In the old legendary story, when Savitri returns to her father, she finds the Sage Narad with him. When she says she has chosen Satyavan as her consort, Narad ejaculates that it is a wrong decision: not because Satyavan is not worthy in every way, but because he is fated to die in a year's time. Aswapati asks her to choose again, but Savitri says that she can but choose once. Narad now advises the king to allow the marriage to take place.

This raises a number of questions. What is predestination? If fixed fate is a fact, of what use is free will? What is fate, after all? Is there really no armour against fate? If all is predestination what is left of man's individuality?

Again, in the old story, Savitri not only defies fate but changes its course. Fear of death will not make her give up Satyavan, but there is more in it than the emotional constancy of love. There is stern resolve as well. And there is some secret source of strength that feeds this resolve and makes her victory possible.

In his epic, Sri Aurobindo gives the key place to this act of will on Savitri's part. It is a positive act of commitment to a chosen course, come what may. She will be no thistledown of fate. She will not be deflected from her chosen path by these advancing intimations of predestination.

In this tense psychological drama as it is unfolded in 'The Book of Fate' by Sri Aurobindo, four characters participate: King Aswapati, his queen, Sage Narad and Savitri herself. The queen is just human, and hence sees the problem of love and marriage and fate and death and widowhood in the ordinary way of the world. She would

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take the line of least resistance. Avoid, if possible, the decree of fate; or raise her voice against the rank injustice of it all. Aswapati is the enlightened man, the seer-king, and hence he sees the problem in a wider perspective. Narad the divine-seer can see even further into the future than the king.

But while all three can only talk of what is in their minds, or prevent hasty speech from uttering itself, it is Savitri alone who has to decide: hers is the call to action: she is the protagonist of the play here. Sri Aurobindo accordingly presents these four—the queen, the king, the sage and Savitri—as an ascending order of consciousness, from the mental to the supramental. Savitri needs no advice from Narad nor any encouragement or consolation from her parents. Her decision is made: she knows her way, and she knows that she must go her own way alone. It is the other three who engage in this drama of question and answer, doubt and assurance, and clarify the developing psychological action.

There is one other point, too, to be remembered. In Sri Aurobindo's epic, there is a double significance to every action. If the date of Satyavan's death is pre-determined, so is the common plight of humanity also pre-determined. Man is a prey to desire, incapacity and death. He can whimper, he can wail, but he cannot change his destiny. Fate holds him in complete thrall: It cannot be affected by tears or through prayer. Savitri's decision has thus a special significance in the symbolic action. She is going to redeem, not her husband alone, but humanity also at the same time. Hers, then, is verily a redeemer's role in the action of, the poem. Sri Aurobindo therefore puts into Narad's mouth words that have a special relevance to these two problems: the problem of fate and the role of the redeemer in human affairs.

Before we turn to the poem, it would be instructive to refer to Sri Aurobindo's own views on these subjects as outlined in his more formal writings. In the Indian view, 'fate' and 'karma' are inter-related: "We ourselves are our own fate through our actions, but the fate

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created by us binds us...Still, we are creating our fate for the future even while undergoing old fate from the past in the present. That gives a meaning to our will and action and does not, as European critics wrongly believe, constitute a rigid and sterilizing fatalism. But again, our will and action can often annul or modify even the past Karma..."¹⁹⁸

The cosmos is not a mere machine, all a Law and an unalterable Process; there is a Spirit behind it all, which is the Process as well as the Power that regulates it. "The destiny which binds our physical being", writes Sri Aurobindo, "binds it so long or in so far as a greater law does not intervene. Action belongs to the physical part of us, it is the physical outcome of our being; but behind our surface is a freer life power, a freer mind power which has another energy and can create another destiny and bring it in to modify the primary plan, and when the soul and self emerges, when we become consciously spiritual beings, that change can cancel or wholly remodel the graph of our physical fate."¹⁹⁹ The so-called finality of fate is thus not quite so final, after all. Fixed fate doesn't rule out free will. The perversity of the outer ego is not the source of this will; on the other hand, there is a deeper centre and it is from there the true self wills and achieves:

But the Will within, exceeding the moments of Time, knows

all these, and the action of Nature in us is an attempt, we might

say, to work out under the difficult conditions of a natural and

egoistic ignorance what is foreseen in full supramental light by

the inner Will and Knowledge.²⁰⁰

When fate seems to bar one's path, there is one recourse possible: appeal to spiritual force. All is possible then. The law itself may be exceeded, and predestination held at bay or even effectively turned back:

