The first edition of this biography in 1945 contained corrections by Sri Aurobindo himself. The third edition in 1972 was rewritten in the light of new material
Sri Aurobindo : Biography
THEME/S
CHAPTER 5
I
Even before Sri Aurobindo started on his translation. The Hero and the Nymph, he had been sufficiently captivated by the theme to produce a long romantic narrative on the subject. Urvasie* was published in Baroda in 1896; it thus belongs to the period of Sri Aurobindo's first years in India, on his return after a long sojourn in England. When the poem was offered to an English publisher, it was referred to Lionel Johnson who "acknowledged some poetic merit but said that it was a repetition of Matthew Arnold"; and Sri Aurobindo adds: "But Lionel Johnson, I was told like the Vedantic sage who sees Brahman in all things, saw Arnold everywhere".1 In the nineties of the last century, romanticism had not yet ceased to be fashionable, and Urvasie - whether Amoldian or no - wasn't quite out of tune with the age.
Urvasie is a poem of approximately 1,500 lines, and is divided into four cantos: the length and cast of a small epic like Paradise Regained. The story is substantially Kalidasa's still, but it is here rendered as a metrical romance in blank verse. Admirably proportioned, Urvasie is interspersed with many passages that evoke colour and sound with a compelling sureness of touch and a rare self-confidence. And there are not wanting passages where the words move like winged squadrons, radiating a nervous potency of suggestion romantic to the marrow.
Sri Aurobindo evidently desired to treat the story of Pururavas and Urvasie on an epic scale almost, and also to underline what may be called its "national" significance; he accordingly made certain departures from the purely dramatic unfolding of the theme in Kalidasa's Vikramorvasie. The Urvasie myth has indeed shown an easy adaptability and a limitless flexibility through the ages. Hymnist and ritualist, chronicler and romancer, theologian and playwright, - to them all it has been legitimate prey. But Sri Aurobindo's approach was "integral" (if that word which has gathered so much significance may be used here), and in his ambitious epic canvas are brought the essential elements in the Vedic-Brahmanic, the later Puranic and the Kalidasan renderings of the myth.
The war against the Titans having come to a victorious close, Pururavas the warrior-king now turns earthward, happy to breathe our mortal air, to drink into his soul the "virgin silence" of the mountains, to divine "his mother's breasts"; and he gazes into
* The reader is referred to the present writer's long article "Urvasi" (Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual, 1949) for a historical study of the Urvasi-Pururavas myth from Rig Veda and Satapatha Brahmana to Sri Aurobindo and Rabindranath Tagore.
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...the quiet maiden East,
Of some great poem out of dimness grew,
Slowly unfolding into perfect speech.
The grey lucidity and pearliness
Bloomed more and more, and over earth chaste again
The freshness of the primal dawn returned,
Life coming with a virginal sharp strength,
Renewed as from the streams of Paradise.
Nearer it drew now to him and he saw
Out of the widening glory move a face
Of dawn, a body fresh from mystery,
Enveloped with a prophecy of light
More rich than perfect splendours. It was she,
The golden virgin, Usha.. .2
Sri Aurobindo is endlessly fascinated by the magic phenomenon of Dawn - both his later poems, Ilion and Savitri, beginning with elaborate marvellously wrought evocations of this magic-tinted many-toned phenomenon. In the fragment, Chitrangada, which was written perhaps not long after Urvasie, there is another striking description of Dawn:
In Manipur upon her orient hills
Chitrangada beheld intending dawn
Gaze coldly in. She understood the call.
The silence and imperfect pallor passed
Into her heart and in herself she grew
Prescient of grey realities.3
The 'Dawn' in Urvasie is a richer piece of embroidery yet not comparable, in its suggestion of mystic overtones, to 'Dawn over Ilion' or 'The Symbol Dawn'; it is more of a bright promissory note for these greater riches to come. An early poem, Urvasie has the sensuousness, the vernal opulence, even perhaps the unbridled effervescence of romantic youth. But it is without question authentic poetry.
