On Sri Aurobindo's Savitri

DR. V. K. GOKAK AND

SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI

In the Indian Express, Saturday, September 11, 1982, p. 14, Dr. V. K. Gokak was interviewed on his latest literary work, an epic in Kannada due to be published in November of the same year. Asked why, being an English scholar who had taught the language for more than three decades, he wrote his epic in Kannada, Dr. Gokak was quoted as replying:

"...I was hesitant to write in a language which I have not mastered completely. Aurobindo who had mastered the language wrote his Savitri in English and, though it contained most beautiful passages, I felt the language was a bit awkward. If a scholar like Aurobindo can have problems in English, what about an ordinary man like me?"

Dr. Gokak's humility is to be appreciated. And, if we study the four pictures of him, three small and one big, reproduced on the page, we can at once observe that he has not only admiration but also devotion for Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, for behind him there is an open photo-folder bearing the pictures of the Mother and the Master. So we cannot attribute to him any prejudiced and hostile attitude such as found in a number of poets and critics of a much smaller stature than he. A clique of so-called modern-minded writers never loses an opportunity to have a dig at Sri Aurobindo who, while fully conversant with all modern moods and techniques, refused to confine himself to them. He used the

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1 [Originally published in Mother India, January 1983, pp. 31-34.]

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English language in varied ways to express high spiritual visions and experiences in the framework of a Legend that is a Symbol in the nearly 24,000 blank-verse lines of Savitri. It is therefore very surprising that one holding no truck with this coterie should label as "a bit awkward" the English of Sri Aurobindo's epic.

The surprise becomes sheer puzzlement when we notice that Dr. Gokak's phrase is in flagrant contradiction of his own accompanying remarks. First of all, if somebody admits that he has not mastered English completely and grants that another has done so, it is anomalous for the former to adjudge the latter linguistically unskilful to a small extent everywhere. Again, how can one who is declared to have mastered the English language be said to make it move with a slightly clumsy gait throughout? Lastly, is it not odd to refer to "most beautiful passages" as being couched in a speech that is a trifle ill-adapted for use in them? Dr. Gokak has cut the ground from under his own proposition that Sri Aurobindo had "problems in English".

Surely, he has himself been "a bit awkward" in the verdict he has given. What he should have said is that he, unlike Sri Aurobindo who had mastered the English language and shown his mastery in Savitri, could not venture on this language for his own epic but stick to his native Kannada over which he had a hold such as he could not claim over English. The propriety of a statement on these lines as regards Sri Aurobindo is driven home to us not only by the context of his present unfortunate inconsistency. It is driven home also by all that he has pronounced on other occasions apropos of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri.

When we open his Introduction to that admirable compilation by him, The Golden Treasury of Indo-Anglican Poetry, published by the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, in 1970, what do we read? " 'The Book of Love' (the fifth Book of Savitri) combines the freshness and lyric bloom of Romeo and Juliet with the idealism and platonism of Shelley and

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fuses them with a philosophical and mystical profundity all his own (p. xxxi)... His Savitri is an epic which sets forth with great precision and fidelity some of the highest states of mystical awareness (p. xxxiv)... Sri Aurobindo developed many kinds of style before 1950 and the best of them are all illustrated in Savitri. The style in this epic is flexible and varies according to its context and theme and Savitri is rich in its contexts and themes. It can be 'neoclassical' or 'romantic', symbolic or modernistic. There is his narrative or dramatic style employed when he has to present a character or situation, an encounter or a debate. His reflective style is of three kinds - the balanced and antithetical style employed when the matter is familiar to the reader, the paradoxical style where he writes at a more intense level or where the thought is subtly metaphysical, and the learned style where he is out to capture in precise words the contours of a theme which is likely to be difficult or unfamiliar to the reader. Then there is the expository or analytical style employed while presenting rare perceptions and levels, introducing the structuring and ordering of the intellect into the mystical consciousness. There is also the lyric style rising into a great height of intensity and passion. Lastly, there is the allusive style. As T. S. Eliot uses literary quotation to enrich his own meaning, Sri Aurobindo uses literary allusions to throw a bridge of understanding before the reader and to communicate to him effectively the thrill and the ecstasy which he himself has experienced at a higher level of consciousness" (pp. xxxvi-vii).

In all these detailed and penetrating encomiums Dr. Gokak is not merely referring to Sri Aurobindo's manifold subject-matter, his diverse "contexts and themes". He has in mind, too, Sri Aurobindo's manner of dealing with them in English, suiting his style flexibly to each. The very term "style", along with phrases like "freshness and lyric bloom", "precision and fidelity", "height of intensity and passion" and along with a mention of the means adopted "to communicate effectively" to the reader the writer's

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own spiritual "thrill and ecstasy" - the term "style" itself, repeated appreciatively, implies that vision, word and rhythm are fused together in successful self-expression in the tongue chosen by the poet. Not even the ghost of any awkwardness can be slipped in as a suggestion into Dr. Gokak's elaborately considered and expounded opinion of Savitri's achievement in English poetry.

