led to suppose that dasha prapitve denotes, in all
probability, the time of the contest, as ahna!J prapitve does in
the other passage, and that dasha prapitve must be taken as
equivalent to dashanam prapitve and translated to mean " On
the completion of the ten, " which can be done 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 ahna!J prapitve may suggest " days. " but the fight with
Shu~h:pa 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 dashiinam when the compound
is dissolved ) as equivalent to ten months in the same way as the
numeral dvadashasya is interpreted to mean " of the twelfth
month," or dvddashasya masasya in VII, 103, 9. The passage
thus denotes the exact time when the wheel of the sun, or the solar
orb, was stolen by lndra and 'utilised 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 Roman year, or at the close of
the sacrificial session of the Dashagvas who with lndra 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 meaning of similar
other passages relating to the fight of Shu~h:pa, and is far more
rational than the current meaning which makes lndra bite his
enemy in a rustic and unprecedented manner. It is the Pada
text that is responsible for the present unnatural meaning; for
if it had not split up the phrase dasha and prapitve its correct
meaning might not have become so obscure as at present. But
the Pada text is not infallible; and even Yaska and Saya:pa have
adopted amendments in certain cases ( cf. I, 105, 18; X, 19, 1;
and Nir. V, 21; VI, 28 ), and the same thing has been done rather
more freely by Western scholars. We are not therefore, following