On Savitri
THEME/S
PREFACE TO THE
FIRST EDITION
This book is substantially the same as the thesis for which the Andhra University, on the unanimous recommendations of a Board consisting of Professors Vivian de Sola Pinto, H. O. White and T.J.B. Spencer, awarded the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy on me at the Annual Convocation held in December 1961. The present publication has been kindly sponsored by the Andhra University, with the help of a grant-in-aid from the University Grants Commission (UGC), and I am duly grateful to both ,y Alma Mater and the UGC for thus facilitating the publication of this book so soon after the award of the Degree.
During the last several months I have been asking myself why, having wavered for quite some time between Virginia Woolf and Savitri as my subject for the PhD course, I finally chose the latter. I should perhaps say rather that whereas I chose Virginia Woolf, Savitri chose me. Sir Aurobindo's portraits adorn the walls of my parental home, and I have grown up in silent and reverent admiration of the Master. As a girl I was once privileged to visit the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry. And which Hindu girl reacts otherwise than with love and gratitude towards the mythic heroine, Savitri.
That I should wish to study Sri Aurobindo's Savitri was thus not surprising: what was really surprising was that I took so long to reach a decision which, once made, seemed altogether the right thing. My first postgraduate enthusiasm had been the great Tamil poet, Subramania Bharati, some of whose poems I translated into English and published as Bharati in English Verse. Now Bharati had been Sri Aurobindo's intimate friend at Pondicherry for about ten years, and what could be more appropriate than my turning from Bharati to Sri Aurobindo?
There has been no end to my good fortune. Firstly the subject itself, which I now think is the greatest—the most inspiring—that a woman, at any rate a Hindu woman, could think of or write about. Secondly, I have had constant advice and help from my father, Prof K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, who is not only the author of the standard biographical study of Sri Aurobindo but is also one of the eminent authorities on the subject. Thirdly, the UGC were good enough to award a research scholarship that enabled me to prosecute my studies without saddling myself with teaching duties.
Fourthly, in November 1959, Mr A.B. Purani the author of the only book on Sri Aurobindo's Savitri was our guest for a few days and gave on 25 November an inspiring lecture in the University on Savitri. Having been closely associated with Sri Aurobindo for about thirty years, Mr Purani is one of the very few people who can talk with real authority on the Master's thought and message. I was privileged to discuss the plan of my book with him, clear up several of my difficulties, and even to look into some of his private lecture notes on Savitri. Finally, certain review-assignments by Madame Sophia Wadia for the Aryan Path and the Indian P.E.N, enabled me during the last few years to read and write about Sri Aurobindo's posthumous publications—notably Ilion and the plays—while Sri Nolini Kanta Gupta, Secretary of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, gave me no small encouragement by publishing my first essay on Savitri ('The Exordium') in the quarterly journal, The Advent.
On the other hand, the more I studied, the more I began to feel bewildered. Savitri is a colossal poem of nearly 24,000 lines. The mere attempt to 'understand' it left me often despairing whether I would ever be able to bring my project to some sort of conclusion. I was for a while quite lost in Aswapati's 'Worlds', and the 'Descent into Night' was a terrible experience. But I persevered and my father was always there to help me whenever I floundered. The collateral studies took me to vast new oceans of knowledge. There were Sri Aurobindo's own works, formidable in their bulk and weight and manifoldness of knowledge. I was advised to read Evelyn Underbill's classic treatise on mysticism, and this took me to other books on mysticism and the great mystics. I also took deep draughts from the springs of modern English and American poetry Browsing in the University library, I read whatever seemed to have relevance to my subject in its wider perspective, and took numerous notes and carefully card-indexed them. As the months passed I had the feeling of a person who has foolishly ventured far into the sea and finds, whichever way he turns, nothing but an endless expanse of water. The shore seems to be nowhere.
I could have gone on reading and taking notes for a lifetime,for one subject led to another and to another still, and all seemed relevant enough to the study of a 'Cosmic' epic like Savitri. But I realised at last that I must really put my notes in some order, plan my book and start writing it. First I attempted a verse play on the Savitri theme, more as an exercise in understanding and interpretation than as a serious literary effort. Next I turned to Part II of the present thesis. Mr Purani's 'Summary' was very useful, of course, but since he is a tried sadhak or initiate of Sri Aurobindo's yoga, many things that are perhaps self-explanatory to him seemed at first puzzling in the extreme to me. But repeated re-readings enabled me to complete this Part which is more or less a critical synopsis of the poem. I now turned to the original legend in the Mahabharata and made my own rendering, though I found the prose versions of Pratap Chandra Roy and John
Brough as also the verse renderings of Sir Edwin Arnold, Romesh Chunder Dutt and Torn Dutt useful for one reason or another.
