The Author and the Work
Ramchandra Narayan Dandekar (1909–2001) spent four decades as one of the most rigorous Indologists working in independent India, stationed chiefly at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune. Vedic Mythological Tracts is the first volume of his Select Writings, published in 1979 to mark his seventieth birthday. It collects ten papers written between roughly 1939 and 1977, reproduced in chronological order with minimal revision. The span of those decades shows: Dandekar’s early essays work inside the conventions of European Vedic philology, his middle essays push hard against them, and his late appendix delivers a comprehensive methodological audit of the entire field of comparative Indo-European mythology.
The book covers nine Vedic deities — Savitr, Varuna, Viṣṇu, Pūṣan, Yama, Indra, Rudra, Agni, and Vasiṣṭha — plus a closing appendix on Indo-Europeanism. Each essay is self-contained, but a single thread runs through all of them: Dandekar’s doctrine of evolutionary mythology. That doctrine is the key to reading the whole book.
The Master Argument: Evolutionary Mythology
Dandekar’s foundational claim, stated most explicitly in the Indra and Rudra essays but operative everywhere, is that Vedic mythology is not a static system. The Ṛgveda did not emerge fully formed. Each god’s personality is a palimpsest — layers deposited at different stages of Aryan cultural history, some of them contradicting each other. When scholars encounter inconsistency in a god’s character, the standard move is to dismiss it as poetic license or ritualistic confusion. Dandekar refuses this. For him, contradiction is data. It marks the seam where an older conception was revised, absorbed, or overlaid by a newer one.
The method has two practical tools. First, statistical analysis of hymn distribution — which Maṇḍala concentrates a god’s references, which clans are the custodians of which cult. Second, etymological and comparative-linguistic evidence deployed not as a trump card but as a check on, or against, other hypotheses. When etymology and ritual evidence diverge, Dandekar weighs both rather than mechanically privileging one.
This makes the book unusual in its era. Dandekar is neither a pure Max Müller solar mythologist nor a pure Oldenberg ritualist. He takes from both and criticizes both.
The Essays, One by One
1. New Light on the Vedic God Savitr
The essay opens the collection and immediately demonstrates Dandekar’s method at its most patient. Savitr is a notoriously slippery deity — scholars had argued for decades whether he is simply the sun-god, a personification of the abstract principle of stimulation, or something else entirely.
Dandekar dispatches Oldenberg’s view that Savitr is purely an abstract, late, non-Indo-European deity by showing that abstraction and solar character appear in the same hymns, sometimes the same verses. The dichotomy is false. He then dismantles Hillebrandt’s solar identification by pointing to ritual evidence — Savitr is associated with pāśas (fetters), which are overwhelmingly a feature of the Varuṇa-mythology, not solar mythology. The Taittirīya-Saṃhitā passage on this is particularly striking.
Dandekar’s own hypothesis: Savitr is derived from the root su (to stimulate, to set in motion) and originally represented the divine principle of universal motion — the impulse behind all cosmic and natural movement. At a later stage, this abstract mover was partially identified with the visible sun as the most obvious mover in the sky. Neither the abstract nor the solar layer is “original” — one became the other under the pressure of evolving religious thought. The famous Gāyatrī mantra (RV III.62.10), which invokes Savitr’s “stimulus” to direct the mind, makes fullest sense only against this backdrop: it is not solar worship but the invocation of a deeper animating power that the sun happens to manifest.
2. Asura Varuṇa
This is one of the two longest and most consequential essays in the volume. Dandekar’s central argument is philological and far-reaching: Varuṇa is fundamentally an asura — not in the later Purāṇic sense of demon, but in the original Vedic sense of lord of cosmic power, a being possessing the sovereign force called maya (not illusion in the Vedāntic sense, but the power to bind and order the cosmos). The asura theology, Dandekar argues, predates the Indra-centred mythology of the Ṛgveda’s later stratum and represents a phase when Varuṇa and his circle held supreme place in the Aryan pantheon.
