Savitri

      PART II

      SAVITRI

      Meet ye the Dawn

    as she shines wide

    towards you

  and with surrender

     bring forward

    your complete energy.

      Exalted in heaven

is the force

to which she rises

 establishing the sweetness;

she makes the luminous worlds

to shine forth

and is a vision

of Felicity.

                                    Rig Veda

THE EXORDIUM

"If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses,

what might not the heart of man become in its long journey

towards the stars?"

                                                                                       G. K. Chesterton

      I

'The Symbol Dawn'

      Sri Aurobindo's chosen aim in life was to show earth-bound : mortals the path that leads to the Life Divine. It was to illustrate this passage to the earthly paradise that he wrote his epic Savitri, a masterpiece of sustained philosophical motivation and steeped in mysticism and yoga sadhana.

      The well-known story of the young wife, Savitri, who saved her husband from an untimely death, thus scoring a victory over the seeming inexorability of Fate, is here swathed in the robes of Vedantic metaphysics and given a poetic reincarnation. Savitri thus evokes, not only the heroic girl-wife of immemorial legend, but also our Universal Mother who bears with infinite patience and immaculate strength the trials and tribulations of mortality and succeeds in the end in vouchsafing immortality to the children of the earth.

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       This ambrosial story is unfolded to the sahrdaya through a succession of images and symbols. Sri Aurobindo's poem opens, as a literary epic usually does, on the crucial day that is to witness the central act of the epic. The past is mapped out in a sudden flashback, the future will be summed up later. The present is what matters, and the poem is concerned with it.

      Savitri, the princess of Madra and darling daughter of King Aswapati, has married the exiled King Dyumatsena's dear son, Satyavan. She is living in the forest with her husband and his elders, sharing uncomplainingly their austere life. Between Savitri and Satyavan a true marriage of minds has been effected. Satyavan is blissfully happy; Savitri too, but her joy is marred by the uneasiness which has been caused by her knowing the approaching end—the fate of Satyavan—as warned by the celestial bard, Narad. Thus the young wife perforce leads a two-fold existence, outwardly serving her elders and preserving an angelic calm, but inwardly dreading the Day and its ominous consequences. And the Day has now arrived. The poem starts here:

      Night is fleeing and Dawn is approaching.

      It was the hour before the Gods awake.¹

      It is an arresting opening, instinct with immeasurable significance. This first canto evokes the 'symbol dawn' and dwells on its varied filiations with life and the spiral of Consciousness. The whole canto is so charged with mystic symbolism that, in a manner of speaking, it is dense and not easily penetrable. Such poetry makes its impact on us by sudden illuminations rather than by the dull steady light of a logical sequence of ideas. A vision is presented to us, and it slowly grows and expands its orbit. First there is the Night—it is pitch dark, for generally the hour immediately preceding Dawn is the darkest of the hours of darkness. Yet, through this dense night, peep the rays of twilight. Presently Dawn envelops the world in a maze of hazy light, and darkness withdraws quiveringly, like the demoness Lankini leaving her guardianship of Lanka's gates with the approach of the

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Sun-like resplendent Hanuman. The process is simultaneous—light coming and darkness retreating and vanishing. And Dawn heralds the Day, even as Aruna heralds Surya.

      This sublime picture of Dawn is verily infused with the symbolism of growth in consciousness: that is, Woman inconscient waking up from her stupor and becoming slowly transformed into the superconscient goddess. Sri Aurobindo's aim in retelling the familiar story of Savitri is to show how the mind that at first partakes of the inconscience of the lowest depths or rungs of life, passes through successive stages of evolution, and at last attains the highest, the Superconscient. In the first canto itself Sri Aurobindo hints at these vistas of higher consciousness, leading man from the lowest to the topmost rung of the evolutionary ladder.

      The key symbol is Dawn. It is preceded by Night which is both silent and grim:

Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable

In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse

The abysm of the unbodied Infinite...²

There is a shower of diction evoking the deep, impenetrable, lethargic, sombre, incomprehensible night. Inconscient matter lies inert, like a coiled pythoness of a woman:

      Its formless stupor without mind or life....³

But in this seemingly 'fathomless zero' lie nevertheless the germs of immortal life. The banian tree waxes immense through centuries in its majestic grandeur. But where lay its beginning? In the tiny seed planted in the womb of the nascent earth! Thus, for the life that ultimately attains the Superconscient, the germ still is the inert, unformed, inconscient matter.⁴ This germ stirs to induce the birth of life. The stir is very slight, gentle and almost imperceptible; it is a "nameless movement, an unthought idea." This movement is personified in a "long lone line of hesitating hue" that heralds the coming Dawn; bringing in her wake the promise of the supramental age:

