The Morning Indra Broke Dawn's Cart

The poet was counting the deeds of Indra.

That is how his hymn works. It is a list, sung to the god's face, one deed to a verse. "Nobody is better than you," the poet begins. "Nobody is stronger. The people roll along behind you like the wheels of a cart."

Then he starts to count.

"Not even all the gods together could beat you in the fight. You made the days longer by holding back the night. You took the wheel from the Sun's own chariot, to help Kutsa in his battle. You fought the angry gods alone, and you won."

And then, in the middle of the list, come four verses about one morning.

It was the hour before sunrise, and Dawn was on her road.

Ushas, the Dawn, is the daughter of the Sky. She travels in a cart. Every morning she drives up out of the east ahead of the sun, and the poets of the Rigveda love her for it. They have a great many hymns in which she is the lady of the light, the young woman in bright clothes who wakes the birds and the cattle and sends people out to their work.

This morning was different. The poet says that Dawn lifted herself up in pride. He says one thing more, that she was planning harm.

He does not tell us what harm. He does not tell us what she was proud of. He gives the mood of the goddess and keeps her reasons to himself.

Indra saw her, and Indra struck.

The cart broke under her. The poet's word is that it was shattered, and he is not a man who wastes words. Dawn sprang down from the wreck, terrified, and ran. She did not stand and argue with the king of the gods. She fled far away, the hymn says, and her cart lay where it had fallen, broken to pieces, in the river Vipash.

"This too you did, Indra," the poet sings. "A hero's deed, a deed of strength. You struck the daughter of the Sky herself."

He does not sound sorry about it. To him this is one more proof that nothing in the three worlds can stand up to Indra, not a dragon, not an army, not even a goddess whom everybody likes.

And he does not stop to explain. The very next verse is about a river in flood that Indra held back, and the one after that is about the demon Shushna and his hoard. The fortresses of Shambara follow, and the hundred stone forts broken for King Divodasa. The list rolls on, and the broken cart is left behind in the river.

What happened to Dawn?

She came back, of course. The same book of the Rigveda holds hymns to her, and in them she is on the eastern road again the next morning, as bright as ever. The poets there call her the giver of delight and the mother of the cows, and they ask her cheerfully whether the cart she is driving today is an old one or a new one.

Three more poets of the Rigveda mention that morning. None of them tells the whole story. Each one keeps a piece.

The poet of the second book is singing about what Indra did when he was full of Soma. Every verse ends the same way, "These things Indra did in the Soma's rapture." He propped up the sky where there was nothing to hold it. He bored channels for the rivers. He made a stream flow uphill.

"And he crushed the cart of Ushas with his thunderbolt," the poet sings. "He tore through her slow team with his own swift horses."

So this poet saw a thunderbolt, and something like a race. Dawn's animals were slow that morning, and Indra's were fast.

A poet of the tenth book saw it another way. In his hymn the Sun has stopped in the middle of the sky and unyoked his horses, and Indra is sharpening his weapons for a fight with a demon. Dawn is on the road when the bolt comes out.

"Bright Ushas was afraid of Indra's bolt," he sings. "She went on her way, and left her cart there."

In this telling nobody says that the blow landed. Dawn takes one look at the weapon, steps down, and walks on without her cart.

The third poet does not tell the story at all. He only uses it. He is praising another of Indra's fights, and he says the enemy went down "as when Indra struck down the cart of Ushas". By his time, it seems, every listener knew what that meant.

There is one more line worth setting beside these. It comes from a hymn to Dawn herself, and it is a warning from someone who is fond of her.

"Shine out, daughter of the Sky. Do not be slow about your work. Do not let the Sun burn you with his heat, as he would a thief."

A Dawn who lingers, that poet thought, is a Dawn in danger.