...as soon as one enters the path of spiritual life, this old

predetermined destiny begins to recede. There comes in a new

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factor, the Divine Grace, the help of a higher Divine Force other

than the force of Karma, which can lift the sadhak beyond the

present possibilities of his nature. One's spiritual destiny is then

the divine election which ensures the future.²⁰¹

Savitri is herself the manifestation of the Divine Grace, and it— becomes her duty—the law of her nature—to defy fate and fight the battle for Satyavan and for mankind. She is the avatar, the world-redeemer, and hers is the responsibility to realise, to establish:

...something essential and radical needed for the terrestrial

evolution which is the evolution of the embodied spirit through

successive stages towards the Divine.²⁰²

To return to the poem: in the first canto of 'The Book of Fate' we are back in the Madra kingdom. Savitri hasn't arrived in her father's palace yet, but towards this home of the royal seer, Aswapati, the divine seer, Narad, descends from the clouds:

In silent bounds bordering the mortal's plane

Crossing a wide expanse of brilliant peace

Narad the heavenly sage from Paradise

Came chanting through the large and lustrous air.²⁰³

Narad is Heaven's minstrel and messenger in one, but he can jumble his functions well so that his deeper purposes cannot at once be seen. What brings him from the spaces of heaven to "these rooms of a see-saw game of death and life?" As he wings and sings his way to Aswapati's abode, the seer rapidly reads as from an open book the secrets of life; the cosmic panorama unrolls before him, he passes from mind to the realm of material things; and what he sees, what he reads, he tunes to immortal song. As he gazes at the terrestrial play, his mood changes, his voice quivers with pathos and pity, and he chants the still sad music of humanity. He sings of the beginnings, "how stars were made and life began"; he sings of dumb matter and its veiled self, "its blind unerring occult mystery"; he sings the saga of darkness yearning towards the Light, of death aspiring to

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immortality; of man and the blossoming of his mind and the throb of his soul and the ache of his brooding Love; and also of his future and his destined rise to the godhead:

He sang of the glory and marvel still to be born,

Of Godhead throwing off at last its veil,

Of bodies made divine and life made bliss,

Immortal sweetness clasping immortal might,...²⁰⁴

As he steps into Aswapati's palace, Narad's face wears "a beautiful mask of antique joy", and the king and queen give him a royal welcome, and for an hour he feasts their ears with his "measured chant" bespeaking the tale of human joys and woes:

He sang to them of the lotus-heart of love

With all its thousand luminous buds of truth,...

And one day it shall hear a blissful voice

And in the garden of the Spouse shall bloom

When she is seized by her discovered lord.²⁰⁵

Even as Narad sings of this transfiguring marvel, the miracle of the bud of the human heart's sudden efflorescence under the warmth of Love, there appears Savitri herself before them as if in quick fulfilment of the sage's prophetic song. Narad himself is taken aback, but as he flings on her "his vast immortal look", knowledge streams into him, and there is nothing that he cannot see. Yet he holds back this shaft of foreknowledge but rather gives vent to his seeming sense of wonder and glorious surmise. Who is this marvel, the flame-born, the beauty-arrayed? Can the halo of love bring about such a wondrous sea-change and cast a miracle-light on a human frame? Narad is so touched with ecstasy that he cries out to her:

From what green glimmer of glades

Retreating into dewy silences

Or half-seen verge of waters moon-betrayed

Bringst thou this glory of enchanted eyes?...

Reveal, O winged with light, whence thou hast flown

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Hastening bright-hued through the green tangled earth,

Thy body rhythmical with the spring-bird's call.²⁰⁶

Narad has travelled oft in the realms of this earth and the other earths; but this vision is like no other he has seen. Here is spring poised towards summer, here is morning making towards the noon, here girlhood glows into womanhood, and here is earth's hope straining towards fruition. Narad's sudden immortal gaze has seized the truth behind the layers of appearance, he knows Savitri's high destiny on earth, he knows too how her path will be strewn with difficulty and danger. Although he has striven to rein back knowledge, the words escape him all the same:

O thou who hast come to this great perilous world

Now only seen through the splendour of thy dreams,

Where hardly love and beauty can live safe,

Thyself a being dangerously great,...

As high, as happy might thy waking be!

If for all time doom could be left to sleep!²⁰⁷

The dreaming—and the waking; and the shadow of doom in between, this is what Narad sees, and the word is almost spoken. The dream is vivid, being decked in golden hues. Savitri has been to an enchanted grove, she has drunk a joy from no earthly cup, her soul has "answered to a Word unknown". The "ravishing flutes of heaven" are still echoing in the secret chambers of her heart. The "thrill of a remembered clasp" burns into her still. But can reality rise to the expectation of the splendour of her dreams? Is the world of reality safe enough for love and beauty to live in peace? Isn't doom always round the comer, as it were!

