Hardev Singh ji,
I refer to page 23-24 of the book that interprets the "Indra-Vrtra myth". It furthers the Aryan invasion myth that has long been trashed.
Indra as supposedly the God of the invading Aryans ho clashed with the native inhabitants in the sapth sinndhu region.
The "Aryas", the supposed new arrivals are held to be "good" and the natives they are fighting "bad".
It is a gross misrepresentation of the veda that it as a fight between an arriving tribe and the established tribe.
The new theory is the "Out of India" theory. Aryans went out of India to settle in Europe.
AccordingtoSriAurobindo,IndraisthelordofdivinemindandVrtrarepresentsvarietiesofforces,dedicatedtohoardingthedynamicalenergiesorwaters,concealingknowledgefromthehumansandingeneralthwartingtheidealsof
thehumanbeings.HumanbeingswhoareopentoVrtraforcedevelopthequalitiessuchascoveringtheknowledge,hoardingetc.AtthisstageIndra,theintelligence,discriminatesandseestheforceswhichareadversetotheyogicjourney.
The Veda is for those who are driven by desire, who seek after enjoyment, who are content to swim in the unceasing currents of Nature, to rise and fall with its restless waves. But for those who would give up all desire and
would turn away from the chase of worldly or heavenly pleasures, who would rise above the flux of Nature to the immutable truth of Being, for them is the Vedanta. But the sacrificial works of the Veda can be a step in the attaining of the true knowledge, for
performed without desire for their fruits they purify the doer and he becomes a fit vessel for the knowledge. This is the traditional opinion on the Veda which had got slowly crystallised and ultimately prevailed, but there must have been, and we know that
there were, other trends of opinion in the long course of India's cultural history.
Western scholars entered into the field of Vedic interpretation about a century ago and have kept on labouring steadily at it. They find in it an extremely interesting picture of the mind of humanity in its childhood. Powers
and phenomena of Nature are personified, deified and worshipped through magical rites for the sake of food and rain, cows and horses, sons and servants, long life, triumph over enemies, and wealth of all kinds. Fire and Air Agni and Vayu; storm winds and
the mysterious Power that bursts open the clouds with the lightning-shaft and makes them rain Maruts and Indra; the Dawn and the Sun Ushas and Surya; the Lords of the Day and the Night Mitra and Varuna such and suchlike are the gods of the Vedic worshipper.
It happened that each of these gods in his turn for worship was being raised to the rank of supremacy and also one god was being identified with another for lack of any very distinctive features amongst themselves. There was thus a sort of perplexed tendency
towards monotheism, which civilised religions of other countries reached through gradual evolution. But a peculiarly Indian development, we are made to understand, seems to have intervened with the identification of Aditi, mother of the gods, with the whole
of Nature and we have as a result the pantheism of the Vedanta. The Vedic religion itself occupies a position somewhere between primitive anthropomorphism and the polytheism of the Greek and Roman mythologies.
What may be called the nature aspect of the Vedic gods was no new thing to Indian tradition. "Who is Vritra?" asks Yaska1 and answers, "The Nairuktas say it is the cloud and the Aitihasikas
that he is an Asura, son of Twashtri". And he goes on to say that the battle between Indra and Vritra is only a figurative description of the intermingling of the two elements Water and Light, from which action rain is produced. And to the western scholars
Vritra is either the nightly darkness destroyed by Indra the sun in his daily rising on the eastern horizon, or he is the primeval darkness of chaos victoriously conquered on the first morning of creation, or he is the demon of drought or even of eclipse,
or, represented by that asterism of the zodiac in which the sun loses his strength, he stands for the forces of winter adverse to life. The traditional interpreters regarded the Nature aspect of the gods as the outer and part expression of their divine personalities.
They did not speculate on the problem as to how man came to conceive them. But to the western scholars and those who follow in their wake the Veda is interesting as revealing the very birth of the gods, as showing how early man created them from the powers
and phenomena of Nature.
But when Madhucchandas says that the rapture of Indra is indeed cow-giving "go-da id revato madah" one is apt to take it as a plain statement of fact, that the Rishi believed that the offering of the Soma-wine in the sacrific
exhilarated Indra to the point of expelling all stinginess from him and that somehow he then saw to it that cows accrued to the sacrificer. This may have been the idea of the ordinary worshipper even in the Vedic times; but to those who entered into the heart
of the Vedic worship it conveyed a different meaning altogether. To them the gift of Indra was the gift of Light, of the inner Light that illumines the mind. The image of the physical cow was merely a symbol for the inner Light. And moreover the word 'gau'
conveyed the sense of light also as one of its various meanings. In the particular stage of language development which we observe in the Veda the word meant both cow and light, suggested to the mind both senses with equal readiness and naturalness. This may
appear to us to be no more than an instance of the rhetorical figure of slesa or double entendre with which we are so familiar in classical Sanskrit, but there is a great difference. However easily classical Sanskrit may lend itself to the use of this figure,
it is always by an artificial device of style that a word is made to yield more than one meaning. But Vedic Sanskrit appears to preserve something of the original character of language when words have not yet been rigidly fixed into conventional signs denoting
a unique and precisely marked-off significance, but have a freedom of movement over a wide and connected range of meanings all of which are naturally suggested by their etymology and it is only the intention of the speaker as expressed by the context that
decides which one of its several meanings a word conveys in a particular place. Thus, the Vedic use of the word 'gau' so as to give both the meanings of cow and light is no artificial figure of double entendre, but a natural consequence of the peculiar character
of the Vedic speech. A further extension of this method by which a word is made to convey more than one meaning is illustrated by the use of the word 'asva'. Coming from a root which means, among other things, to possess, to enjoy, to reach, to attain, it
signifies not only a horse, but, by the packing of all these different senses into one idea so as to derive a cumulative effect, it is also made to stand as a designation of vital force the Vedic Steed of Life. Influenced by this peculiar character of the
language the Vedic Rishis are naturally led into a symbolic diction and they use words like 'gait and 'asva' to convey under cover of their external physical meaning an inner psychological conception.