Savitri

      XI

Symbolism in Savitri

While Sri Aurobindo found the bardic story a piece of pure and austere sublimity, he felt that it could be rendered anew in the current idiom of our century in the light of his own spiritual quests, struggles and fulfilments. His basic thesis is that Felicity, if it is to come, must come here, here on earth, and even when the soul is undivorced from the body. If the many human instruments, mind, soul, emotions, works, could be god-inspired and god-directed, so could the body itself be. Mere asceticism is vain; inflicting on the body all sorts of punishment cannot lead to any easy escape. The body too is the house of the Spirit, and the body could be made to deserve that honour. An integral transformation of all the elements that make man is indeed the whole aim of the evolutionary adventure. Sri Aurobindo saw this—almost experienced it—as a distinct possibility and as a near probability. In The Life Divine he wrote:

Life and the body would be no longer tyrannous masters

demanding nine-tenths of their satisfaction, but means and

powers for the expression of the spirit. At the same time, since

the matter and the body are accepted, the control and the right

use of physical things would be a part of the realised life of the

spirit in the manifestation in earth-nature.⁵⁸

"The matter and the body are accepted", accepted and made fit instruments for housing the divine; this is no turning away from life,

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seeking felicity in a remote Vaikuntha or Paradise in a vague hereafter but seeking it here and now.

      Sri Aurobindo affirmed, indeed, that an integral transformation a divinisation, of human nature and earth-nature is a thing "decreed and inevitable".⁵⁹ He even laid down the main lines of this progressive transformation in his treatise, The Synthesis of Yoga and hinted at the nature of the final change:

The integral liberation comes when this passion for release,

mumksutuia, founded on distaste or vairāgya, is itself transcended;

the soul is then liberated both from attachment to the lower action

of nature and from all repugnance to the cosmic action of the

Divine. This liberation gets its completeness when the spiritual

gnosis can act with a supramental knowledge and reception of the

action of Nature and a supramental luminous will in initiation.

The gnosis discovers the spiritual sense in Nature, God in things,

the soul of good in all things that have the contrary appearance.

The liberation of the Nature becomes one with the liberation

of the spirit, and there is founded in the integral freedom the

integral perfection.⁶⁰

Adam and Eve, in their state of innocence, inhabited and filled with their unblemished joy an earthly Paradise; and such paradise felicity  certainly didn't exclude the pleasures of the body. A return to such paradisal felicity, an establishment here of the life divine, must mean

the breaking of the seals of our present human imperfection—namely, false desire, the corroding feeling of failure and incapacity, the dread of unavoidable death.

      Are we asking for the impossible? Is it more prudent to accept our present limitations? Is it foolhardy to take up arms against this  seeming sea of the impossible? But such false prudence can be a "deadly sin", says Abercrombie:

      For this refuseth faith in the unknown powers

      Within man's nature...

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      Narrows desire into the scope of thought.

      But it is written in the heart of man,

      Thou shalt no larger be than thy desire...

      But send desire often forth to scan

      The immense night which is thy greater soul;

      Knowing the possible, see thou try beyond it

      Into impossible things, unlikely ends;

      And thou shalt find thy knowledgeable desire

      Grow large as all the regions of thy soul,

      Whose firmament doth cover the whole of Being,

      And of created purpose reach the ends.⁶¹

Prudence tells Savitri that Satyavan, being fated to die within a year, is no suitable husband for her; prudence tells her, again, that irresistible fate is not to be checkmated. Yet she sets herself against Fate; the impossible becomes possible; the lie becomes the truth. Sri Aurobindo too refused, as a Yogi, as a philosopher and as a poet, "to recognise the physical breaking-up as an inescapable destiny".⁶² It was an earthly paradise, a human divinity, that seemed to him the goal of the whole evolutionary process.

      In Sri Aurobindo's epic, as in the old bardic legend, Savitri strives by herself, but not for herself alone. In the legend, along with Satyavan regaining his life, Dyumatsena regains his eyesight and kingdom, and Aswapati has the promise of a hundred sons; in the epic, Satyavan's returning to life means all these, and also the inauguration of a new age in man's and earth's history. Savitri and Satyavan are the "firstborn of a new supernal race"; they are the Supreme's dual power—she the Force, he the Soul-—set in the world to refashion human nature and earth-nature. The promise is given:

      Mortality's bond-slaves shall unloose their bonds,

      Mere men into spiritual beings grow

      And see awake the dumb divinity.⁶³

This is more than a personal or individual victory, more even than the recovery of a kingdom or the promise of increase and prosperity; this is a revolutionary change, this is a total victory. In Savitri are exemplified the powers and personalities of the Vedic Varuna, Mitra, Aryaman and Bhaga; and it is her adamantine purpose, arduous preparation, and inflexibly vigilant struggle in the dark spaces of Night, the quick-sands of Twilight, and the blinding regions of utter Day that help her to, "bring down into this world of obscurity and falsehood and death and suffering Truth and Light and Life divine and the immortal's Ananda .⁶⁴

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