Narad has spoken one word too many; he checks himself too late. Aswapati has "marked the dubious close" and inferred behind the words a sinister hint, but he covers up his anxiety with tact and asks the sage rather to bless his child, who is his treasure and his sole hope and only heir:

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Behold her, singer with the prescient gaze,

And let thy blessing chant that this fair child

Shall pour the nectar of a sorrowless life

Around her from her lucid heart of love,

Heal with her bliss the tired breast of earth

And cast like a happy snare felicity.²⁰⁸

What can Narad say, knowing as he does that "words are vain and Fate is lord"? Assuming, therefore, a mere human curiosity, he asks about the "mission" from which Savitri has returned with "Paradise made visible in her eyes". Aswapati turns to Savitri, and she gives the answer in a few chosen words sufficient to the occasion:

I have obeyed my heart, I have heard its call.

On the borders of a dreaming wilderness

Mid Shalwa's giant hills and brooding woods

In his thatched hermitage Dyumatsena dwells,

Blind, exiled, outcast, once a mighty king.

The son of Dyumatsena, Satyavan,

I have met on the wild forest's lonely verge.

My father, I have chosen. This is done.²⁰⁹

All are astonished, all sit silent "for a space". A "heavy shadow" floats before his inner vision, but Aswapati sees also a pursuing light; all may yet be well. He tells his daughter that she has chosen well:

If this is all, then all is surely well;

If there is more, then all can still be well.²¹⁰

When Narad is about to warn Savitri, Aswapati stays the "dangerous word" and tells him that not to know the future is best:

Impose not on the mortal's tremulous breast

The dire ordeal that foreknowledge brings;...²¹¹

Narad takes the hint and is silent, but the queen's fears are thoroughly roused by the oblique speeches of the sage and the king. The former mentioned "doom"—then quickly withdrew into himself. The king has spoken darkly too—spoken as if some future danger threatened Savitri.

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She therefore roundly questions the sage. On the face of it, Savitri's choice is unexceptionable. But, perhaps, Narad can scent something. What is it? What shadow lies sprawled across their future wedded life? And so she concludes with the entreaty:

Or if crouches unseen a panther doom,

If wings of Evil brood above that house,

Then also speak, that we may turn aside

And rescue our lives from hazard of wayside doom

And chance entanglement of an alien fate.²¹²

But Narad merely answers, elaborating the king's prudential exhortation:

A future knowledge is an added pain,

A torturing burden and a fruitless light

On the enormous scene that Fate has built.²¹³

The sages know that fate is inexorable; why, then, should mortals— frail as they are—burden themselves with this sure foreknowledge and thus agonisingly anticipate the preordained event? Why should the eyes of the mind be clouded by a future foreknown, for that can only destroy even the little flavour there is yet in life! So- potent a power is fate that the very words a man speaks are already numbered in "The Book of Fate'. Narad's words go home, as arrows released by an expert archer unerringly find their target. Although Narad has doled out but vague ominous generalities, this the queen now knows without a doubt: some dark danger lies in wait for her beloved daughter if she marries Satyavan. The dignified queen now yields place to the agitated mother who gives way to uncontrollable grief and begins reviling the law that makes it possible for the fairest lilies to fester or fade away so soon. The Shalwa boy himself, Satyavan, now seems a thing of evil to the queen:

Perhaps he came an enemy from her past

Armed with a hidden force of ancient wrongs,

Himself unknowing, and seized her unknown.²¹⁴

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In her frantic mood, this accusation becomes a certainty:

Old cruelties come back unrecognized,

The gods make use of our forgotten deeds.²¹⁵

Tossed about thus in the play of the gods, our lives, one and all of them, are an endless tragic sequence. But the gods do not know this; they are not human, hence they have no pity. We are not the bloodless, eternally young (or everlastingly mature) gods, who can create passion, play havoc with human lives, themselves remaining unmoved by anything, love or hate:

An ancient tale of woe can move us still,

We keep the ache of breasts that breathe no more,

We are shaken by the sight of human pain,

And share the miseries that others feel.²¹⁶

It is the very nature of man to be moved by the miseries of others, and rush forth to the aid of the sufferer; thus has it been always with the compassionate queen of Aswapati. But now on her, on her whose heart had often gone out to her beloved subjects, on herself is this calamity cast:

Even a stranger's anguish rends my heart,

And this, O Narad, is my well-loved child.²¹⁷

Now that she has come to know of some misfortune to this beloved daughter of hers, it is better to know the worst that is to be; for otherwise she will be dreading it everywhere and all the time; in the very steps of Savitri she may have to read the book of her fear Therefore she wants to know what it is about so that afterwards, if it is indeed an irredeemable fate, she can at least wait for the event with stoic forbearance.