Pururavas, now in a mood of happy relaxation, happens to catch a glimpse of the apsaras basking in Dawn's unfolding immaculate loveliness, - and "among them she", the golden incomparable Urvasie -
And seeing her Pururavas the king
Shuddered as of felicity afraid,
And all the wide heart of Pururavas
Moved like the sea - when with a conning wind
Great Ocean lifts in far expectancy
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Waiting to feel the shock, so was he moved
By expectation of her face. For this
Was secret in its own divinity
Like a high sun of splendour.. .4
Pururavas is stirred to the depths: his soul "whirls alien", and he hears amazed "the galloping of uncontrollable steeds"; Urvasie is verily a decree of fate, and hen-union is "magically inevitable as a perfect verse from the Veda". The life he lived, the life that now yawns ahead vague and ambrosial, - which is the dream, a which the reality? "0 Urvasie," he cries, "set thy feet upon my heart!" Sri Aurobindo here interposes a splendid epic simile, rather Amoldian in manner, to bring out the predicament of Pururavas, inescapably caught in the meshes of Love's sovereignty:
As when a man to the grey face of dawn
Awaking from an unremembered dream,
Repines at life awhile and buffets back
The wave of old familiar thoughts, and hating
His usual happiness and usual cares
Strives to recall a dream's felicity; -
Long strives in vain and rolls his painful thought
Through many alien ways, when sudden comes
A flash, another, and the vision bums
Like lightning in the brain, so leaped that name
Into the musing of the troubled king. 5
The human, half-divine. Hero - and the heavenly, yet half-human, Apsara: the confrontation in the poem is splendorous, portentous, and presaging wonders yet to come. To divinise man, to humanise heaven, and to make them meet in close-breast: isn't this the consummation towards which the drama of the universe is racing? But, in the meantime, - in the "realm between", - there needs must be enacted false starts, failures, and fresh and ever fresh attempts to effect in the fullness of time the destined, if repeatedly deferred, marriage of Heaven and Earth.
The sky suddenly darkens, anarchy is seen advancing its ominous front, and the giant Cayshie looms immense in the "dim disguise of rain... filling the regions with himself. Urvasie is the intended victim of this sudden invasion, and the storm lifts the lily", Cayshie spirits her away. Pururavas, blazing with anger, storms after him, and the giant, realising that discretion is the better part of a our, drops her on the snow, and in discomfiture retires to the East. Pururavas "Gels by Urvasie's side, long he kneels, silently drinking in her paradisal beauty, now he sets her in his chariot and starts homeward again:
And soon she moved. Those wonderful wide orbs
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Dawned into his, quietly, as if in muse.
A lovely slow surprise crept into them
Afterwards; last, something far lovelier,
Which was herself, and was delight, and love.6
Their journey, however, is cut short by the other apsaras, and Tilottama reminds him of his great human worth and responsibility:
O King, O mortal mightier than the Gods!
For Gods change not their strength, but are of old
And as of old, and man, though less than these,
May yet proceed to greater, self-evolved.
Man, by experience of passion purged,
His myriad faculty perfecting, widens
His nature as it rises till it grows
With God conterminous.7
This is a recurrent idea, an oft-repeated exhortation, in Sri Aurobindo's writings.* Frail mortal man has nevertheless the promise of sovereignty, but if he is to gain it, he must first be willing to lose himself - to hush up desire - to enact the fiery meaning of Sacrifice. Pururavas understands and withdraws without a word; Urvasie joins her companions. Yet once more her eyes meet his across widening space - he staggers as one smitten - and "curving downwards on precipitate wheels", he reaches his palace in Ila's peaceful town at last.
Canto II takes us to high Indra's hall in heaven, where revels - the archetypes of our earthly arts - are in progress. Urvasie the supreme celestial dancer reveals inadvertently her infatuation for a mortal, and no wonder "a gust of laughter" rocks the assembled gods. But Bharat, Master of the Revels, sees his glorious art shamed and stained, and banishes Urvasie from "Swarga's streams and golden groves". Indra intercedes on her behalf, and Bharat is sufficiently mollified to set a natural limit to her exile from heaven. Escorted by Tilottama, Urvasie commences her journey to the earth, and visits bright and holy places still lost in thought, and chasing vain regrets and wayward hopes.
Now Pururavas too is a waif of fortune, self-exiled from Ila to "the infinite and lonely hills". The search after felicity is for him a mocking infelicity. In the sixth month of his travels, he manages to reach a silent awe-inspiring place:
Snow on ravine, and snow on cliff, and snow
* Cf. To the Sea (Vol. 5, p. 45), and The Life Heavens (Vol. 5, p. 574), Also the prophecy in Savitri (Vol. 29, p. 699):
The mind of earth shall be a home of light,
The life of earth a tree growing towards heaven,
The body of earth a tabernacle of God.
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Sweeping in strenuous outlines to heaven,
With distant gleaming vales and turbulent rocks,
Giant precipices black-hewn and bold
Daring the universal whiteness....8
Commenting on the first line above, K. D. Sethna writes: " 'the universal whiteness' (of the last line) is created for us by that word ('snow') beginning and ending the line as well as occupying its centre-foot. Again, the terminal 'snow' runs the line over to the next by its connection with the word 'sweeping' and sustains the idea of the icy continuity and ubiquitousness".9 Pururavas climbs the summits, then comes down, and sits motionless, adding to the "surrounding hush".
