On Sri Aurobindo's Savitri

SRI AUROBINDO'S FIRST FAIR COPY OF

HIS EARLIEST VERSION OF SAVITRI

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

Towards the end of 1968 Nirodbaran put into my hands two old exercise-books he had found among Sri Aurobindo's papers. One had a cover greyish green and the other a brown cover. Both had been made in Madras and bore the trademark "Hanuman". A glance at their pages immediately gave the impression that they dated back to Sri Aurobindo's early days in Pondicherry, for his script showed his early practice of writing the English "e" like the Greek epsilon (e). And this script, in two or three kinds of ink and with some portions in more than one draft, set forth a version of Savitri older than any I had come across.

The very first version I had known was that which Sri Aurobindo used to send me privately in small consecutive instalments day after day in 1936 and from which the final one grew to its enormous length by 1950. This version was "A Legend and a Symbol". As I discovered with Nirodbaran's help in the period after Sri Aurobindo had left his body, its predecessor had been called Sâvithrî: A Tale and a Vision. Here not only the name of the heroine from the Mahabharata-story but also those of the two other leading characters (the heroine's father and her elected bridegroom) were spelled differently from their forms in 1936. Instead of Aswapati and Satyavan, they read Uswapathy and Suthyavân. The copy which I saw was in two sections. The first bore the general title Earth and

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was divided into four Books captioned respectively Quest, Love, Fate, Death. The second section was concerned with Beyond and consisted of parts entitled Night, Twilight, Day, Epilogue - the last relating the Return to Earth of Savithri with the revived Suthyâvan.

The poem opened:

The boundless spirit of Night, dreamless, alone

In the unlit temple of immensity

Waiting upon the marge of Silence sat

Mute with the expectation of her change,

An hour was near of the transfiguring gods.

Obviously, here, in a broad sense, is "the expectation" of the draft disclosed to me in 1936 and opening:

It was the hour before the Gods awake.

Across the path of the divine Event

The huge unslumbering spirit of Night, alone

In the unlit temple of immensity,

Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge

Mute with the unplumbed prevision of her change.

This later draft is itself a "prevision" of the final form which omits the last line and modifies lines 3 and 4 thus:

The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone

In her unlit temple of eternity... [p. 1]

The contents of that pair of exercise-books on which Nirodbaran had lighted was the starting point of several recensions to which Sri Aurobindo seems to allude collectively in a letter of 1931 to me: "There is a previous draft, the result of the many retouchings of which somebody told you; but in that form it would not have been a 'magnum opus' at all. Besides, it would have been a legend and not a symbol.

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I therefore started recasting the whole thing; only the best passages and lines of the old draft will remain, altered so as to fit into the new frame."

The very prelude of the poem in the "Hanuman" exercise-books strikes a note which goes clean out of the category of "Symbol":

In a huge forest where the listening Night

Heard lonely voices and in the large hush

Was conscious of the sigh and tread of things

That have no sound for the rich heart of day, -

For now her phantom tribes were not abroad,

The panther's eyes glared not, the tiger slept

Prone in his lair of jungle or deep grass, -

Startling the wide-browed dreamer Dawn arose.

A finely descriptive and subtly imaginative recounting of a famous traditional episode is promised, something like the poetic creations of Sri Aurobindo's middle and late twenties - Urvasie and Love and Death. But, as we perceive when we read further, we have more mental power of insight than in those narrative masterpieces of an impetuous romantic vitality. Like the semi-historical Baji Prabhou which came after those poems, it makes - though in a different and deeper style than that dynamic martial composition's - a transition between the afflatus of the early Sri Aurobindo and the inspiration of the later. One of the technical signs of the old afflatus is the frequent nineteenth-century convention of placing adjectives on either side of a noun: it persists here in phrases like "calm bright-eyed women pure", "deep glades divine". By the time I joined the Ashram (December 1927) and took Sri Aurobindo as my Master in poetry-writing no less than as the Guru of my Yoga, he had accepted many modern modes of expression. On the long labour between the old and the new inspirations in the spiritual domain Sri Aurobindo commented in 1936: "There

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have been made several successive revisions, each trying to lift the general level, higher and higher towards a possible Overmind poetry." In the same letter we read: "The poem was originally written from a lower level, a mixture of the inner mind, psychic, poetic intelligence, sublimised vital, afterwards with the Higher Mind, often illumined and intuitivised, intervening."

Since the time of Nirodbaran's discovery other drafts of the same version have surfaced. One of them mostly precedes the matter in the exercise-books, occupies a large portion of a small notebook and bears at its beginning the date "August 8th 9th/1916" and towards its end "Nov. 9". The exercise-books carry a fair copy of the contents of the notebook. Work in them was begun even before work in the latter was completed. Dates in one of them range between 1 November and 16 November. The year is not given just as it is not given at the end of the notebook - and apparently for the same reason: namely, that it is the very year in which the notebook commenced.

