Savitri

      IX

'Savitri' in the Veda

"Always precise", that is to say, precise in its denotation; but the connotation may vary from age to age, even from person to person. For instance, there can be no denotative ambiguity about Darkness and Light, but the area or depth or intensity of the meaning we invest them with may vary. When they become the symbols of ignorance and knowledge, the sense is precise enough, yet there may be layers and layers of significance which in one quick view we cannot hope to exhaust. Now Light itself is too abstract, and hence we may wisely choose to equate the Sun with Light, and sunrise with the gradual unfoldment of light. "The sun with its powerful rays, its warmth and light, its life-giving qualities", writes Wilbur Marshall Urban, "becomes a natural symbol for the creating and eliciting power. Moreover, the contrasts bound up with it, light and darkness, power and weakness, life and death, spirit and matter, good and evil, become a natural vehicle for the expression and embodiment of moral and other value contrasts as they develop in the life of man."⁴³ Energy, creativity, life, power, knowledge, enjoyment may come naturally to be associated with light, or the sun; and it would be also natural to represent the gradualism of sunrise as "a parallel to the awakening of consciousness",⁴⁴ with any number of gradations. For example, the ancient Hindus imagined that each phase of sunrise was presided over by an appropriate deity: the Aswins first, then Usha (or Dawn) in her three forms, the grey, the bright, and the resplendent, and finally, the Sun with his five phases.⁴⁵

      In the Vedic system of linked equivalences, the Sun is sometimes referred to as savitar, which is a name for the God Indra also; Savitri is feminine, whereas savitar is masculine, and means a mother or a cow; and a cow, again, can mean a ray of truth, and 'lost cows' may mean 'hidden truths'; and savitri means a ray of light and also the Gayatri mantra. By sleight of hand as it were, the poet can shift from one sense to another, or imply two or more at one and the same time. Thus Sri Aurobindo could not have chosen a richer, a more many-sided, or a profounder symbol than Savitri—the name, the person, the power—at once to unify and fill the immense epic canvas of his great poem.

      There is, further, the double conception of the Surya Savitri and the Bhaga Savitri, who are themselves aspects of Surya, the Sun; for the Sun is, not only Truth, but also Light; he is the creator (Surya Savitri), the fosterer or increaser (Pushan), and the enjoyer (Bhaga Savitri). Like reflections of light on a sheet of trembling water, meanings merge and separate and mingle again in some of these ancient Riks:

      And thou art powerful for every creation; and thou becomest the

      Increaser, O God, by thy movings; and thou illuminest utterly all

      this world of becomings.⁴⁶

      Today, O divine Producer, send forth on us fruitful felicity;

     dismiss what belongs to the evil dream.⁴⁷

Surya Savitri, creator and increaser, and Bhaga Savitri, receiver

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and enjoyer, come into a natural relation or partnership; from the unmanifest come the "seven delights", thanks to Surya Savitri, and Bhaga Savitri prevents their misuse and induces "fruitful felicity", or creative enjoyment:

Surya Savitri, who is Bhaga, stands between the Infinite and the

created worlds within us and without... When in us each creation

of the active Ananda, the prajāvat saubhagam, comes thus out of

the unmanifest, received and heard rightly of the knowledge in

the faultless rhythm of things, then is our creation that of Bhaga

Savitri, and all the births of that creation, our children, our

offspring, prajād, apatyam, are things of the delight, viśva vāmāni.⁴³

Nay more: Savitri the creator, Surya Savitri, is not only Bhaga, but also three other divinities: Varuna, Mitra and Aryaman. Surya and Savitri are themselves a unity in difference, the passive and the active (rather like light and heat); Surya the light of Reality, which is satyam ritam brihat—or the truth, the right and the vast—and Savitri its dynamic or creative aspect, are inseparably linked, being but the reverse and obverse of the same ultimate Truth. But Savitri is also the power to approach from the human end, and this is the reason why the Gayatri mantra, the holiest and most celebrated verse in the Veda,⁴⁹ is addressed to Savitri and is besides referred to as the Savitri mantra as well. As the creator-spirit (sancrus spiritus), Savitri is invoked to inspire and charge with his power and presence the thoughts of his worshippers.

