Page 561 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

3-42 SAMAGRA TILAK - 2 • THE ARCTIC HOME
rightly read and understood. In fact the task, which I set to
myself, was to find out such passages, and show how in the
absence of the true key to their meaning, they have been sub-
jected to forced construction, or ignored and neglected, by
Vedic scholars both Indian and foreign, ancient and modern.
I do not mean, however, to underrate, on that account, the
value or the importance of the labours of Indian Nairuktas
like Yaska, or commentators like Sayap.a. Without their aid
we should have, it is readily admitted, been able to do little in
the field of the Vedic interpretation; and I am fully aware of
the service they have rendered to this cause. There is no ques-
tion that they have done their best in elucidating the meaning
of our sacred books; and their claims on the grateful remembr-
ance of their services by future generations of scholars will ever
remain unchallenged. But if the Vedas are really the oldest
records of our race, who can deny that in the light of the
advancing knowledge regarding primitive humanity, we may
still discover in these ancient records facts and statements which
may have escaped the attention of older scholars owing
to the imperfect nature, in their days, of those sciences which
are calculated to throw further light on the habits and environ-
ments of the oldest ancestors of our race ? There is, therefore,
nothing strange if some of the passages in the ~ig-Veda and
the A vesta disclose to us ideas which the ancient commentators
could not and did not perceive in them; and I would request
the reader to bear this in mind in comparing the interpretations
and explanations proposed by me in the foregoing chapters
with the current interpretations of these passages by eastern
or western Vedic scholars.
But our conclusions do not rest merely on the interpreta-
tion of passages which, if rightly construed, disclose climatic
characteristics peculiar to the Arctic regions; though this evi-
dence, is, by itself, sufficient to prove our hypothesis. We have
seen that in the sacrificial literature of the Vedic people as well
as in their mythology there are many indications which
point to the same conclusion; and these are fully corroborated
by the ancient traditions and legends in the Avesta and also
by the mythologies of the European branches of the Aryan
race. A sacrificial session of ten months held by the Dasha-
gvas, or an annual sattra of the same duration, compared with