The linguistic case rests on connecting Varuṇa with the Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to bind” (compare Avestan var, to cover or enclose). Varuṇa is the Binder — not in a punitive sense primarily, but cosmologically. Ṛta, the cosmic order, is Varuṇa’s binding law. Aditi (the mother of the Ādityas, Varuṇa’s entourage) means the Unbound, and the Ādityas are “the free ones” precisely because they are unbound by the world-sovereign Varuṇa himself. Mitra means “the Binder” in a contractual sense. Varūtri (protectress) and vrata (ordinance, rule of conduct) fit the same cluster. The whole Mitra-Varuṇa theology coheres around the concept of cosmic binding.
Dandekar reinforces this with the Boghazköi inscription (14th century BC), where both Varuṇa and Mitra appear — confirming their extreme antiquity and their collective rather than individual character even in the proto-Aryan period.
This essay also contains one of the book’s sharpest polemical passages: the demolition of Paul Thieme’s hypothesis that Mitra simply means “Contract” and Varuṇa simply means “True-Speech.” Dandekar shows this is philologically dubious (the IE root ver, “to speak,” does not generate u-themes), ritually unsupported, and philosophically thin — reducing profound cosmic theology to sociological abstraction.
3. Viṣṇu in the Veda
The Viṣṇu essay, one of Dandekar’s earlier pieces, addresses the puzzle of how a relatively minor Vedic deity becomes, in Purāṇic Hinduism, one of the supreme gods. The Ṛgveda gives Viṣṇu only a handful of dedicated hymns. He is typically described as striding across the universe in three steps — a mytheme Dandekar connects to his original character as a solar bird-deity, the form of vi (from the root meaning “to fly”) from which the name derives.
Dandekar traces a slow but consistent accretion: Viṣṇu’s association with sacrifice (the Brāhmaṇas identify him with the sacrificial act itself), his deepening alliance with Indra, and his gradual absorption of solar and cosmic attributes that had once belonged to other gods. The evolutionary trajectory shows clearly — Viṣṇu’s Vedic personality is not yet the Nārāyaṇa of the Epics, but the seeds are systematically identifiable.
4. Pūṣan, the Pastoral God of the Veda
Pūṣan is the most enigmatic deity in the collection. He appears 120 times in the Ṛgveda, five of his eight complete hymns concentrated in the sixth Maṇḍala — the family book of the Bharadvājas. Dandekar takes this statistical clustering seriously: the Pūṣan-cult was a clan possession of the Bharadvajas. This means Pūṣan’s mythology carries the particular preoccupations of a pastoral, cattle-herding community.
The deity’s characteristics resist easy systematization: he is a pathfinder, a guide of travelers and the dead, a protector of livestock, a deity associated with goats rather than horses (unusual in the Vedic context), and he is notably absent from the Soma ceremonies. He has no teeth. Dandekar argues these features — strange in a sky-god context — make perfect sense if Pūṣan is interpreted as the divine embodiment of the pastoral community’s most pressing concerns: safe paths, protected cattle, successful journeys, and the knowledge of roads and boundaries.
The toothlessness is characteristically Dandekar: he doesn’t paper it over. It appears in post-Vedic mythology as a consequence of Rudra’s attack at Dakṣa’s sacrifice. But the Vedic Pūṣan is toothless already — he eats mush (karambha). Dandekar reads this as a very ancient feature, possibly connecting Pūṣan to a pre-Vedic deity absorbed into the Aryan pantheon, one who was from the outset outside the sacrificial Soma circuit.
5. Yama in the Veda
The Yama essay is a sustained argument against taking the god’s apparent simplicity at face value. Yama in the Ṛgveda seems transparent: he is the first mortal who died and thereby became king of the dead, ruling over a pleasant afterworld where the righteous gather and drink Soma. Dandekar shows this tidy picture conceals an earlier, more complex stratum.