      It is Savitri who makes the human body the home of the affiliated deities—Varuna, Mitra, Aryaman and Bhaga—who signify graces and powers and functions of their own. Varuna is the power of the indefinable Infinite, from which is derived everything else; less distinct than the other gods because he is the manifestation of omniscience, and being everywhere, present and active, his particular presence and activity are apt to be blurred or little noticed. Mitra, on the other hand, is more to the foreground; he is beauty and grace, he is builder and harmoniser, he is embracer and container. And Varuna and Mitra

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are complementary.-to each other. The third deity, Aryaman, is the patient executant, the traveller of the worlds of striving, the pathfinder who hews his way through the jungles of resistance and difficulty, and takes us in his wake to the threshold of the luminous sanctuary where the journey ends and the blissful enjoyment of Bhaga awaits us:

The goal of the path is the divine beatitude, the illimitable joy of

the Truth, of the infinity of our being. Bhaga is the godhead who

brings this joy and supreme felicity into the human consciousness;

he is the divine enjoyer in man.. .Bhaga is Savitri the Creator, he

who brings forth from the unmanifest Divine the truth of a

divine universe, dispelling from us the evil dream of this lower

consciousness in which we falter amidst a confused tangle of truth

and falsehood, strength and weakness, joy and suffering.. .Thus

is the divine creation of the fourfold Savitri founded on Varuna,

combined and guided by Mitra, achieved by Aryaman, enjoyed

in Bhaga: Aditi the infinite Mother realises herself in the human

being by the birth and works of her glorious children.⁵⁰

Although at first the references to the various, the numerous, divinities of Vedic mythology may tend to confuse, a closer scrutiny will reveal a sparkling system of psychological correspondences, imposing thereby a significant unity in difference on the whole. The clue to the puzzle is that "each god contains in himself all the others, but remains still himself in his peculiar function."⁵¹ Naming the different limbs of the body, doesn't destroy the unity of the whole; each limb has its character and function, yet the whole is somehow more than the sum of the parts; and the Vedic deities bear the same relation of Reality that the limbs bear to the human body:

The Vedic deities are names, powers, personalities of the universal

Godhead and they represent each some essential puissance of the

Divine Being. They manifest the cosmos and are manifest in it.

Children of Light, Sons of the Infinite, they recognise in the soul

of man their brother and ally and desire to help and increase him

by themselves increasing in him so as to possess his world with

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their light, strength and beauty. The Gods call man to a divine

companionship and alliance.. .To the Vedic seers they (the Gods)

are living realities; the vicissitudes of the human soul represent

a cosmic struggle not merely of principles and tendencies but of

the cosmic Powers which support and embody them...On the

world-stage and in the individual soul the same real drama with

the same personages is enacted.⁵²

 The key-sentence is the last: the same drama is played, with the same actors, both on the world-stage and in the theatre of the individual soul. The macrocosm is the microcosm; infinity is reflected, is summed up, in a grain of sand. The cosmic drama is also the human drama; Savitri the cosmic symbol is also the human legend.

      A drama, whether cosmic or human, or cosmic as well as human, implies a conflict—a conflict clinched by the tragedy of defeat or the fulfilment of victory. One term of the conflict is the Sun, in his double aspect of light and heat, knowledge and power, an "all-illumining Light" and an "all-creative Truth", the body of Surya and the force of Savitri. The other term of the conflict is—shall we say?—Death, in his double aspect of Darkness and Ignorance, Falsehood and Nescience. But, then, how did the conflict start in the first instance? This is really the central mystery of phenomenal existence, and taking his cue from the Vedic revelatory hints Sri Aurobindo attempts the following explanation of the origins of the cosmic conflict:

This antinomy between the Light and the Darkness, the Truth

and the Falsehood has its roots in an original cosmic antinomy

between the illumined Infinite and the darkened finite

consciousness. Aditi the infinite, the undivided, is the mother

of the Gods, Diti or Danu, the division, the separative consciousness

the mother of the Titans; therefore the gods in man move towards

light, infinity and unity, the Titans dwell in their cave of the

darkness and issue from it only to break up, make discordant,

wounded, limited his knowledge, will, strength, joy and being.⁵³

In Sri Aurobindo's poem, the two aspects of the first term are incarnated

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as Satyavan and Savitri: the all-illuminating light and the all-creative truth, light's being and its truth-becoming. The second term, of course, is Yama or Death, not the Yama that is both Death and Dharma, but the Yama that is Death and Falsehood and Ignorance and all the scheming, deluding, baffling Titans who obstruct the passage to Bhaga or Felicity. The two terms thus become three: Satyavan, self-luminous, passively right and purposive; Savitri, a flame of energy, actively creative and truth-becoming; and Death, active, false, destructive. The drama turns out to be a trial of strength between Savitri and Death for the redemption of Satyavan, who is for a time the lost Sun, but presently re-emerges in all his splendour in the company of Savitri, while the shades of Night and Death retreat and disappear.

      The essence of the Vedic drama of imprisonment, struggle and release is that Aditi the infinite consciousness is, "espoused and held by the lower creative power which works through the limited mind and body", but is ultimately, "delivered from this subjection by the force of the divine or illumined Mind born of her in the mentality of man".⁵⁴ But in Sri Aurobindo's handling of the theme, there is an even greater wideness and totality of comprehension than any simple statement of the Vedic conception or of even the Aurobindonian worldview would suggest. Being poetry, and especially symbolic mystical poetry, Savitri is richer in its overtones and more massive in its comprehension than any merely intellectual formulations.

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