Parts of the chapter 'Overhead' Poetry and Savitri were presented as a paper before the English Faculty Research Seminar on 12 March 1960. The final chapter on Savitri as a 'Cosmic Epic' took me to other epics, ancient and modern, and I had an enchanting time exploring these 'realms of gold'. Dante, among the poets of the past, comes closest to Sri Aurobindo, and I found the essays on Dante by T.S. Eliot and Allen Tate the most illuminating, though Charles Williams is very good too. Of the moderns, Ezra Pound and Nikos Kazantzakis challenge comparison with Sri Aurobindo as epic poets. I have therefore made an attempt to see both the Cantos and The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, in relation to Savitri. Last to be written was the first chapter on Sri Aurobindo's life and work: while writing it I was conscious of what I had already written in the later chapters, and hence some points have been only glanced at since they are anyhow dealt with in fuller detail at the appropriate places later on.
My main difficulty has been narrowing down the subject and at the same time setting it in the right backgrounds. This is no study of Sri Aurobindo or of his philosophy or yoga or politics, not even a study of his poetry as a whole. The single poem, Savitri, is the subject; and Sri Aurobindo's life and thought, his philosophy and yoga and politics and his other poems, are brought in only to make the appreciation of Savitri easy or complete. But Savitri is an epic in the English language, and it cannot be studied in a cultural vacuum. Savitri by itself, Savitri in relation to Sri Aurobindo's life and work, and Savitri in relation to the currents of human thought and experience of all times: such are the three ascending terms in the argument that I have tried to present in the following pages.
Sri Aurobindo's yoga and his philosophy were no 'freaks' but are paralleled by similar (though not identical) realisations and leaps of thought elsewhere. Thus, while claiming outstanding genius and originality for Sri Aurobindo, I have been at some pains to show that,
far from being a 'crank' or a 'case', he was generally in the line of the great mystics, philosophers and poets of the world. For example, when I had almost completed my thesis, I came across Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man, and I was surprised to find striking similarities between his and Sri Aurobindo's speculations, to which 1 have drawn attention in the course of the first chapter.
In The 'Legend' and the 'Symbol', I have tried to show that Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, massive though it is in conception and impressive in execution, is in its main ingredients implied in the old legendary story, even as the colossal Indian banyan tree is essentially implied in its tiny seed. As regards the symbolism, I have striven to show that Sri Aurobindo has drawn freely from the rich storehouse of Vedic symbolism and fused the many derived symbols into a single new blaze of revelation. In 'Overhead' Poetry and Savitri, again, I have endeavoured to show that as 'overhead' poetry involves, first 'thematic content', second 'language' or verbal expression, and finally 'rhythm', in Savitri the 'content' is mainly Sri Aurobindo's own yogic experiences (including the journey in consciousness and the spiritual struggles in the mystic's 'Dark Night of the Soul'), the language is symbolic, often drawing upon the Vedic symbolism, and the rhythm' is iambic blank verse, but with an Upanishadic and Kalidasian force and finish.
But 'overhead' poetry is not, after all, a wholly new bag of poetical, tricks, but rather the pushing up of certain possibilities in all great poetry to a further height and consistency of profoundly moving utterance. This point too I have tried to make in the course of the chapter, with illustrations from poets of the ancient and the modern world. Finally, in Savitri: A Cosmic Epic, I have done my best to show that Savitri is an epic of the soul with a range that is truly cosmic, and that, while it recalls for one or another reason many ot the epics of the past and of the present-day world, still the Divina Commedia comes nearest to it in its scope and depth and quality of its poetic utterance. The essence of the celebrated Gayatri (or Savitri) mantra is that by meditating on Savitri the adorable Supreme Creator
of the Universe, the devotee invokes the intercession of that Power to awaken the veiled indwelling Effulgence to guide the mind towards the Truth. The Supreme Creator is also the veiled slumbering Effulgence; as a result of the divine intercession, what is slumbering is awakened, what is veiled is revealed, and man returns to the sovereignty of the Spirit. Sri Aurobindo is thus able to make his poem at once the story of Savitri and Satyavan, and the story of Man in the Universe: in short a human and a cosmic epic in one.
