Savitri

        III

'The Wonderful Poem'

Such is the Mahabharata 'legend'. No summary or paraphrase, no attempt at translation, can do adequate justice to the bareness and strength and utter self-sufficiency of the original. Not a word is wasted, and as one reads the poem one feels that what needs to be said has been said; one accepts the story as something primordial and permanently significant like the Sun itself. There are other 'episodes'—the Nala and the Sakuntala, for example—in the Mahabharata that have also won the affections of many generations of men, but the Savitri stands apart even among them, verily a star. "The 'story of Savitri' is the gem of the whole poem", wrote Alfred Wallace,⁵ "and I cannot recall anything in poetry more beautiful, or any higher teaching as to the sanctity of love and marriage. We have really not advanced one step beyond this old-world people in our ethical standards."

      Savitri is presented by the ancient poet as beauty, truth, goodness, and, above all, power incarnate. She is the gift of the Goddess Savitri and the fruit of eighteen years' severe austerities. She is so beautiful that like the Sun itself she keeps at a distance would-be wooers. She doesn't speak an untrue word even in small matters. She radiates goodness as a matter of course, and all benefit by it. But shakti or power is what makes Savitri unique among the heroines of legend and history. It is characteristic of her that she never weeps. Satyavan weeps aloud thinking of his parents, Dyumatsena weeps thinking of his son; Savitri does not weep—not when Narad speaks the cruel words, not when Satyavan dies, nor when, after coming back to life, he breaks down at the thought of his parents. Neither is it callousness, indifference, or want of feeling; rather is it the measure of her stern purpose, her poised readiness to face any eventuality whatsoever, her tranquil consciousness of her own strength.

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      Tom Dutt, the marvellous Bengali girl who mastered two 'alien' languages like English and French and wrote with distinction in both, felt attracted to the Savitri story and translated it into English verse. The daughter of a Christian convert, yet she felt drawn to this Hindu story (as also to another great Hindu heroine, Sita). "The chief thing in Savitri's life which attracted the vehement soul of Toru", writes S.V. Mukerjea, "was that she could not but have been the child of a society of freedom."⁶ A society where purdah, male domination and child marriages are the governing factors could certainly not have evolved such a heroine as Savitri. Yet it would be wrong to call Savitri an Amazon, a vague Indian Penthesilea. For there is a quality in Savitri—her flaming love for Satyavan—that gathers up and gives edge to her other qualities, her beauty, truthfulness, goodness and power. She is the eternal feminine coming from the home of the Absolute, not the conventional feminine—the fair sex, the weaker sex, made out of one of the ribs of Man!

      If Savitri never weeps, neither does she ever beg or play the pathetic suppliant. When Narad's terrible warning is uttered and Aswapati asks her to choose again, she doesn't plead with them to be permitted to marry Satyavan; she merely says that once only can her heart be given away. It is Narad who changes his mind and persuades Aswapati to give her in marriage to Satyavan. Neither divine sage nor terrestrial king is able to resist her simple steely resolution. She takes the decision to undertake the tri-rāttra vow herself; her father-in-law later merely acquiesces in her decision. Hers is the decision not to touch food even on the fourth day till nightfall; hers too is the decision to accompany her husband on the fatal day to the woods. "I'm determined to go with you, please don't forbid me", she tells Satyavan; even her request to her parents-in-law is couched in such terms that there can be only one answer.

      When the anticipated blow comes at last and life is extinct in Satyavan and Yama stands in front of her, her self-possession doesn't leave her, she is Savitri still. There is just a hint of defiance (not meant

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as such, though) in her question: Who are you, and what is it you want to do? When Yama carries away Satyavan's life (prana), she follows her husband, and every time speaks only when spoken to by Yama; there is no pleading or entreaty in her voice or aspect; she speaks fairly and truly and wisely, and increasingly Yama is put on the defensive. Yama is also Dharma; the Lord of Death is also—should be also—the Lord of Righteousness. This is the whole point of her gentle, seemingly sententious, speeches. She doesn't ask, it is Yama who offers one boon after another; and she takes them as they come, thinks first of her parents-in-law, then of her own parents, and last only of herself and Satyavan. Yama almost feels instructed more and more, feels awakened to his true role as Dharma, and so it is with relief that he releases Satyavan's life and takes leave of Savitri. As Winternitz remarks,...in the whole of the Mahabharata the idea prevails that Yama, the god of death, is one with Dharma, the personification of Law. But nowhere is the identification of the King of the realm of death with the lord of law and justice expressed so beautifully as in the most magnificent of all brahmanical poems which the epic has preserved, the wonderful poem of faithful Savitri.⁷