The key evidence: Yama is never explicitly called a god in the Ṛgveda, yet he is also never called a human. He is distinguished from the pitṛs (ancestors), over whom he nevertheless rules. The famous dialogue hymn between Yama and Yamī (RV X.10) — in which the sister Yamī solicits union with her twin brother Yama, who refuses — preserves a mythological residue that Dandekar connects to the IE myth of the primal twin pair. (Compare the Iranian Yima, the Norse Ymir.) Originally, Yama and Yamī together may have represented the primal couple whose separation or death brought mortality into the world. The Vedic Yama has been domesticated — moralized into a just king — and the darker, more primeval dimension of the twin myth has been suppressed.
Dandekar also makes a careful argument that Yama’s connection with the south (the direction of the dead) and his role as “finder of the hidden path” place him in a very ancient stratum of funerary ideology, one that predates the Indra-centred warrior mythology.
6. Vṛtrahā Indra
At nearly 150,000 characters, the Indra essay is the longest in the book and the most ambitious. Its central claim is the most provocative: Indra was originally a human hero.
Dandekar marshals a detailed case. The Vedic poets describe Indra with a degree of physical, psychological, and moral concreteness found in no other deity — his enormous belly, his notorious fondness for Soma, his sexual appetite, his bouts of cowardice and bravado, his intimate friendship with the poet-seers. This is not anthropomorphism of the kind applied to Varuṇa or Mitra; it is the portraiture of a specific man. The human Indra, Dandekar argues, was a proto-Aryan tribal war-leader of exceptional power, probably active during the period of the proto-Aryan settlement in the region of Balkh (Bactria). His victories against the Vṛtra (the obstructor, possibly a historical enemy confederation) were so legendary that after his death he was elevated to the status of national war-god and eventually, by the time the Ṛgveda was composed, to the supreme deity of the hieratic pantheon.
The naturalistic reading — Vṛtra as drought and Indra as the storm that breaks it — is then a second layer superimposed on the historical memory. Dandekar does not dismiss the naturalistic reading; he subordinates it chronologically. The cosmic drama of Indra releasing the waters was grafted onto a pre-existing heroic legend.
This thesis connects to a broader claim about the evolution of Vedic religion: the transition from the Varuṇa-dominated asura phase (cosmic order, binding, moral sovereignty) to the Indra-dominated warrior phase (physical force, battle, liberation through strength) represents a cultural and possibly historical shift in the Aryan community — from a priestly-pastoral to a warrior-dominant social order. Vedic mythology records that transition.
The Vṛtra myth itself is analyzed in granular detail: Dandekar works through every variant of the combat — the role of Soma, the involvement of the Maruts, the relationship with Vāyu, the figures of Tvaṣṭṛ and Viśvarūpa, the separate Namucī episode. Each variant adds a stratum. The finished picture is not a single myth but a geological formation.
7. Rudra in the Veda
The Rudra essay is arguably the most intellectually daring in the collection, and it builds directly on the Indra and Yama essays. Dandekar’s argument: Rudra is not originally Vedic at all. He is a non-Aryan, possibly Dravidian, deity who was forcibly incorporated into the Vedic pantheon under the pressure of cultural contact and demographic necessity.
The evidence is assembled on multiple fronts. In the Ṛgveda, Rudra is kept at arm’s length. The hymns to him are few, cautious, and characteristically defensive in tone — the worshipper pleads with Rudra to not harm his household, his cattle, his children. This distancing language has no parallel in hymns to the canonical Vedic gods. The post-Ṛgvedic literature intensifies the separation: the Rudra of the Atharvaveda and Yajurveda roams with hosts of evil spirits, dwells at crossroads, is associated with the north (not the south, which is the death direction — an anomaly that Dandekar flags), and is propitiated with svāhā rather than svadhā, the formula reserved for the ancestors.
Two distinct Rudras co-exist in Vedic literature — the heavenly Rudra of the Ṛgveda with his Marut-hosts, and the earthly, chthonic Rudra of later texts with his demonic entourage. This split, Dandekar argues, reflects the historical process of incorporation: the Vedic poet-priests accepted an alien deity under social and political compulsion (the communities who worshipped him were too important to exclude), but they could not fully harmonize him with their theology, hence the persistent inconsistencies.
