Savitri

  V

New Dimensions

While the changes in the formal human story are few, there are, however, elaborations, psychological explorations, profound spiritual intimations, which are grafted on the original so as to give the epic impressive new dimensions quite beyond the scope of the Upakhyana. On the other hand, it will be seen, mighty though the overarching Banyan that is the epic, its seed—no bigger than an atom—is still in the old bardic poem. The bare bones of the original are Aswapati's eighteen-year long austerities followed by the birth of Savitri, the challenge of fate when Savitri marries Satyavan, Savitri's three-nights' fasting and austerities, and Savitri triumphing over Yama and fate and reclaiming 'lost' Satyavan and redeeming her parents' and parents-in-law's family fortunes.

      Sri Aurobindo's epic retains these cardinal features but packs them with enormous fresh significance. Eighteen years' austerities? Only for the birth of a child? What symbol worlds, spiritual realms, psychic regions might Aswapati not have traversed in the course of his austerities? Musn't he have grown in understanding, musn't even his original aspiration have suffered a progressive sea-change with the widening of the horizons of his understanding? The ancient poet has referred to the Goddess Savitri, and the goddess herself speaks on behalf of 'Grandfather' Brahman. Children, of course, could unquestioningly grasp these extra-terrestrial situations; but the adult rational mind, emptied of imagination, shakes its head.

      Sri Aurobindo accordingly explores in the epic the nature of Aswapati's Yoga, presents its various stages, maps out the worlds travelled, the depths sounded, the heights scaled. Not every poet could do this. The experiences described are supra-normal; and besides the inspiration of the Vedas and the Upanishads, Sri Aurobindo has also had to draw very largely upon his own Yogic experiences. A few verses in the original poem became a "small passage" in the early drafts of

Page 257

Sri Aurobindo's epic; and, ultimately, this "small passage" came to be replaced by a whole Book, in fifteen cantos.¹¹ In fact, Aswapati's Yoga and the promise of the Goddess Savitri, which take about ten lines in the Mahabharata, occupy almost half of Sri Aurobindo's entire epic, which means more than a thousand-fold expansion!

      The second key event is Narad first uttering a grave warning against Savitri's marrying Satyavan, and, later, after hearing Savitri, actively advising Aswapati to allow Savitri to have her own way. Even in the original, the situation is not lacking in an elemental self-sufficiency. Savitri was the sort of person that neither sage nor king could stand against; they yielded, because such was the power of her personality. But Sri Aurobindo explains and elaborates. Savitri's quest is described by Vyasa in the three stanzas at the end of the first canto, and it is only from the retrospective narration that we learn about her meeting and falling in love with Satyavan. But Sri Aurobindo lingers with affection on the meeting, and tries to probe behind the minds of Aswapati, Narad and Savitri in the tense scene described with shining succinctness by Vyasa in the second canto. It is also worth recapitulating that the very last additions Sri Aurobindo made were in the long speech of Narad, towards the close of Book VI, canto 2.¹² It is therefore evident that Sri Aurobindo attached particular significance to this climactic scene in the epic, and kept returning to it again and again, and could give it the finishing touch only a few days before he passed away.

      There is, then, the tri-rāttra vow—fasting, standing day and night, offering libation to the fire, saluting the elders. These are the objective hints regarding Savitri's austerities, even as the reference to the eighteen-year duration of Aswapati's austerities was an indication of their temporal extension. But tapas, yoga, prayer have their true measure in subjective, rather than objective terms; one has to look within, enter the "inner countries", lose (and find) oneself in the infinitudes of the Spirit. Faced with a great danger, how does one forge a spiritual armour in self-defence and in defence of

Page 258

the world? How does one tear asunder veil after veil of deceptive appearance and penetrate to the core, the hidden source, the still centre of Reality? Surely it was no simple business of fasting and physical endurance; these were but the outward signs of a profound inner quest, a prolonged inner struggle, capped by an accession of knowledge and power.

      As with Aswapati's Yoga, Sri Aurobindo turns the searchlight of revelation to the purposes and processes of Savitri's Yoga also; the earlier cantos describing Aswapati careering through the "worlds" are now seen to be complementary to the five cantos in Book VII ("The Book of Yoga') which describes Savitri's quest for her soul, her entry into the "inner countries", and her ultimate finding of her true soul and the Soul. Here, too, the pregnant hint contained in a couple of stanzas in the original undergoes an impressive elaboration, a meaningful exploration of hidden realms of consciousness, a confrontation of apocalyptic visions, all with their source of inspiration in Vedas and Upanishads and with ample corroboration from Sri Aurobindo's and his spiritual collaborator, the Mother's own yogic strivings and realisations. No wonder this part of the epic spans over about 125 pages, or nearly 4,000 lines.

      Finally, and most important of all—for the rest are but a preparation, a leading to it—is the scene, a scene probably without a parallel in all literature, where Savitri faces alone Yama that is Dharma as well, and follows him as he carries away Satyavan's life, and compels the law of predestination itself to yield ground and submit to the imperatives of Savitri's love for her husband. Vyasa has treated this part of the story with more subtlety and elaboration than the earlier parts, for it covers about one-fourth of the whole poem. What, exactly, is the writ of Fate? Are we to take it to mean something unalterably predetermined? Thus Omar Khayyam (or Fitzgerald) says:

      The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,

      Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

      Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

      Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Page 259

If Yama is the executant of this law of predestination, how is he Dharma also at the same time?