For six days he thus sits in the posture of tapas, but gazing towards "the dim unfathomed gorge"; on the seventh day, Tilottama and Urvasie come through the gorge and approach him, his steadfastness in love drawing them towards him like a powerful magnet. Tilottama makes one more feeble attempt to wean away his thoughts from Urvasie, reminding him of his path of kingly glory. But he promptly declares that he cares neither for glory nor for far-off purity, for Urvasie is more than all his worlds. Their great love is intense with uncontrollable longing:
...he yearned towards her like a wave,
And she received him in her eyes as earth
Receives the rain.10
There is little more to say, and so Tilottama leaves the lovers together, having first stipulated the conditions attached to the union of Pururavas and Urvasie.* They have long dreamt of each other, and they are now at last together - and she is clinging and shuddering:
She, o'erborne,
Panting, with inarticulate murmurs lay,
Like a slim tree half seen through driving hail,
Her naked arms clasping his neck, her cheek
And golden throat averted, and wide trouble
In her large eyes bewildered with their bliss.
Amid her wind-blown hair their faces met.
With her sweet limbs all his, feeling her breasts
Tumultuous up against his beating heart,
He kissed the glorious mouth of heaven's desire.
So clung they as two shipwrecked in a surge.11
"The principal condition is that his naked body should never be seen by her:
Hither a rapture she invisible
Or he a mystic body and mystic soul.
Reveal not then thy being naked to hers.... (Vol. 5, p. 206).
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Not Shakespeare, nor Donne, nor Rossetti could have achieved a completer, a more uninhibited, a more passionate evocation of love's fierce storm and its aftermath of fulfilled calm than in these whirling and hotly adequate lines.
Having won Urvasie, Pururavas can never have too much of her; they form a kind of closed universe where the leap of sensuous pleasure is alone the governing law. Some years pass, she becomes a mother, and tired of "soulless woods and waves" they return to "the virgin's city Ilian" and inaugurate a golden age:
The sacred city felt a finer life
Within it; burning inspirations breathed
From hallowed poets...
And from the city of Pururavas
High influences went....12
Seven years pass, and now the gods in heaven, missing Urvasie more and more, resolve to break the romance and get her back:
They in colossal council marble, said
To that bright sister whom she had loved best,
"Menaca!" crying "how long shall one man
Divide from heaven its most perfect bliss?
Go down and bring her back.. ."13
By means of a trick, the denizens of heaven, the Gandharvas, arrange to steal away the rams particularly beloved of Urvasie and disappear in a blinding rush of lightning. She cries out to Pururavas, and when he springs up from the bed, there is lightning again and she sees him -
...all a grace of naked limbs,
The hero beautiful, Pururavas,
In that fierce light.14
Although owing to no fault of their own, the compact is broken, and Urvasie returns to heaven. She might come back before dawn, he thinks; but the dawn belies his hopes; "then he knew he was alone".
Pururavas is disconsolate. He leaves his kingdom, he seeks his beloved on hill and dale and glen and grotto until he comes to the silence of the peaks and treads regions "as vast and lonely as his love":
Then with a confident sublime appeal
He to the listening summits stretched his hands:
"O desolate strong Himalaya, great
Thy peaks alone with heaven and dreadful hush
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In which the Soul of all the world is felt
Meditating creation!...
I come to you, O mountains, with a heart
Desolate like you, like you snow-swept, and stretch
Towards your solemn summits kindred hands.
Give back to me, O mountains, give her back."15
And the Himalaya "bent towards him, white... seemed to recognise a soul / Immense as they, reaching as they to heaven / And capable of infinite solitude". In a massive piece of Nature description like this, where amplitude is doubled with intensity, where man and mountain achieve confrontation and communion, the poetry of apostrophe and pathetic fallacy reaches a dizzier height than ever. Moving now further north "past the supreme great ridges", moving through mists and seeing beyond rocks and ramparts the golden sun, he sees enthroned upon the summit "Indira, the goddess, Ocean's child", the patroness of Aryasthan, and he tells her the name of his "termless wide desire"; and "like a viol", she returns this prophetic reply:
Sprung of the moon, thy grandsire's fault in thee
Yet lives; but since thy love is singly great,
Doubtless thou shalt possess thy whole desire.
Yet hast thou maimed the future and discrowned
The Aryan people; for though Ila's sons,
In Hustina, the city of elephants,
And Indraprastha, future towns, shall rule
Drawing my peoples to one sceptre, at last
Their power by excess of beauty falls, -
Thy sin, Pururavas - of beauty and love:
And this the land divine to impure grasp
Yields of barbarians from the outer shores.16
Notwithstanding the unnatural inversion (a symptom of nineteenth-century versification) in the last two lines, the speech is charged with power and embodies a core of historical truth and eloquently utters a note of warning, as pertinent today as K was when Pururavas faced the austere goddess and patroness of Aryasthan.