Now Narad realises that she ought to be told the truth, for it would be no use trying to hide this fatal secret from the queen, thereby torturing a mother's heart. He also hopes to steel and strengthen the will of Savitri to face the coming ordeal. He begins by saying that Satyavan is the best of men, in whom,

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...soul and Nature, equal Presences,

Balance and fuse in a wide harmony.²¹⁸

He is made on earth, of heaven. In him the godhead resides, but not for long:

Heaven's greatness came, but was too great to stay.

Twelve swift-winged months are given to him and her;

This day returning Satyavan must die.²¹⁹

Thus has Narad communicated the terrible word of doom. But the queen, in her disturbed ignorant state, in vain tries to clutch at any straw that may be available and save the joyful spring-time of her dear daughter. She hopes to order fate to change her certain course; rejecting "the grace and the mockery" of the gods, she asks Savitri to go forth into the world again and choose for herself another bridegroom that would live long happily with her, and quite forget Satyavan. But vain is the remedy, Savitri is sure of her steps and her resolution holds:

Once my heart chose and chooses not again...

Death's grip can break our bodies, not our souls;

If death take him, I too know how to die.²²⁰

Savitri, born by the grace of the divine Mother, full of "untrembling virgin fire", will she yield the ground to the foe without struggling against the injustice? No, she was not born to die; neither will it be Satyavan's fate. Savitri will not allow blind fate to cut the cords of love that bind her to Satyavan and the ties that bind both to this world. They are born to plan and achieve the raising of the mortal's life to the Life Divine. They will not yield to mortality. Savitri denies death and affirms life:

I am stronger than death and greater than my fate;

My love shall outlast the world, doom falls from me

Helpless against my immortality.

Fate's law may change, but not my spirit's will".²²¹

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And now comes a very curious passage. Like Rishi Jabali in the Ramayana, the queen, who has hitherto led a life of devotion and love, now driven by her despair, preaches to her daughter the philosophy of Hedonism. She assures Savitri that all talk of love, pledge, troth and devotion are meaningless. What is most important is a life lived in the full current of joy and pleasure. In this ever-changing world, can we forever cling to a set of unchanging laws and moral codes?

Here on this mutable and ignorant earth

Who is the lover and who is the friend? ²²²

Savitri's talk of love and pledge are meaningless, for essentially she and Satyavan are strangers. Once Savitri loses sight of Satyavan's physical body, she loses him forever. The physical remains of the Shalwa prince will be distributed between the five elements, which will again fashion forth another man who will love and live and die again, having a soul lodged within him for some time. The queen feels that the physical beings are like shirts after all, worn for a time, and then cast away.

Thus our souls come to this earth time and again, take residence in a physical object for some time, and then part forever:

But for our souls, upon the wheel of God

For ever turning, they arrive and go,

Married and sundered in the magic round

Of the great Dancer of the boundless dance.²²¹

Will not her dear daughter Savitri realise what it is to set such a high store upon these lofty ideals, when all the time she knows that human life is too short and our cup of joy never even half-full? It is for that reason man has been given the faculty to choose for himself a reasonably happy life within the prescribed limits of this all too short fife. He has been given the power of reason, and with that he must carefully avoid the pitfalls as far as possible, and seek the wine of joy when and where he can find it. Man is between the titan and the animal. The former cares not for his destiny, and with all brute force

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and belief in his own power rushes towards his destiny with eyes open, so that in this mad onrush he would be able to climb upto and above the divine; the animal has no thinking power at all, and with blind eyes it meets its destiny.

But man can hew for himself the middle path; he need not unnecessarily thrust himself before the gaze of wide-eyed fury, nor need he receive his fate unknowingly. He can think, and decide on the best course; with wary eyes he can choose for himself the golden path that will lead him to happiness. The queen warns Savitri not to rely on any platonic or aesthetic love to console her in her trial. Her human love for Satyavan will be no match against the relentlessness of fate: only when Savitri is able to merge with the One completely can she realise the unity of humanity and be happy therein. But for such consciousness she is too young; the gods have been kind enough to warn her of her fate, and it would be better to follow a different course of action and thus avoid the impact of the foretold calamity.

But Savitri has decided; the specious reasoning falls flat and she replies:

My strength is not the Titan's; it is God's.²²⁴

Hers is not the love merely of a beautiful face; it is rather a true marriage of minds at the first dawn of spiritual sight. She has found her true lord and lover; she has found true reality,

Beyond my body in another's being. . .²²⁵

No, no, Savitri will not bend; she has found her haven. A renewed fill of joy and strength has enriched her since her meeting the Shalwa prince:

If for a year, that year is all my life.

And yet 1 know this is not all my fate

Only to live and love awhile and die.

For I know now why my spirit came on earth

And who I am and who he is I love.

I have looked at him from my immortal Self,

I have seen God smile at me in Satyavan;

I have seen the Eternal in a human face.²²⁶

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