I realise now that it was vain on my part to have supposed that what Sri Aurobindo took some decades to compose could be 'studied' and the results of the study presented in easy critical categories. But I derive much encouragement from the concluding remarks in Mr Patrick Cruttwell's recent article on 'Makers and Persons':
...two very general caveats for the critic, which are also caveats,
to a slightly lesser degree, for the common reader. The first is
that we ought to make quite sure, before we undertake the
microscopic investigation of a writer, that he is, for ourselves,
worth investigating—which means, that we have enjoyed and
been impressed by his work. And the second caveat is that the
ways in which the person affects and is revealed in his creations a
re enormously varied and subtle; the evidence, however lavish,
is never, in the nature of things, complete; and it behoves us,
therefore, however fearless we may be in our pryings, to be
cautious in our conclusions.1
I can at least say that I have genuinely enjoyed, and have often been overwhelmed by Savitri; I can also say that after all this exploration and scrutiny, I still feel that there is a lot more to know, that all the 'facts of the case' are not ready to hand; and if the poem intrigues me still in many places, if I feel constantly baffled, the reason may very well be that I do not know all the facts, that perhaps I have not even had the patience or perseverance to look for them in the right places. The poetry of Savitri is the reality, my critical study is but an illusion, but I hope, an illusion not wholly unrelated to the Reality!
Savitri is poetry and philosophy, and is based on Sri Aurobindo's own yogic experiences and realisations. The appreciation of a poem like Savitri must accordingly involve special difficulties. In the 'Preface' to his thoughtful work, Dante the Philosopher, M. Etienne Gilson writes:
When a philosopher discusses literature he often reveals a want of
taste, but when a man of letter discusses ideas he sometimes
reveals a want of precision. By helping one another we shall
perhaps draw nearer to that state of grace in which love increases
as understanding becomes clearer, and understanding is all the
clearer as love is the more profound. Great writers expect no
less of us, for their ideas are bound up with their art, and their
very greatness consists in the fact that after they have gone their
thoughts remain inseparable from the manner in which they have
expressed them.2
Being neither a philosopher nor a litterateur but only a hesitant student attempting the double approach, it is possible that my argument lacks 'precision and 'taste' both; but at least I have not failed to hanker after 'that state of grace' to which M. Gilson refers. Again and again, amidst others, two names—Dante and Sri Aurobindo — are brought into juxtaposition in my thesis, sometimes deliberately and sometimes by accident, as it were; and re-reading the whole thesis, I ask myself whether the crest of the winding argument is not, in effect, to hail Savitri as a modern Divine Comedy.
If Savitri the epic is poetry and philosophy fused with mystic experience, its central character is the blessed feminine herself, woman pictured not only as beauty and love but also as strength and will. The good wife is verily man's shakti, all the reservoirs of his strength, and not just the 'weaker' sex; not frailty but strength is the mark of woman: such is the inspiring Hindu conception of the role of woman as wife as it finds expression in the Mahabharata story. The German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, explaining the whole 'meaning and purpose' of his Malte Laurids Brigge, once asked in the course of a letter:
.. .how is it possible to live, when the very elements of this life are
unintelligible to us? When we're everlastingly inadequate in love,
uncertain in resolve, and incapable in the presence of death, how
is it possible to exist?3
These—the first and last things are the very issues treated in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, and Savitri is the answer to our existential' problem. Yoga leads to right knowledge, and right knowledge makes right action possible. Savitri is an example of a woman who is not 'inadequate in love', who is not 'uncertain in resolve', and who is not 'incapable in the presence of death'. She bravely faces the 'existential' problem and masters it; she is the redeemer of her husband, and she is the redeemer of the world. There is, indeed, no heroine in the world's literature who is quite as adorably human and at the same time as lovably divine as Savitri. It was thus with sure insight that Sri Aurobindo has made this archetypal woman as wife and shakti the theme of his loftiest poetical flight.