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        Dawn built her aura of magnificent hues....⁵

Earth's children have risen, and they spring to their daily tasks. Savitri too has risen. But although she is in it, she is not of it. When people around her are immersed in their daily tasks, she goes about with her heart rendered numb by the coming ordeal. Her face is calm, and outwardly she is merely the stern daughter of Duty. But:

      A dark foreknowledge separated her

      From all of whom she was the star and stay.. .⁶

      She has to face an ordeal and save Satyavan and safeguard

      humanity's future, and to accomplish this divine task,

      Unhelped she must foresee and dread and dare.⁷

For Savitri knows that this long-awaited Dawn ushers in "the day when Satyavan must die".

      So much for the coming of light and the gathering of consciousness out of night and unformed matter. In this canto Sri Aurobindo uses a carefully balanced structure of symbols to demonstrate the emergence of knowledge from the amorphous matter of ignorance. Three women are introduced in this connection. The swarthy woman, Night; the efflorescent damsel, Dawn; and, mediating between them, Savitri, who is human as well as divine.

      Night is like Lankini, the demoness-deity of Ravana's Lanka. It is next to impossible to detect life in any form or cultivate consciousness of any kind in this unintelligible chaos. This woman clad in funereal robes is the denial of all hopes—or so it seems at first. The idea of supramental bliss is incongruous in the context of this impenetrable veil of unfeeling, unintelligible matter. Where, then, is the hope for man—Earth's child—who yearns for the Life Divine, when what he faces is this:

      ...shadow spinning through a soulless Void...? ⁸

But this dark mud nevertheless contains the sapling for tomorrow's fresh white lotus.

      Presently Earth's child sees the gay dawn approaching, and most welcome is her approach. It is the Goddess Usha who symbolises

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the Superconscient. Man naturally wants to cast away the badges of temporal limitation that he has been wearing till now, and gather the life eternal that Usha symbolises. She comes bringing with her the "God-touch" that promises Fulfilment and interprets:

      .. .a recondite beauty and bliss

      In colour's hieroglyphs of mystic sense...

      .. .the lines of a significant myth

      Telling of a greatness of spiritual dawns...⁹

Goddess Usha has come; the seed in the black earth has become the beautiful rose; a sweet odour pervades the earth; early birds are chirping; the far east is presently glowing russet-hued; the wind is fresh and free. Thus the coming of Usha is very auspicious for the mortal who aspires for immortality.

      But all is not right with the world which wants to reach God in his Heaven, as it knows not the way. How will the ordinary mortal reach the dizzy heights of the soul's high mountains? How will the sapling inside the mire blow forth a divine lotus? Man is either depressed and rendered hopeless by the gaping mass of inconscient matter that is symbolised through Night, or he is astonished and left helpless by the dazzle of the Superconscient symbolised by the Goddess Usha. Is there no way for the ordinary mortal to cut through the coils of uncivilised demoniac dominations imposed by formless matter and embrace the Life Divine of civilised angelic Brahma-Knowledge? There is, says Sri Aurobindo, and paints in apt poetic hues the sufferings and successes of our Primordial Mother represented in the light-stepping slender-waisted Savitri.

      In the first canto itself a hurried but memorable hint of Savitri's life and trial has been given. After all, we know the story of Savitri's struggle and victory. It is this Savitri of popular legend that is seen to forge the link between the inconscient matter and the Superconscient Life Divine. The life-giving rays of the Sun turn the tiny seed buried in the pond into a bright pearly lotus.

      Savitri begins her life as an artless innocent princess born amidst wealth and comfort. Then she assumes the role of the Redeemer whose mission is to transform this meaningless mortal life into the purposeful Life Divine. "Savitri is represented in the poem", says Sri Aurobindo, "as an incarnation of the Divine Mother. This incarnation is supposed to have taken place in far past times when the whole thing had to be opened, so as to 'hew the ways of Immortality' ."¹⁰

      As a mortal, Savitri weds Satyavan, who symbolises Truth, pure and unsullied. Truth at first succumbs to Death, to the poison of ignorance. Savitri, now the incarnation, roused by this outrage, and armed with Love and Righteousness, wins back Truth (Satyavan), and the couple reunite to inaugurate the Life Eternal on earth.

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