Savitri

  SECTION C

      'THE BOOK OF THE DOUBLE TWILIGHT'

Already, in Book IX, while the dramatic situation derives from the Mahabharata original, the dialectic in which Savitri and Death (Yama) engage begins increasingly to assume a distinctly Aurobindonian hue and cast. In Vyasa's epic, Savitri is the pure wife whose deathless love for her husband moves Yama—who is also Dharma Raja or Lord of Righteousness—to compassion as well as admiration, till at last he readily grants her the final boon of Satyavan's return to life. Essentially, Savitri is the silent and worthy suppliant, while Yama is the gracious and righteous giver

      In the Aurobindonian conception, on the other hand, Death (the name 'Yama' is scarcely mentioned) is the static God of ignorance, illusion and destruction, while Savitri is both humanity evolving into divinity and the transcendent divine itself, in other words, a more prepotent power than Death, who has taken a human form, not to destroy or be destroyed, but to fulfil a mission and help the Divine's secret purposes to be fulfilled. From the very beginning almost, Savitri refuses to be cowed down by Death's terrible aspect and imperious attitudes, refuses to be deviated from her set purpose, refuses to be patronised.

      This challenge to his assumed, and so long unquestioned, omnipotence is a new experience for Death, and he is unsure of the moves he should make to frighten or cajole Savitri into acquiescence. His seemingly gracious offer of a boon is accepted by her as though he has but irresistibly complied with her demand. His threats have cut no ice with her, his loud affirmations have been met by her own, not a whit less categorical, nor less instinct with self-assurance and consciousness of power, than his own. Savitri has not got her Satyavan back, nor has Death succeeded in making her drop her demand and go back to her home on the earth. It is the perfect stalemate.

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         Savitri, being more than the 'legend' that it is in the Mahabharata and, in Sri Aurobindo's conception, a 'symbol' besides, the human and the symbolic figures, worlds and actions, generally run parallel; but sometimes either the legend or the symbol monopolises the foreground, though the other too is not ignored altogether. The 'action comprises a single day: dawn to another dawn, quickly passing over morning, noon and afternoon (these are rapidly slurred over in the legendary action described in Book VIII), but lingering over evening, dusk, night and twilight, and ushering in the new dawn of everlasting day. Books IX, X, XI speak of 'Eternal Night', 'Double Twilight' and 'Everlasting Day', the juxtaposition of adjective and substantive in each case suggestive of the dual significance of the action, the legendary and the symbolic.

      Sri Aurobindo has remarked that "the central conception of the Veda is the conquest of the Truth out of the darkness of Ignorance and by the conquest of the Truth also of Immortality".²³ Savitri too is a symbolic scripture when viewed from one angle, and its characters stand out both as persons and as powers, and the esoteric meaning is not less, but perhaps more important than the surface meaning. Death seizes Truth (Satyavan), Darkness swallows up Light; Ignorance has brought about the collapse of Knowledge. Who is Savitri, that she should resist Ignorance, Darkness and Death, and finally recover Light, which is Truth-being or Satyavan?

      Savitri partly harks back to the Sun God who is addressed in a Vedic hymn "as the source of divine knowledge and the creator of the inner worlds",²⁴ and partly to the infinite Mother, Aditi, also with hoary Vedic associations; and above all to the creative inspiration behind Savitri in Sri Aurobindo's own metaphysics as outlined in The Life Divine and his dynamic psychology as set forth in The Synthesis of Yoga. Much of this comes to a head in Book X or 'The Book of the Double Twilight'. In the four cantos of this mass of verse sustained at a consistently high level of poetic inspiration, the dialectical issue between Death and Savitri is joined once again, all arts are tried, thesis is countered by antithesis, the soap-bubble of casuistry is pricked to nothingness, false lures are firmly rejected, challenges are triumphantly accepted; Savitri attempts dialectical persuasion, and fails; when all fails, she assumes her visvarupa or cosmic form, which at long last proves to Death that his game is over, and he retreats into the shadows from which he had come earlier. Savitri has her Satyavan again.

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I

'The Dream Twilight of the Ideal'

      For a time all three, Savitri, Death and Satyavan's spirit, move in a region that is a 'house of void' making for a Nowhere in this land of Nought. If a beam of light anywhere appears at all, even that seems a ghostly unreal thing. Has she been mistaken, after all? Her present discomfiture seems like expiation for the pride of her assumption that, although made of dust, she can be "a living fire of God". Is she to be chastised for her sense of immortality? Is corruption greater than incorruption? That cannot be. The fact is, the superconscient is in a trance of sleep in the inconscience of matter:

      Death is a stair, a door, a stumbling stride

      The soul must take to cross from birth to birth,

      A grey defeat pregnant with victory,

      A whip to lash us towards our deathless state...

      Night is not our beginning nor our end;

      She is the dark Mother in whose womb we have hid

      Safe from too swift a waking to world-pain.²⁵

Now comes a golden fire to burn out the heart of Night; there is the faintest stir of light and consciousness; and "intolerant darkness" pales and slowly draws apart. Night reluctantly gives place to twilight.

      The description of twilight is one of the great passages in Savitri, almost comparable to the evocation of the Symbol Dawn

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in the opening canto. The touches are at once physical and supra-physical, and the lines have—if one may say so—the distinct ring of 'overhead' poetry:

      There is a morning Twilight of the gods;

      Miraculous from sleep their forms arise

      And God's long nights are justified by dawn.

      There breaks a passion and splendour of new birth

      And hue-winged visions stray across the lids,

      The dreaming deities look beyond the seen

      And fashion in their thoughts the ideal worlds

      Sprung from a limitless moment of desire

      That once had lodged in some abysmal heart.

      Passed was the heaviness of the eyeless dark

      And all the sorrow of the night was dead:...²⁶

Savitri is surprised into joy by this decisive change in the prospect; all is strangely, vaguely, intangibly fascinating. Sri Aurobindo repeats the word 'vague' like a soothing caress, a drowsy incantation:

      Vague fields were there, vague pastures gleamed, vague trees,

      Vague scenes dim-hearted in a drifting haze;

      Vague cattle white roamed glimmering through the mist;

      Vague spirits wandered with a bodiless cry,

      Vague melodies touched the soul and fled pursued

      Into harmonious distances unseized;...²⁷

Kaleidoscopic, ever-changing like ever-new formations of clouds, forever playing games that never end, forever holding out hopes that gaily defy realisation, this is a brittle bright world:

      Here vision fled back from the sight alarmed,

      And sound sought refuge from the ear's surprise,

      And all experience was a hasty joy.²⁸

Savitri walks half-enraptured the spaces of this attractive unreal world, "besieged, by the illusion of a mystic space" feasted by the sight "of wonder Satyavan before her". Not Death himself is able quite to darken this lustrous world:

The sombre Shadow sullen, implacable

Made beauty and laughter more imperative;...

Pain grew a trembling undertone of bliss

And transience immortality's floating hem,

A moment's robe in which she looked more fair,

Its antithesis sharpening her divinity.²⁹

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