There is another circumstance, too, about this poem that deserves emphasis here. Savitri is the work of an Indian poet in the English language, a fact that must have a challenging significance today. Anglo-Indian literary relations are an absorbing subject and call for separate examination. But here one or two points are particularly relevant. The British political connection has ceased, but English has still a place in India. India's elder statesman, Mr C. Rajagopalachari, has acknowledged that English is the gift of the Goddess Saraswati to India. And Mr Sisirkumar Mitra writes:
Now a word about English. This remarkable language,
already international, has rendered signal service to the cause
of India's unity, her nationalism and her independence, and
occupies, in her everyday life, a place of importance, perhaps
no whit less great than did Sanskrit or Pali, each in its own
day... If English is the greatest gift of England to India, India's
greatest gift to English, and through it, to the world is Sri
Aurobindo's masterpiece, The Life Divine and his sublime epic,
Savitri, through which he has sent forth his divine message
to humanity.4
Sri Aurobindo spent his impressionable years in England— Manchester, London, Cambridge—and he was thus ideally equipped to be the builder of the bridge of understanding between the people of the West and the East. Even so accomplished a writer as Sri Aurobindo, to whom English was like a mother tongue, is bound to wield the language with a significant difference. But such differences will only serve to enrich the language, not impoverish it. As a writer declared in the Times Literary Supplement, the 'centre of gravity' had shifted and "while we are busy 'consolidating', a brand new 'English' literature will be appearing in Johannesburg or Sydney or Vancouver or Madras."5 He might have added "or Pondicherry".
Another writer, Ronald Nixon (now Sri Krishnaprern), has also expressed the opinion that, "The English language has been given to the world and its usage and limits can now no longer be determined exclusively by the ears of the Islanders whose tongue it originally was. Those who would remain sole rulers of their language must abjure empire."6 Indian English at its best—like American English—has a distinctive quality of its own, for it cannot escape being influenced by the climate—physical, intellectual, spiritual—of India. Nothing therefore is of happier augury for the future of human solidarity and harmony than the fact that Sri Aurobindo, an Indian among Indians, a Rishi in the tradition of Vamadeva and Yajnavalkya, nevertheless chose English as the natural medium of expression to communicate his thoughts and visions to the world.
The appearance of Savitri, therefore, is an auspicious omen of incommensurable potency. The recurrent symbol in the poem is Dawn —Dawn now defeating Darkness, Dawn now paving the way for the Noon of the future. And Savitri may very well herald the dawn of a new and a better world, 'a new heaven and a new earth'. Savitri herself is the Dawn: "Dawn of the luminous journey, Dawn queen of truth, large with the Truth, how wide is the gleam from her rosy limbs— Dawn divine who brings with her the heaven of light."7
I have already recorded my debt to my father. His personal library of Aurobindonian literature has been of ready use to me; he has also permitted me to make use of the letters in his possession as also certain private notes and unpublished articles. We have read the more difficult parts of Savitri together and discussed the planning of my book. He has read the first drafts of my chapters as they were written and made suggestions towards their improvement with regard both to the argument and the style. I am also deeply grateful to Professor Vivian de Sola Pinto (University of Nottingham), Professor H.O. White (Trinity College, Dublin) and Professor TJ.B. Spencer (University of Birmingham), and to three friends at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram—Mr A.B. Purani, Mr M.P. Pandit and Mr K.D. Sethna— for their generous appreciation and helpful criticisms, which have enabled me to revise and make improvements in the 'copy' before sending it finally to the press.
For the rest, my debt to the various authorities is indicated, generally in the 'Select Bibliography', and particularly in the references. I have, almost as a general rule, avoided referring to my authorities with prefixes like Mr, Dr, or Prof, for obvious reasons; this in no way implies want of respect or courtesy to them on my part. I have referred to the dates of publication in the references only if the books are not listed also in the 'Select Bibliography' with all the necessary details. Again, I have given the dates, not necessarily of first publication, but of the publication of the actual edition or impression used by me. With regard to the spelling of proper names and the transliteration of Sanskrit words, I have tried to be consistent, though it is too much to hope that I have been entirely successful. Also, the epigraphs at the head of the three Parts of the thesis are based on Sri Aurobindo's renderings of the respective verses from the Rig Veda, and in fact, I have throughout given extracts only from his versions of the Veda, the Upanishads and the Gita.
I also wish to place on record my gratitude to the Manager and Staff of Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press for the care, patience and
devotion with which they have produced this book with so attractive a get-up. I have indeed received unstinted help and encouragement from so many quarters, and if my A Study of Savitri still falls far short of the ideal, it can only be because of my own limitations of which I am only too conscious. I may, however, take consolation from the words of the Master: "If thy aim be great and thy means small, still act; for by action alone these can increase to thee."
Prema Nandakumar
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