      In the old legend, Savitri pits her strength—the strength of her purity and chastity, the strength that she has acquired through the fulfilment of the vow, and the strength that envelops her on account of her elders' blessings—against this stern adamantine law of predestination. Her speeches to Yama are a strange mixture of naivety and subtlety and even a little ambiguity. There is no pleading, there is no fight or defiance; Savitri and Yama are both on their best behaviour, exchanging civilities and disarmingly polite expressions. "I'm pleased with your words...you speak words that please my mind...your word is life-giving as water to a thirsty man...I have never heard such delightful speech as yours...I respect you because you speak so agreeably, righteously, and laden with significance": such are Yama's reactions, and boon follows boon, culminating in the release of Satyavan himself. Savitri too claims to have done no more than praising the god (Yama) with "true speech" {Satyena vacasā).

      But when one looks beneath the surface, it is clear that what really happens is this: Savitri effects a transformation in Yama himself; the static God of Death is made to look inward and realise the dynamic God of Dharma that is veiled within. If Savitri can thus change the course of predestination, if she can compel change in the God of Death, she must be more than the woman and wife that she is in appearance, and the struggle is not for a single life alone, not for progeny alone, but also for a profounder, a basically revolutionary reason.

      The individual, personal problem must be capable of relation to a wider, cosmic context. The characters should be both persons and symbois, individuals no less than elemental powers involved in the cosmic play. Sri Aurobindo has therefore elaborated this deathless scene too in accordance with the possibilities opened by his own conception of Aswapati's and Savitri's Yoga. Three whole Books— "The Book of Eternal Night', "The Book of the Double Twilight' and 'The Book of Everlasting Day'—taking up a total of over 150

Page 260

pages, are devoted by Sri Aurobindo to this unearthly scene where Savitri comes to clash with alien or seductive powers and succeeds finally in asserting the claims of life, light, and joy.

      It would thus be not far wrong if we concluded that what Sri Aurobindo has tried to accomplish in his epic is largely to work out in poetical terms the possibilities already implied or inherent in the legendary story. Aswapati asks for a child; Savitri is born; and while trying to redeem Satyavan, her husband, she brings happiness to all (sarvam)—herself, her father, her mother and all her husband's family.

      Re-reading the old bardic tale from a fresh angle, Sri Aurobindo invests Aswapati's tapas with a vaster significance; it is a growth in self-knowledge and world-knowledge, it brings him face to face with earth's fetters and the prison-house of man's ignorance; and, at last, the fruit he seeks from his tapas is the solution of no personal problem or the answering of no personal need, but the sundering of earths fetters, the shattering of man's prison-house. At the culminating point of his yogic realisation, Aswapati incarnates all the world's agony of desire and thereby "compels" Savitri's birth.

      In the Aurobindonian conception, then, Savitri is not merely the gift of the Goddess Savitri, she is her incarnation as well. The divine-human quality of Savitri is basic to Sri Aurobindo's scheme, and colours the whole rich vast canvas of the epic. Like Aswapati and Savitri, Satyavan and Yama too, are seized in a larger context and enveloped in varied layers of significance. The characters become more than characters, more even than 'round' characters; now they are persons, now they are gods or god-like figures, and now they are verily occult forces or symbol regions or powers. The bardic 'legend' thus becomes a yogic 'symbol', without however ceasing to be a legend, or even a romance.

      An American poet and critic writes (though in a different if similar context): "I take it that a long poem, a narrative poem, must be about something. A narrative without plot would be as intolerable as a narrative with plot only. The symbol must be a

Page 261

thing before it becomes its meaning."¹³ The "thing" here is simply the old bardic story that has triumphantly stood the test of time, and lives as vividly today in the Hindu racial memory as in the early days of its currency. There is no doubt a seeming dilution, an "unconscionable" elaboration, even perhaps a little complication, in the Aurobindonian version; but it cannot be denied that the main hard lines of the old story—the contours of the "thing"—remain. What, then, is the 'symbol', the 'meaning' of the supposed action?

      In one of his explanatory letters Sri Aurobindo wrote: "The whole of Savitri is, according to the title of the poem, a legend that is a symbol and this opening canto is, it may be said, a key beginning and announcement."¹⁴ With particular reference to this canto, he wrote in the course of another letter: "I am not writing a scientific treatise, I am selecting certain ideas and impressions to form a symbol of a partial and temporary darkness of the soul and Nature which seems to a temporary feeling of that which is caught in the Night as if it were universal and eternal."¹⁵ Again, in yet another letter: "Savitri is represented in the poem as an incarnation of the Divine Mother." ¹⁶ Like Homer and Milton, Sri Aurobindo also plunges in medias res in the opening canto; exclusive of the sections devoted to necessary retrospective narration, the main action of the epic comprises but a single day, and the opening canto describes the dawn of "the day when Satyavan must die". Being intended as "a key beginning and announcement", this canto vividly, impressionistically, projects the "symbol dawn", and thereby anticipates the "greater dawn" referred to in the last line of the epic. In the issue between Night and Day, Darkness and Light, Dawn obviously forms the link, the mediator, the passage; and Savitri the "incarnation of the Divine Mother" is here the mediator, the vanquisher of Night and redeemer of Day.¹⁷

Page 262