Rudra’s later transformation into Śiva — the supreme god of the Śaiva tradition — is then comprehensible as the eventual vindication of a suppressed tradition. The non-Aryan Rudra, long marginalized within Vedic orthodoxy, ultimately displaces the Vedic order itself.
The essay also addresses Rudra’s dual character as destroyer and healer (lord of medicines, Paśupati, lord of animals), connecting this to patterns in comparative religion where gods of death in hunting societies were simultaneously lords of regeneration and fertility.
8. Some Aspects of the Agni-Mythology in the Veda
Derived from two lectures delivered at Baroda in 1962, the Agni essay is more discursive than its predecessors but covers a remarkable amount of ground. Agni presents a different problem from the other gods: rather than obscurity, he suffers from over-familiarity. He is the most immediately practical of Vedic gods — the sacrificial fire, the intermediary between humans and gods — and this practicality has led scholars to treat him as transparent. Dandekar finds him anything but.
The essay focuses on three issues. First, the three forms of Agni: terrestrial (the sacrificial fire), aerial (lightning), and celestial (the sun). This tripartition is not arbitrary — it maps onto three distinct mythological personages who are later identified with Agni: Apāṃ Napāt (the lightning form, “Son of the Waters”), Trita Āptya, and Agni himself. Dandekar traces how the identification of these separate fire-divinities proceeds through the Ṛgvedic period.
Second, the figure of Mātariśvan — the divine being who brings fire to humanity, a Vedic analogue of Prometheus. Dandekar shows that Mātariśvan is not simply another name for Agni but a distinct figure representing the first transmission of fire-knowledge, possibly preserving a memory of actual cultural diffusion.
Third, the relationship between Agni’s mythology and the Soma ritual. Agni is the hotr, the priest who invites the gods. His simultaneous roles as son of gods, father of gods, and envoy (dūta) between earth and heaven give him a structurally paradoxical position that Dandekar reads as evidence of very long mythological sedimentation — the god has been the focal point of too many different ritual contexts over too long a period to possess a single coherent personality.
9. A Vedic God and a Vedic Seer: Varuṇa and Vasiṣṭha
This two-part piece examines Varuṇa in his mature theological character (developing further the Asura Varuṇa essay) and then Vasiṣṭha, the seer of the seventh Maṇḍala. The Varuṇa section is largely a polemic against Thieme’s contractual interpretation, developed in greater textual detail than the earlier essay. Dandekar demonstrates that the vratas associated with Varuṇa are not mere verbal vows but cosmic ordinances — rules of being that sustain the world-order. The section on Vasiṣṭha is the most biographical writing in the book, tracing the family’s role across Vedic literature and arguing that the Vasiṣṭha-Viśvāmitra rivalry preserved in legend likely reflects an actual historical conflict between two priestly lineages competing for royal patronage — an Indological equivalent of the Wars of the Roses fought in hymns.
10. Appendix: Indo-Europeanism and Vedic Mythology
Written for a symposium in Dushanbe in 1977, this is the book’s most explicitly methodological piece, and it functions as a retrospective on the entire enterprise of comparative mythology as practiced for 130 years.
Dandekar traces the arc from Adalbert Kuhn and Max Müller’s enthusiastic etymological equations (Sarameyau = Hermeias; Saraṇyu = Erinys; Dyaus Pitā = Zeus Pater = Jupiter) through the corrections of Bergaigne, Oldenberg, and Hillebrandt, who insisted Vedic mythology must be read primarily as an Indian document, through the twentieth century revival of structuralist comparative mythology culminating in Georges Dumézil.
The treatment of Dumézil is the most substantive and the most damaging section of the appendix. Dandekar takes Dumézil’s tripartite functional theory — the claim that IE society and pantheon were organized around three functions (priest-sovereignty, warrior, fertility-producer) and that this structure is uniquely IE — and systematically challenges it. The criticisms are specific: the Vedic textual evidence does not support the contrast between a calm sacerdotal Mitra and a violent warlike Varuṇa that Dumézil asserts. One searches the Ṛgveda in vain for this marked contrast. The identification of Indra as the warrior-function representative fails to account for Indra’s overwhelming dominance of the corpus — a dominance Dumézil cannot adequately explain within his scheme. The assignment of Viṣṇu to correspond to Scandinavian Vidarr rests on a derivation of Viṣṇu from the preposition vi (separation) when the correct etymology connects it to the root vi (to fly), pointing to Viṣṇu’s original bird-form.
