Savitri

 XI

Savitri and the Commedia

      Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, in its earliest version,¹⁰⁶ must have approximated much closer to the 'legend' in the Mahabharata than to the present epic. The power of Savitri's radiant purity of purpose and fiery chastity confronts Yama; and Yama who is both the Lord of Death and the upholder of Dharma, being irresistibly awakened by her mere presence and the flow of apt speech from her to a realisation of his latter role, consents at last to release the 'soul' of Satyavan, and so the lovers return to their hermitage. It was during his early years at Pondicherry that Sri Aurobindo glimpsed clearly the possibility of the supramentalisation of man and Nature and the earth. Then came the meeting with Madame Richard (the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram), and the launching of the monthly journal, Arya, in which, during the next six years and a half, appeared the monumental philosophical sequence, The Life Divine, wherein Sri Aurobindo argued out with overwhelming force the possibility of the supramentalisation—the divinisation—of man and Nature and the earth. In 1920 Madame Richard returned from a prolonged visit to Japan, and finally settling down in Pondicherry assumed the general control of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

      It was perhaps during the later twenties that Sri Aurobindo decided to give his Savitri—taken up for revision so often before but not brought to the actual point of publication—a wholly new orientation, to turn the 'legend' also into a 'symbol', in the light of his Yogic experiences, his newly formulated philosophy of the Life

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Divine, and also his newly evolved theory and practice of 'overhead' aesthesis. The role of Beatrice in the Commedia is played as purposefully and more dynamically by Savitri in Sri Aurobindo's poem; Virgil is distantly paralleled by Aswapati, and even as Virgil leads to Beatrice, Aswapati leads to Savitri. And Savitri herself is at once the heroine of the legend and the symbol-force of the Supreme Creatrix assuming or incarnating in a human form—like the avatars of old—to effect the supramentalisation of man and his habitat.

      The role of the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas in Dante's poem is as fully and as creatively discharged by The Life Divine in Sri Aurobindo's poem.¹⁰⁷ That Sri Aurobindo 'used' a philosophy which he had himself evolved, partly no doubt in consonance with India's philosophia perennis but partly also in the light of his own Yogic realisations, whereas Dante had been content to 'use' the Thomist philosophy that was ready to hand doesn't essentially affect the parallelism between Savitri and the Commedia, for in one as in the other the philosophy is entirely consumed in the poetry. It is also more than a mere verbal coincidence that the keyword 'Divine' should figure in both the title of Dante's great epic {The Divine Comedy) and in Sri Aurobindo's philosophical treatise (The Life Divine), which is itself a work of art in the 'other harmony' of prose, besides also providing the philosophical sustenance to Savitri.

      There is, of course, danger in making facile comparisons, for they may sometimes mislead more than instruct us. Dante's Florence was a very small world compared with the Indian political stage on which Sri Aurobindo played so notable a part during 1906-10. Besides, while Dante was a religious man, Sri Aurobindo was a Yogi, a pilgrim of Eternity', a vassal of the Spirit. As philosophers, again, there can be no effective comparison between the Florentine and the Indian poet, for whereas the former had merely assimilated the Thomist philosophy, Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine is an independent philosophical work mounting an impressive dialectic and charged with a high creative purpose.

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        Further, Dante left a completed epic behind him while Sri Aurobindo left Savitri apparently incomplete. Two of the projected cantos in Book VIII (The Book of Death) are missing. He evidently knew he had not long to live, and he was therefore particularly anxious to finalise Book VI (The Book of Fate); there was something of a race with time, and it was only after completing the revision of the long (and, in some respects, seminal) second canto of The Book of Fate that the tension relaxed and he felt relieved that it was over. On being told that the Book of Death and the last Book, the Epilogue, still needed to be cast in their final form, Sri Aurobindo seems to have remarked, "We shall see about that later on."¹⁰⁸ He could have revised those sections of the poem too had he cared, but he didn't; it was as though, so far as he was concerned, Savitri was finished. And, indeed, when we read this immense poem at a stretch, we do not get the feeling that it is in any real sense incomplete. It is unconcluded only in the quintessential sense that the cosmic drama of which the poem is no more than a symbol remains yet unconcluded; but merely as a poem, Savitri is a rounded fullness and completeness, verily a total revelation.

      Some differences can also be noted with regard to the content and form of the two poems. The Commedia has a scheme of descent into Hell and ascent of Paradisal peaks via the slopes of Purgatory, which is, "closely similar to similar supernatural peregrination stories in Arabic and in old Persian literature—to say nothing of the descents of Ulysses and Aeneas",¹⁰⁹ to say nothing again of the wanderings of Rama, Sita and Lakshmana in the Ramayana and of the Pandavas in the Mahabharata. Aswapati's spiritual peregrination, described at considerable length in Book II (The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds), has a similar scheme, and can almost be detached from the rest of Savitri, though of course it is also integral to the total scheme of the epic. The occult-spiritual odyssey of Aswapati ends in the fourth canto of Book III (The Book of the Divine Mother), where he has the 'beatific vision' of the Mother who gives her consenting voice to his prayer on behalf of humanity.

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          There is also, in Book VII (The Book of Yoga), Savitri's entry into the inner countries of the spirit culminating in the finding of the soul; like Dante, she too realises in the end that she is at infinity's centre, she is in That without quite becoming That. There are thus two spiritual peregrinations in Savitri, the father's and the daughter's, and they are also a unity in difference. Yet, although important, they are only the background, for in the foreground is played the drama of Savitri and Satyavan, which is profoundly moving in the original legend, but here acquires a further spiritual dimension. Savitri is really the incarnation in human form of the Supreme Mother; there is the first test of her faith in love when Narad tries to warn her against marrying Satyavan, but she stands the test and is firm in her resolve. There is the later impact of Fate, the death of Satyavan, the temptation in the forest, the struggle with Death, and the ultimate victory. Since Death is viewed here as Evil, Ignorance and Darkness and Savitri as Light, Love and Goodness, the struggle between them is more in the nature of the struggle between Ravana and Rama in the Ramayana for the rescue of Sita, or between the Kauravas and the Pandavas in the Mahabharata for the righting of a wrong.

      In the 'legend' Savitri solves her own personal problem, and in the process of regaining her Satyavan she also brings an accession of happiness to her parents and parents-in-law; in the epic, on the other hand, Savitri fights all the time the battle of mankind for a new life—the Life Divine—on earth, for Satyavan is really the "soul of the world". This is the new dimension given to the old story by the seer-poet of Savitri. In the Commedia, Dante, long separated from Beatrice, meets her again, but only on the "other side", not upon "this bank and shoal of time". Nevertheless, in the Commedia and Savitri alike, it is the heroine (the 'hero' in these two epics is about as positive or effective as the heroes in some of Shakespeare's great comedies) who takes the lead, who acts the role of sakti, who makes the divine transformation possible. Allen Tate truly says that, "what Dante achieved is an actual insight into the great dilemma, eternal life or eternal death."¹¹⁰The point may likewise be made that what Sri Aurobindo achieved and sought to dramatise in Savitri is an actual insight into the great dilemma: divine life on earth or death in the ignorance.

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