If Dr. Gokak here is to be believed, gaucherie in the ordinary accepted sense should strike us as the last thing to be hinted at - no matter how moderately - for Sri Aurobindo's epic. Could he be having in view a special significance? It would seem impossible that a fellow-poet should complain in a generalising tone if Sri Aurobindo is in some places a little complicated in verbal turn or structure and may thus be regarded by those who make a fetish of the simple and the straightforward as in some degree unnatural, artificial, awkward. Milton, speaking of Satan's expulsion from Heaven and interposing nearly four and a half lines between a "him" and the "who" related to it can have those three adjectives shot at him - and yet the passage is one of the peaks of grandeur in English poetry:

Him the Almighty Power

Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky

With hideous ruin and combustion down

To bottomless perdition there to dwell

In adamantine chains and penal fire,

Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms.

Similarly, Keats's supremely exquisite evocation of a moment of breathless silence might be charged with awkward English because he has used a double-negatived indirectness to enforce the subdued key set by an opening negative:

No stir of air was there,

Not so much life as on a summer's day

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Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass,

But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.

Especially in presenting occult or spiritual vision one may appear complex and out-of-the-way, not open to immediate understanding, but if one transmits the true afflatus from an inner or higher world the reader is bound to be carried along by a surge of felicitous audacity, as in that snatch of mysterious imagery from Sri Aurobindo's long description of his heroine:

As in a mystic and dynamic dance

A priestess of immaculate ecstasies

Inspired and ruled from Truth's revealing vault

Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,

A heart of silence in the hands of joy

Inhabited with rich creative beats

A body like a parable of dawn

That seemed a niche for veiled divinity

Or golden temple-door to things beyond. [p. 15]

Such a breath of beauty and profundity sweeps through these lines that, whether we catch the exact drift or not at the first reading, a categorisation like "a bit awkward" for the English seems utterly irrelevant.

Sri Aurobindo, however, is not always so directly mystical in expression. He has numerous clear-cut pictures of unusual insight like that seizure of symbolism in what another poem of his calls "the dawn-moment's glamour". The picture in Savitri runs:

Into a far-off nook of heaven there came

A slow miraculous gesture's dim appeal.

The persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch

Persuaded the inert black quietude

And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.

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A wandering hand of pale enchanted light

That glowed along a fading moment's brink

Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge

A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge. [p. 3]

It is a matter of astonishment how Dr. Gokak could have fallen foul of Sri Aurobindo's masterpiece when he has acknowledged the outstanding merit of even the earlier poetry of Sri Aurobindo: e.g., the blank-verse narrative Love and Death written in 1899. Dr. Gokak's discriminative faculty is seen almost at its true function and as at least free from any quirk when he writes in that Introduction on which we have already drawn: "Some of Sri Aurobindo's lyrics in [the youthful] Songs to Myrtilla have the preciosity of 'Decadent' poetry in them. But his grand manner asserts itself in Love and Death..." (p. xxxi). If, as far back as the end of the last century, Sri Aurobindo could write grandly in an English unsullied anywhere even by "preciosity", how could he at the top of his development persistently stumble a little in his language? Mind you, the tendency to be "precious" - that is, over-refined in the choice of words - which Dr. Gokak notes in part of the production of Sri Aurobindo's Cambridge-days is not at all pointed at as "a bit awkward" in its English embodiment. The English of Songs to Myrtilla is nowhere found un-English in the least measure. All the more amazing, then, that a highly respected and responsible critic should commit such a gaffe about Savitri.

If he had shown us Sri Aurobindo facing "problems" in managing on a large scale the type of blank-verse he had selected - the end-stopped variety instead of the kind that flows over or is enjambed - he would have drawn our attention to a difficulty Sri Aurobindo himself envisaged at the start of his epic. Again, if he had touched on "problems" connected with rendering the English tongue more and more plastic to the stress of what Sri Aurobindo describes as the "overhead planes", levels of Yogic consciousness beyond the mental, he

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would have justly indicated the reason why Sri Aurobindo rewrote some portions of Savitri nearly a dozen times. But it is quite another matter to speak of Sri Aurobindo, who was educated in England from his seventh to his twenty-first year, as having "problems" in English as such in the whole course of his crowning poetic performance. The dictum is extremely gratuitious in itself no less than against the background of Dr. Gokak's other remarks in the present interview and all that he has carefully written as a scholar in the past.

(Aspects of Sri Aurobindo, 2000, pp. 125-30)

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