More fundamentally, Dandekar questions whether tripartition is uniquely Indo-European. Brough’s evidence from ancient Jewish history shows independent tripartite social divisions. Popular literature globally tends toward threefold characterization. Dumézil’s theory, Dandekar concludes, is structurally elegant and locally illuminating but cannot bear the weight of universal IE mythological explanation it is asked to carry.
The appendix closes with a survey of Soviet scholars’ contributions — Toporov, Elizarenkova, Ivanov — who brought Slavonic and Baltic comparative evidence to bear on Vedic mythology. Dandekar finds their work on the storm-god mythologeme (Vedic Vṛtra-Vala / Slavonic Veles) and the typological comparison of Uṣas with Lettish Usiṇš genuinely productive, less encumbered by the ideological weight of Dumézil’s grand scheme.
What the Book Is Actually Doing
Dandekar wrote these essays over four decades, but they cohere around three convictions.
First: The Ṛgveda preserves multiple overlapping mythological strata corresponding to distinct phases of Aryan cultural history. The task of Vedic mythology scholarship is to identify those strata, not to paper over the contradictions they generate. This is what “evolutionary mythology” means: not that mythology progresses toward something better, but that it grows by accretion, preserving older layers beneath newer ones.
Second: The Varuṇa-asura theology is more ancient than the Indra-warrior theology, and understanding this corrects a century of scholarship that took the Ṛgveda as a finished system. The shift from a Varuṇa-dominated to an Indra-dominated pantheon reflects real historical and social change in the proto-Aryan and early Aryan communities.
Third: Comparative Indo-European mythology is genuinely useful but must be handled with discipline. Etymology is not sufficient evidence. Structural theories like Dumézil’s are seductive but must be tested against the actual Vedic text, which frequently refuses to cooperate. The Veda is above all an Indian document, shaped by Indian ritual, Indian ecology, and Indian cultural encounters — including encounters with non-Aryan communities whose deities (Rudra being the clearest case) were absorbed into the Vedic system in ways that left permanent, legible traces.
The Book’s Limitations
Vedic Mythological Tracts is a collection, not a monograph, and it shows. The Varuṇa material is spread across three different essays written at different times, creating some redundancy. The Agni essay is less tightly argued than the Indra and Rudra essays. The claim that Indra was “originally a human hero” — the most audacious thesis in the book — is argued with circumstantial energy but ultimately rests on absence of evidence for divinity in early strata, which is a different thing from positive evidence of historicity. Dandekar is honest about this, but the gap between the evidence and the conclusion is wider than in his other arguments.
The book also assumes familiarity with the European Indological tradition — Oldenberg, Hillebrandt, Geldner, Bergaigne — that contemporary readers may not have. Many of the arguments take their shape from positions being refuted, and without knowing those positions the refutations can seem abstract.
Why the Book Matters
Dandekar wrote at a moment when Indian scholars were beginning to assert genuine independence from the frameworks inherited from nineteenth-century European Indology. He did this not by rejecting Western scholarship wholesale but by working through it — mastering it and then finding its limits from the inside. The result is scholarship that is neither defensive nationalism nor uncritical discipleship.
The doctrine of evolutionary mythology remains useful. Wherever Vedic scholarship has stalled because a deity’s contradictory characteristics seemed irresolvable, Dandekar’s instinct — treat the contradiction as evidence of historical layering — opens the problem back up. His reading of Rudra as a non-Aryan incorporation, in particular, anticipated directions that later archaeology and archaeogenetics would make more pressing. The relationship between the Vedic Aryans and the pre-existing inhabitants of the subcontinent — their cultural exchanges, conflicts, and mutual absorptions — is a question that grows more, not less, important with time. Dandekar was working on it in 1950.