THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT
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alighting now in one place and now in another. The very absurdity of this story suggests that it must have had a different significance once. The history of a single word clears up the mystery. The Sanskrit word parvata consists of two elements — parva> ‘a knot’ or ‘ section’ and ta , a suffix signi- fying possession. The word thus means anything that is in sections and is an appropriate designation for a line of clouds or a range of hills. As a matter of fact we find the word used in both these senses in the Rgveda. The term was probably originally applied to a class of objects that answered a certain description; but in course of time became narrowed down to its present meaning of ‘mountain’; as, for example, has been the case with the English word ‘deer’ which once meant ‘wild animal’ but is now applied to one particular class of animals. From this explanation, it is obvious that what the story once said of Indra and clouds has gradually come to be erroneously associated with Indra and mountains. Indra is the Vedic god of rain who cleaves the clouds and releases the water. What wonder if the fancy of the Vedic Indians represented the scudding clouds as flying from Indra and their ultimate stoppage as due to the clipping of their wings. Thus by comparing the meanings of parvata in two different periods in the history of the language we discover that the current form of the story is due to a discrepancy of interpret- ation.
These two illustrations will, I trust, make clear what I mean by saying that you should look at everything you study in the light of its history. The traditional explanation in both these cases is unconvincing and therefore arouses our curiosity and leads us to investigation. But often, even when our enquiry is not historical, we get plausible explanations but we must be careful not to take them for correct explanations, for we shall not know where they are deficient until we resort to historical analysis. We should never feel satisfied with the explanation of single stages but push it back as far as we can, for we cannot know the part aright until we have known the whole.
In a second direction also the deficiency of the old scholarship has to be made good by modern study. By the very nature of the conditions under which the old Pandit lived, he was unable to bring to bear upon his study a wide knowledge
