One does more justice to the way of thinking of the poets of the Rgveda and the nature of this text if one places the term krsnä tvac in RV 1.130.8 i… - Maria Schetelich

It is a victory of light, of the sun, of wide space over darkness, narrowness or distress, which is equated or compared with the victory of day over night. Light, sunbeams or fire are also the means by which Indra overcomes evil and its representations, and again the boundary between the human and the supernatural sphere is quite fluid. The ancient symbolism of black and white also serves to depict the all-dominating polarity of good and evil, light and darkness. Bright, golden, shiny, white is everything that symbolizes light, that brings it to power or is otherwise connected to it: the sun, the soma drops, the day, Indra's dun horses, etc. m. Bright, shining, white is accordingly the color of those on whose side and for whose benefit Indra fights .

Here, too, light is the antithesis to darkness. Soma, after all, is often called ‘shining golden, white, bright, goldencoloured {sukla- varnay or ‘bringer of light’.

Considering context and construction of the verses the term cited ‘dark skin’ should not merely be taken as a reference to the complexion of certain non-vedic people but as a quantity of its own, a symbolic expression for the darkness, the embodiment of the forces impairing the well-being of the Aryan tribes. As such, it fits into a complex of mythological motifs centered on the polarity of evil and good which plays an important role in the world-view of the Vedic tribes. Criterion for the qualification of a phenomenon as good was the relation to .society, religion and cult of the Vedic Aryan. As good the Rgvedic hymns classify the light, bright, goldencolourcd, the sun, heaven and large space, well-being and security, the right (religio-rnoral) norms and behaviour [suvrala), the arya or aryavarna Indra. Soma and their adoration by sacrificing to them, to the sphere of evil belong darkness, the night, the black colour, the unbelieving and non-sacrificing (to Indra and Soma) people, the dilsa, the dasyu, a bad or no vrata at all {apa- anya or avrata), the ‘black skin’, the depth, danger, narrowness. It was already in the middle of the former century that Christian Lassen qualified the opposition of arya and dasyu or dasa as a contrast between different religions expressed by the age-old symbolism of black opposed to white and not as a contrast of dark- complexioned to white coloured men.