Who Ushas is
Ushas is the Dawn. Of all the goddesses in the Rigveda she is the one the poets sing to most. About twenty hymns are hers, and her name comes up more than three hundred times.
The poets never forget that she is the sky before sunrise, and they never stop seeing her as a person. She is a young woman who puts on bright clothes like a dancer and shows herself in the east. She is the daughter of the Sky. She is the sister of Night, and the two of them share one road and take turns on it. The Sun follows her as a young man follows a girl, and so she is called his wife or his beloved. The Ashvin twins, the riders of the early morning, are her friends.
She travels in a shining cart. Red horses pull it in some hymns, and red cows or oxen in others, and the poets call her the Mother of the Cows. When she arrives she opens the doors of the sky. Birds leave their nests. People get up and go about their business, each to his own work. The fires are lit, and the gods are brought to the morning offering.
She is asked for a great deal: cattle, horses, sons, long life, a good name. She is also asked to take bad dreams away with her when she goes.
There is a sadness in her hymns that the hymns to other gods do not have. She is always young, because she is born again every day. The people who watch her are not. One poet says that she wears away the lives of mortals, like a hunter thinning a flock of birds. Another looks at her and thinks of everyone who saw her before he did, and of those who will see her when he is gone.
She is the last of the dawns that have gone and the first of the dawns to come.
She was not always gentle, and not always safe. One strange story says that Indra, the king of the gods, once smashed her cart with his thunderbolt and left it lying in a river, while she ran.
For all the love the poets gave her, the scholar Macdonell points out that she was given no share in the Soma offering, which nearly every god received.