This dating provides a definitive gloss on Sri Aurobindo's statement on October 31, 1936: "Savitri was originally written many years ago before the Mother came, as a narrative poem in two parts." His explanation, in the same letter, of the two parts evidently refers to "A Tale and a Vision" which has that very division as well as a scheme of Books with identical names. And as Savitri (or rather Sâvithrî) in this form is subsequent to that in the exercise-books, this form must fall in a period later than 1916. If so, its precedence of the Mother's coming to Pondicherry proves that Sri Aurobindo had in mind not her first arrival on 29 March 1914 which was followed nearly a year later by her departure for quite a while, but her final settlement for good from 24 April 1920 onward. But how can any draft of "A Tale and a Vision" be regarded as the original Savitri when we are positive about an earlier version? Obviously, Sri Aurobindo looked at it as essentially a variation played

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upon a single theme and at the two versions as phases of one continuing phenomenon in a certain psychological progression which he characterised in two stages in the letter about lifting more and more high the inspiration of his early versions.

In that case, for all the broad affinity of "A Tale and a Vision" to "A Legend and a Symbol", "the new frame", of whose imposition on the old draft he has written, should be taken to mean a very late version. Possibly not even that which after several experiments at the opening line like

It was an hour of the transfiguring Gods

or

An hour was near of the transfiguring Gods

or

It was the hush of a transfiguring hour, first struck upon

It was the hour before the Gods awake, [p. 1]

can qualify. In a wide sense the description would be apt only for the version on which the later Savitri is based - the one just preceding that from which instalments were communicated to me in 1936. In a specific connotation it could apply only to the last-named version in which for the first time there are passages briefly recording a climbing of subtle planes of existence by Uswapathy.

To get an idea of how far the poem has moved from its beginning to its final shape across nearly half of the poet's life like a grander Faust until it counted 23,803¹ lines, we cannot but consider as a document of extreme literary interest what

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1 [23,837 in the 1993 Revised Edition.]

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can be termed the first fair copy by Sri Aurobindo of the earliest draft now extant.

Here is no indication of a Part I called Earth and a Part II named Beyond. The work is simply entitled Sâvithrî and consists of two Books without any headings. The first book, divided into paragraphs, deals with quest, love, fate and death; the second brings in the themes of night, twilight and day, the day-section unfinished. Of the epilogue we have only one stray passage scribbled on the last page of the brown exercise-book. Almost everywhere we meet with small changes, radical alterations, even substantial additions - many of them after-thoughts that tend to link up more and more with those of a later period but which obviously came at a time when the latter had not yet taken shape.

Already there are passages forming perfect launching-pads for sustained memorable flights in the subsequent versions and even in the massive final one. An exquisite example is Sâvithrî's awakening on "the day when Suthyavan must die":

Sighing she laid her hand upon her bosom,

Nor knew why the close lingering ache was there,

So quiet, so old, so natural to its place,

Till memory came opening like a bud

Her strong sleep-shrouded soul....

For a sublime as well as audacious instance we have the end of Uswapathy's Yoga:

His soul drew back into the speed and noise

Of the vast business of created things

Out of its rapt abysm. He resumed

His burden and was strong for daily deeds,

Wise with the thoughts that skim the fathomless surge

Of Nature and wing back to hidden shores.

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Take for subtlety the lines on Savithri's natural-supernatural girlhood:

She grew like a young tree in silent bliss

Self-gathered that receives the shocks of earth

With wordless passion. Bathed in another light,

Firm, quivering inwardly with mystic rain,

Proud of the ravishing storm's immense assault,

The tree in other calms and tempests lives.

The shadowy touches of these outward things

It only knows as shapes of powers within.

Or we see "natural magic" fringed with haunting mystery just before Sâvithrî catches sight of Suthyavan:

But now to a Nature more remote, self-hidden,

From all but its own vision deep and wild,

Attracted by the sombre forest's call

Her chariot hastened, skirting prouder glades

Where the green stragglers lingered in the light

Behind immenser seas of foliage, rear

Of a tremendous solitude of trees.

Here in a lifting of the vast secrecy

Where plunged a narrow cleft, a track ran hewn

To screened infinities from a farewell space

Of sunlight, she beheld a kingly youth...