      Savitri is thus throughout dignified, masterful and independent without for a second lacking in real womanliness or respect for elders or reverence for tradition. Winternitz is right when he says that Savitri "recalls more the women of heroic poetry, such as Draupadi, Kunti and Vidula, than the brahmanical ideal of woman",⁸ though it is doubtful whether even these, great as is their capacity to suffer and sacrifice, measure upto Savitri's incandescent purity of motive and action. If Savitri transcends the brahmanical ideal of woman because throughout she acts as a being essentially free, electrically free, from considerations other than the imperatives of Dharma, she transcends no less the merely heroic or even tragic ideal of woman, because she is never racked by a sense of guilt, she is never uncertain of herself, she is involved in no 'inner struggle'; on the other hand, her sense of direction is uncanny, the way she gets ready for the

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event shows how well she can time her actions, and her words, gestures and general strategy and particular tactics are those of an infallible General, a self-poised self-sustained Woman of Destiny. She is the darling daughter, the loving girl-wife, the solicitous daughter-in-law, no doubt; she forgets none of the duties of a daughter, of a wife, or of a daughter-in-law. Yet, even as she is ideally these, she also transcends them, and is also the protectress, the benefactress, of her father's and her husband's families as well.

      The Savitri story takes up about 700 lines in the original Sanskrit, but the quality of the poetry is pure molten gold. To quote Winternitz again, "Only a great poet was capable of placing this noble female character before us so that we seem to see her before our eyes. Only a true poet could have described in such a touching and elevating manner the victory of love and constancy, of virtue and wisdom, over destiny and death, without even for an instant falling into the tone of the dry preacher of morality."⁹

      The scenes, the characters, and the tremendous action in which they are both intimately implicated, all literally tingle with life. No theme can be more 'romantic', for it is a story of love at first sight, love defying destiny, love victorious over death; yet no theme could have been rendered with more 'classic' restraint and poise, or more immaculate 'Apollonian' grace. The poet waves his wand, and we see the king engaged in the self-absorbed concentration of tapas invoking the blessings of the Goddess Savitri; the poet waves his wand, and the scene where Savitri's resolution gets the better of Narad and Aswapati leaps before our eyes; again the poet waves his wand, and the forest, its groves, its pools, its rivers, the agnihotra sacrifices, the elected silences are upon us, and we are a part of them; or we watch the deathless scene of the retreat of Death; or we admire Savitri's attention to detail when she hangs the pot of fruits from the branch of a tree and carries the axe herself, lest Satyavan should be encumbered with it; or we watch with a rush of tenderness and a feeling of personal relief and joy the reunited couple, his left arm on her shoulder, her right arm around his waist, returning in 'the dark that is light enough' to their hermitage.

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        The Savitri story inevitably challenges comparison with the much longer Nala story, which also finds a place in the Vana Parva of the Mahabharata. Nala is more of a tragic hero, and Damayanti more of a long-suffering heroine, than Satyavan or Savitri. Damayanti is a heroine wholly without blemish, and Nala himself is more sinned against than sinning; it is the dark God who engineers most of the mischief. Humanity could almost raise the plaint, "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods!" The Savitri story is reared on quite other foundations. Man here is master of his fate; Woman is shakti, the redeemer, the transvaluer of values, the subduer of destiny. Comparing the two stories Sri Aurobindo writes:

The Nala.. .has the delicate and unusual romantic grace of a young

and severe classic who has permitted himself to go a-maying

in the fields of romance. There is a remote charm of restraint in

the midst of abandon, of vigilance in the play of fancy which is

passing sweet and strange. The Savitri is a maturer and nobler

work, perfect and restrained in detail, but it has still some glow

of the same youth and grace over it.¹⁰

Idea and word, character and action, background, atmosphere, the psychological tension, the drama in Death's dream kingdom, all crystallise into a radiant and sparkling unity.

      Although Savitri can be read simply as a poem, since there is nowhere any obtrusive religious or ethical stress, still the story of Savitri has in the course of the ages come to be invested with a primal religious significance that transcends all regional, sectarian or racial considerations. Savitri remains the heroine of legend to lovers of poetry, but she is also to the Hindus, to Hindu women especially, a very personal goddess, and to this day girls and wives perform the Savitri-vrata to ensure a happy married life for themselves. Rama is the hero of the Ramayana, but he is also the prince who became God to millions of devoted Hindus; Krishna is the protagonist of the Bhagavata and Arjuna's friend and charioteer in the Mahabharata, but he is the Lord of Brindavan too, the bhagavan who indites the Gita, to his numberless devotees. Likewise, Savitri is the goddess of virgin purity and married fruitfulness, of goodness and truth and faithfulness and strength. She is not formally worshipped as other deities are, but she has her rosy sanctuary in the untrodden regions of Hindu women's minds and hearts, and she reigns there forever.

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