Savitri

 THE STRUGGLE AND

  THE VICTORY

      Then came, at a predetermined moment,

a moment in time and of time,

 A moment not out of time, but in time, in what

we call history: transecting, bisecting the world

of time, a moment in time but not like a moment of time,

A moment in time but time was made through that moment:

 for without the meaning there is no time,

 and that moment of time gave the meaning.

                                                                               T.S.ELIOT

      SECTION A

      'THE BOOK OF DEATH'

     I

The Two Missing Cantos

       In the two opening cantos of Savitri, the action of the epic begins, as in Western epics like the Iliad and Paradise Lost, at a critical point even the most critical; the action plunges in medias res, into the middle of things: it is the dawn of the day when Satyavan is fated to die according to Sage Narad's reading of the future. After the first two cantos that constitute the exordium, there comes a long, long spell of retrospective narration, sketching the personal and cosmic backgrounds to the central action. This has taken thirty-eight cantos in all out of the forty-nine that now make the poem, or a little over 600 pages out of the total 814 in the definitive one-volume edition of the poem.¹

      Book VIII, entitled "The Book of Death', is to continue in strict time-sequence the story as begun in the first two cantos of Book I. But ol the three projected cantos of Book VIII, only canto 3 seems actually to have been completed by Sri Aurobindo from an earlier version and rewritten at places.² The reference to the trirāttra (three-night)

fast in the original Mahabharata has already been transformed by Sri Aurobindo into the vast dimensions of 'The Book of Yoga', which describes Savitri's realisations of her secret self, of cosmic consciousness, and, finally, of supracosmic or transcendent consciousness.

      The events of the fateful day from dawn to evening are compressed into a few pregnant verses in the Mahabharata, and nothing that is material is omitted in canto 3.Thus it is difficult to speculate as to how Sri Aurobindo had planned to fill the spaces of the proposed cantos 1 and 2, for canto 3 itself forms a natural continuation of the story impressively begun in Book I, cantos 1 and 2. Probably Sri Aurobindo had tentatively divided Book VIII into three cantos, hoping to enlarge the scope of the present canto 3 so as to split it meaningfully into three cantos and give Book VIII an ampler base and a richer substance. However, taking the poem as it is, the supposed gap in Book VIII, though it intrigues us a litde and introduces a possible element of incompleteness, doesn't vitally affect our comprehension of the epic action or really impair the striking unity of the whole. Once we concentrate on the foreground action, that is to say, once we shift our gaze from antecedents and backgrounds to the centre of the stage, the drama involving Savitri and Satyavan on the appointed day—the drama proceeds from dawn to evening, from evening to night, from night to twilight, and from twilight to day.

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