Not only in such passages, where the turn of thought and image anticipates the future version, but also frequently elsewhere occur lines that have travelled intact to the ultimate recension - poetic surprises that could never be bettered. So in many ways there is a vivid continuity. At the same time we encounter a number of differences. Most of them are admirable in their particular roles. Some appear less happy: e.g., a poetic conventionalism of language on occasion, an overworking of romantic epithets like "sweet" and

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"rich". But these elements, we may be sure, Sri Aurobindo himself would have weeded out on a final critical whole-look instead of piecemeal surveys at various times. What might have stayed on is a feature on a more elusive level, something psychologically organic to the period: a play of penetrating revelatory idea reaching its fulfilment just short of that absolute profundity of suggestion which is so easy and natural to an increasing degree in the later recasts of the poem.

Perhaps the last point may be best illustrated in brief by comparing a certain small passage to its definitive version. Originally, Sâvithrî declared to Yama:

Advance, O Death,

Beyond the phantom beauty of this world,

Of its vague citizens I am not one,

Nor has my heart consented to be foiled.

I cherish there the fire and not the dream.

A variant of the concluding line ran:

I cherish, god, the fire and not the dream.

A very impressive affirmation, this, artistically all the better for being self-contained by omission of the "there", and it pierces to a fundamental posture of the soul militant and intransigent amidst a region of happy illusions. The state of the manuscript raises in one even the suspicion that Sri Aurobindo intended both the commas in the line to be omitted. The phrase would then take on a deeper colour according more directly with the speaker's own divinely inspired nature; but one is not quite sure of the poet's intention because of the small "g" left in of the word "god" which is always applied to Death. Whatever be the case, we are in the presence of the mot juste in the self-contained version. In that fine form the line would be a credit to any poet, and

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nobody would think of any falling short until he saw how Sri Aurobindo suddenly brought what we may term the mot inevitable in the ultimate recension of the passage:

Advance, O Death,

Beyond the phantom beauty of this world;

For of its citizens I am not one.

I cherish God the Fire, not God the Dream. [p. 614]

The full potentiality of the penetrating revelatory idea is released, the expression acquires the utmost intensity, the rhythmic movement an absolute concentration. And in the closing phrase, with its capitalised "G" and the term "God" ringing out twice, the speaker's soul at its profoundest is laid bare and startlingly suggests without the least veil that even in spirituality there can be a crucial choice between divine truths, on which may hinge the entire destiny of man the evolutionary aspirant.

However, in dealing with the affinities and the differences, we may record a curious fact. Except for the sheer transfiguration of the juste into the inévitable in the closing line, the ultimate recension of our passage is exactly the same as an alternative by Sri Aurobindo while producing the form with which we have contrasted that recension. The verse about Sâvithrî's heart was not there nor did the verse preceding it have the adjective "vague". A spare directness characterised the formulation. Only in the last line a slight rhetorical touch came in with the exclamation "O God" in place of the later more simple "god" which hovered on the verge of the final transfigurative suggestion. Thus, as regards most of this passage, the issue of affinity-difference is not so clear as it seems, though the last line spotlights it rather tellingly with its new directness of a dense rather than a spare kind.

Faithfully to trace all the differences and affinities, both on the obvious and on the elusive plane, is the editorial

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task in the presentation we have undertaken. But the odds against correct reading of the script in each detail are pretty formidable at times. Not only is there multiple rewriting over the lines: there is also revision done in the margins, line after line rewritten and then too not infrequently cancelled and revised. Further, at the top of the page and at the bottom we come across passages, either definitively or tentatively cast, demanding to be woven in. Occasionally stray words or phrases besprinkle the empty spaces and they have to be fitted into their right contexts. Again, some passages occur in several shapes at unsuspected parts of the exercise-books. One has to peep into every nook and corner lest any suggestion should get overlooked. With a broad yet detailed sweep, executed mostly with the help of a magnifying glass, one has to set about "the vast business of created things" in the first fair copy.

Even so, a few uncertainties are likely to remain. They would be due either to inadequate decipherment of what has been hurriedly scribbled or to difficulty in arranging the added lines properly or else to the gaps left by the author himself for future filling as well as to inability to decide whether a word or two scratched out were really meant to be omitted. The last-mentioned problem crops up when we see that something which is run through with ink or pencil is required by the metrical scheme: no substitute is offered and yet no sign is given that the deletion should be ignored.

Whether we have accomplished our task with reasonable success or not can be judged only by some future comber of the complicated MSS. If he brings a closer eye for the minutiae of the Aurobindonian inspiration he will produce a better transcript, especially with the help of the larger quantity of materials that have come to hand since I made mine towards the end of 1968. But, as it has not been possible for anyone yet to set forth the exact relation of the two earliest versions or between the first fair copy and the

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versions following it, the transcript I have made will have to serve at the moment, for good or ill, the critical reader, the literary historian and the studious disciple with its aim to place at their disposal as authentically and completely as possible what for all practical purposes may be designated the Ur-Savitri.

(from 'Sri Aurobindo's First Fair Copy of His Earliest Version of

Savitri', Mother India, August 1981, pp. 421-27)

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