Savitri

      XII

     SAVITRI AND AUROBINDO'S EARLY

 NARRATIVE POEMS

      It must be clear from the above that Savitri is a Commedia doubled with a Ramayana. The general scheme of the epic may now be indicated. "Savitri was originally written many years before the Mother came", wrote Sri Aurobindo to a correspondent in 1936, "as a narrative poem in two parts, Part I Earth and Part II Beyond...each of four Books—or rather Part II consisted of three Books and an epilogue."¹¹¹ The scheme was probably as follows:

 Part I: Earth    

      Part II: Beyond

         Epilogue

There was nothing in the early version corresponding to the present Book of the Traveller of the Worlds or to the cantos describing Savitri s Yoga; "rather Savitri moved through the worlds of Night, of Twilight, of Day—all of course in a spiritual sense—and ended by

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calling down the power of the Highest Worlds of Sachchidananda"; and Sri Aurobindo has also admitted that at that time he had no idea of what the supramental World would be like.¹¹²

      Quite obviously, this early version of Savitri was written not long after Urvasie (1896) and Love and Death (1899), the two early narrative poems ('epyllions', Iyengar calls them)¹¹³ in which Sri Aurobindo had essayed a somewhat similar theme. In Urvasie, the human hero Pururavas and the celestial nymph Urvasie come together, they are separated, and they come together again—and finally— when Pururavas is raised to the semi-divine status of a Gandharva. Not the death of Urvasie, but her withdrawal to heaven, causes the complication which is happily resolved when Pururavas too qualifies for life in that 'dream kingdom' of Gandharvas and Apsaras. An early poem, it is steeped in romantic sentiment and imagery, there is a 'temptation' at its heart, and an implied lesson. What though Urvasie were lost? All was not lost, there were his people, his kingdom, his responsibilities; not for personal enjoyment,

But to the voice of Vedic litanies,

Sacredly placed are the dread crowns of Kings .

For bright felicities and cruel toils.¹¹⁴

But no: Pururavas is "driven by a termless wide desire"; he can have no life without Urvasie. He gains his private felicity at last but at a heavy cost to his people and his kingdom:

Then Love in his sweet heavens was satisfied.

But far below through silent mighty space

The green and strenuous earth abandoned rolled.¹¹⁵

In the companion poem, Love and Death,¹¹⁶ there is described an Indian Orpheus (Ruru) regaining his lost Eurydice (Priyumvada); the roles of the Savitri story are here reversed, for it is the husband who by the power of his love regains his partner. Ruru, Sage Brigu's grandson, and Priyumvada, the Apsara Menaca's daughter, fall in love and marry. They lead the life of love's fulfilment, but the joy

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is short-lived. Priyumvada is bitten by a snake and dies. When the first shock is over, Ruru realises his grave loss and resolves to get back the living bride from Deaths grim claws. The God of Love, Kama, tells Ruru that it may be Death will relent, but he would also drive a heavy bargain:

      Alone of gods Death loves not gifts: he visits

      The pure heart as the stained...

      Life the pale ghost requires: with half thy life

      Thou mayest protract the thread too early cut

      Of that delightful spirit.. ¹¹⁷

 Ruru readily consents to the sacrifice, and so Kama shows the distracted husband the passage to the nether world,

      ... to the grey waste,

      Hopeless Patala, the immutable

      Country, where neither sun nor rain arrives,

      Nor happy labour of the human plough

      Fruitfully turns the soil, but in vague sands

      And indeterminable strange rocks and caverns

      That into silent blackness huge recede,

      Dwell the great serpent and his hosts, writhed forms,

      Sinuous, abhorred, through many horrible leagues

      Coiling in a half darkness...¹¹⁸

This is like the descent into Dante's Hell, and Ruru is aghast when he sees the shapes and hears the cries in Death's Kingdom. But Ruru's resolve is unshaken, and he makes the inexorable bargain with Death, and Ruru and Priyumvada are permitted to renew their interrupted life on earth.

      In both Urvasie and Love and Death, the hero, faced between two alternatives, unhesitatingly chooses love. Pururavas would rather be united with Urvasie in heaven than remain on earth and discharge his high obligations as a leader of the human race. Ruru would rather get back his Priyumvada even at the cost of half his own life than follow

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the higher calling of a Brahmin, and pursue (in the Dantean phrase) virtue and knowledge. Their single-minded love is worthy of all praise, but something is lost all the same; only that love is truly blessed that brings through its fulfillment happiness to all. Savitri, even in the legend, not merely regains her Satyavan, but brings undreamt of happiness to her own and Satyavan's parents. Already Sri Aurobindo was obscurely approaching the Savitri ideal of world redemption through love, for nobler still than Pururavas and Ruru and their successful defiance of fate was the defiance of Death on Savitri's part and all that came afterwards. In the words of K.D.Sethna,

In Urvasie as well as Love and Death there is that struggle

against mortality and the fate which circumscribes mundane life.

Pururavas scales an Overworld to clasp the vanished Urvasie;

Ruru descends into an Underworld to bring back Priyumvada

killed before she was ripe. Earth's heart storming beyond earth

to gain fulfilment, either by attaining the supra-terrestrial

and remaining in its light or by invading the infra-terrestrial and

reclaiming from its darkness what it has snatched and submerged

—this is the psychological motif behind Sri Aurobindo's two

most striking masses of achievement in blank verse during early

life, and it renders his many-sided poetic masteries in them a

kind of foreshadowing of the blank verse of Savitri in which

today he is embodying his Yogic explorations of the Unknown in

a more luminously mystical legend and symbol of love.¹¹⁹

Although this was written when Savitri was still in the process of revision, it is by no means an incorrect anticipation of the manifoldness of significance in the completed Legend and Symbol.

      The new element which Sri Aurobindo introduced into the revised Savitri was his vision of the worlds up to the supramental and his conviction regarding the possibility of realising the Life Divine on earth. Much more now went into the first Book than there originally was, and ultimately most of the present Part I came to be newly added, while the present Part II and Part III are really revised versions

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of the old Parts I and II respectively. The main additions, then, relate to Aswapati's Yoga in Part I (Books I-III) and Savitri's Yoga (Book VII). The piece d'resistance in the whole poem is Book II, with its fifteen cantos, in which Aswapati's 'odyssey' through the 'worlds' is described.

      In 1938 Sri Aurobindo took up the 'Worlds' seriously, and by 1946 "the small passage about Aswapati and the other worlds" became an enormous Book, and besides the poem as a whole also was fast taking its final shape. Although in the meantime he had developed his theory of the overhead aesthesis and was in practice often writing in response to the movements in the higher planes of consciousness, he was nevertheless aware of inequalities of level in the still widening expanse of the poem. "In so large a plan", he wrote in 1946, "covering most subjects of philosophical thought and vision and many aspects of spiritual experience there is bound to be much variation of tone: but that is, I think, necessary for the richness and completeness of the treatment."¹²⁰ Anyhow, by October or November 1950, the poem in its present form was ready, and Sri Aurobindo was content to leave it there. He knew that a poem like Savitri could not hope to be understood at once. His best hope was expressed in these terms in a letter written in 1947: "It took the world something like a hundred years to discover Blake; it would not be improbable that there might be a greater time-lag here, though naturally we hope for better things. For in India at least some understanding or feeling and an audience few and fit may be possible. Perhaps by some miracle there may be before long a larger appreciative audience."¹²¹

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