Savitri

  SAVITRI'S STORY

      SECTION A

      THE BOOK OF BIRTH AND QUEST'

      I

      'THE BlRTH AND CHILDHOOD

      OF THE FLAME'

      There are two backgrounds to the central drama played in Savitri. There is the cosmic background, sketched already in Books II and III—'The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds' and 'The Book of the Divine Mother', and there is the human background, to be sketched now in Book IV, 'The Book of Savitri's Birth and Quest'. The wider cosmic background includes the smaller human background, for they are both centred in Savitri. Aswapati's Yoga articulates the earth's cry for perfection, and in answer, the Power behind the cosmos promises the advent of Savitri. Aswapati's aspirations on behalf of evolving humanity are to be realised by Savitri, though only after a struggle. The struggle and the victory are the hard core of the drama of Savitri, the rest is epic scaffolding. The outer scaffolding being

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concluded, Sri Aurobindo now turns to the nearer scaffolding, that is, Savitri's earlier story upto the dawn of the fateful day in her and in the world's history. This recital takes four Books, made up of sixteen cantos. It is only when this spell of retrospective narration is over that the drama can be continued from the point where it has been left at the end of Book I, canto 2.

      Revolving earth participates in the cycle of the seasons. The sea of inconscience beats against the shores of infinity. Life appears obscurely, appears and disappears and reappears. The seasons pass, the seasons return. What is the far-off event towards which all creation is striving?

Amid the ambiguous stillness of the stars

She moved towards some undisclosed event

And her rhythm measured the long whirl of Time.¹⁵⁷

The seasons are turns in the rhythm, and mark "the symbol pageant of the changing year". First summer, with its violent noons and torrid light, "and the blue seal of a great burnished sky", follows the season of rain-tide, the sky is overcast with clouds, the furrowed earth receives the torrents, and heaven's waters trail and dribble through the drowned land. The dry soil is muddied and miry, earth assumes a dull-grey look, till "a last massive deluge" clears up the mess and leaves everything in "lulled repose". It is the creative mating of the sky and the earth, the secret fashioning of the cosmic purpose.

      A calmness neared as of the approach of God,

      A light of musing trance lit soil and sky

      And an identity and ecstasy

      Filled meditation's solitary heart.

      A dream loitered in the dumb mind of Space,

      Time opened its chambers of felicity,

      An exaltation entered and a hope:...¹⁵⁸

As the days and months pass, as "three thoughtful seasons" scan their pregnant hours, there is the expectancy of a flame, a mighty

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birth to come. Summer has given place to autumn, which in turn is followed by winter: the season of mellow fruitfulness is followed by dew-time conservation, and the "tranquil beauty of the waning year":

      Then Spring, an ardent lover, leaped through leaves

      And caught the earth-bride in his eager clasp;

      His advent was a fire of irised hues,

      His arms were a circle of the arrival of joy.¹⁵⁹

Million-hued, joy blossoms forth, and to live is very ecstasy; all sights, all voices, breathe new charm; colours fuse into patterns of delight, while cries coalesce into litanies, and all Nature is at beauty's festival.

      Spring always signals the "arrival of joy", but a special and unique joy is Aswapati's when, in answer to his yearning and the earth's, "a mediating ray" touches the human vessel and lights a new lamp. There is verily "a consanguinity of earth and heaven", for ever since the earth-plasm first tingled with life, heaven is invading earth and pressing "perfection on life's stumbling powers". But although relapses are easy and success eludes, the strivings continue without intermission and heaven drives the earth to new attempts at reaching infinitude. At the culmination of many such adventures in transcendence there is this new descent invoked by the pressure of Aswapati's Yoga—Savitri is conceived, Savitri is born. An immaculate event in this symbol spring of humanity's reviving year, the child is "as yet a prophecy only and a hint"; but she is more, much more, when new dawns fill her with beauty and purpose:

      Even in her childish movements could be felt

      The nearness of a light still kept from earth,...

      As needing nothing but its own rapt flight

      Her nature dwelt in a strong separate air

      Like a strange bird with large rich-coloured breast

      That sojourns on a secret fruited bough,

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       Lost in the emerald glory of the woods

      Or flies above divine unreachable tops.¹⁶⁰

Savitri's childhood and girlhood are a wonder apart, for while she is apparently at home in the world of Nature and man, she is also not of it, she is ruled by an occult godhead, and it is as though,

      Invisibly protected from our sense

      The Dryad lives drenched in a deeper ray

      And feels another air of storms and calms

      And quivers inwardly with mystic rain.¹⁶¹

The traditional stories of "Krishna Lila" reveal the boy who was also God, the innocence that was also Wisdom, the baby-tenderness that was also sovereign Power. Likewise, in the life of the child and girl Savitri, a tenuous line separates the human from the divine:

      As from the soil sprang glory of branch and flower,

      As from the animal's life rose thinking man,

      A new epiphany appeared in her.

      A mind of light, a life of rhythmic force,

      A body instinct with hidden divinity

      Prepared an image of the coming god;...¹⁶²

As the years add to her strength of limb and grace of form, as the movements of her heart gather the world into her and endear her to all, even so her 'solitary greatness' only grows and grows, a warrior will paces "in her city of strength/Inviolate, guarding Truth's diamond throne".¹⁶³

      Sri Aurobindo's description of the birth and childhood of Savitri is far from conventional. The legend and the symbol intertwine and contribute to their mutual enrichment. The magnificent account of the burst of rain-tide, the rumble of thunder and the dazzle of lightning, the "emissary javelins" and the "surge and hiss and onset of huge rain", the assault of the sky on the recumbent earth, the downpour and drip, the fullness and the exhaustion, the contentment and the lulled repose, all suggestively lead to the promised miraculous

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event of Savitri's conception and her birth, "three thoughtful seasons" later, in the season of spring. The cosmic and terrestrial planes meet in an intimate embrace, and out of the flux and the tension, the passion and the creative will, is born the child Savitri who shall be the redeemer, the saviour. Of the child Lucy, William Wordsworth writes:

      Three years she grew in sun and shower,

      Then Nature said, 'A lovelier flower

      On earth was never sown;

      This Child I to myself will take....'

 The occult powers behind the phenomena of Nature lend Savitri their graces and their strengths, as Nature moulds Lucy; but Savitri draws to herself other powers too, from the home and base of all:

      An invisible sunlight ran within her veins

      And flooded her brain with heavenly brilliances

      That woke a wider sight than earth could know.¹⁶⁴

She is the dream made real, "an image made of heaven's transparent light", a "perfect whole", harmonious, immense and various; a "golden bridge" spanning earth and heaven.

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