But Pururavas wanders farther still, sights Coilas (Kailas) in the distance, receives benedictions from the Mother of the Aryans, and rising yet further sees the 'Mighty Mother herself on the peaks. The Mother knows that Pururavas, hero-man is sting away his high destiny on earth for the pleasures of heaven:
Thou then hast failed, bright soul; but God blames not
Nor punishes. Impartially he deals
To every strenuous spirit its chosen reward.17
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The desire that "wastes" his soul can be quenched only by Urvasie; he is therefore permitted to find his felicity in her arms:
But far below through silent mighty space
The green and strenuous earth abandoned rolled.18
He has won a kind of personal salvation, but only by retreating from his terrestrial sphere of service; he has failed his greater self, he has failed India, he has failed humanity.
Even in this early poem, certain motifs of some of Sri Aurobindo's greatest poetry - life as a journey and a struggle, life as a scaling of great heights - (higher still and higher), a resisting of (or succumbing to) temptations, an appreciation of the glory and sensual ecstasy of love and yet the call to beyond that glory and ecstasy to be able to serve a greater cause - all are already introduced. In the Chitrangada pieces (Chitrangada as well as Uloupie), written after Urvasie and perhaps also after Love and Death, Arjuna is for the time being a willing captive of the Manipur Queen, but both know in their heart of hearts that there are claims of greater concern than even Love. In Uloupie, Chitrangada is bold enough to face the logic of the situation and tell Arjuna where his stem duty lies (although it is a wrench for her to speak the words):
Hero, take up thy bow! Warrior, arise!
Proceed with thy majestic mission. Thou
From many mighty spirits was selected
And mayst not for a transient joy renounce
The anguish and the crown.19
Although both the Chitrangada pieces have come to us only in a fragmentary condition, one would fain believe that it was Sri Aurobindo's intention to make the Chitrangada-Arjuna story a striking foil to the Urvasie-Pururavas story or that of Priyumvada and Rum in Love and Death. It is also characteristic that the decisive move is taken by the Woman, Chitrangada, and not by Arjuna.
Apart from this underlying existential dialectic, which is unobtrusive enough so as not to stain the poetry, Urvasie has all the felicities of diction and style associated with epic poetry. Expanded similes. Nature descriptions, arrays of polysyllabic proper names, set eloquent speeches, all these are true to type; and the whole action ultimately hinges upon a Temptation, a temptation to which the Hero succumbs. It would be therefore not inappropriate to call Urvasie an epic or an epyllion. If the Temptation gives the poem a sense of unity and wide human interest, the strings of proper names and the elaborate similes make the poem aesthetically satisfying. Here we have no more than a catalogue of names, and yet the result is exquisitely exotic poetry:
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So danced they numberless as dew-drops gleam,
Menaca, Misracayshie, Mullica,
Rumbha, Nelabha, Shela, Nolinie,
Lolita, Lavonya and Tilottama, -
Many delightful names....20
Again, doesn't an expanded simile like the following reproduce, and more than reproduce, the appositeness as well as exuberance of typical epic similes:
As when a child falls asleep unawares
At a closed window on a stormy day,
Looking into the weary rain, and long
Sleeps, and wakes quietly into a life
Of ancient moonlight, first the thoughtfulness
Of that felicitous world to which the soul
Is visitor in sleep, keeps her sublime
Discurtained eyes; human dismay comes next,
Slowly; last, sudden, they brighten and grow wide
With recognition of an altered world,
Delighted: so woke Urvasie to love.21
Urvasie is the work of an young man; if it has youth's boldness, idealism, intuition of romantic imagery and feeling for language, it has also something of youth's excess. For a long time, Sri Aurobindo was dissatisfied with it ("I got disgusted with it and rejected it", he wrote in 1933), and wasn't anxious to save it from oblivion; but happily he was persuaded to include it in the Collected Edition of his Poems and Plays in 1942.22 Urvasie is Sri Aurobindo's Endymion, but an Endymion transferred, by sleight of hand, to Aryasthan and presented in terms of immemorial Hindu thought. By rendering the age-long Urvasie legend on an epic (at least mini-epic) scale, Sri Aurobindo has dyed it with shining indelible purpose and crowned it with racial and prophetic significance. Its wealth of sensuous elaboration, its luxuriance in colour and sound, its high-arching epic similes, its resounding polysyllabic proper names, its subtle fusion of personal and national perspectives, its forceful delineation of the drama of man's temptation and fall, its suggestion of the filiations between earth and heaven - these divers "marks" of Sri "Aurobindo's Urvasie make it no small achievement in the difficult genre of Romantic Epic.
II
Love and Death which followed Urvasie, was written when Sri Aurobindo was twenty-seven; somewhat shorter than Urvasie, it runs to about 1,000 lines
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and is not divided into cantos. According to Sri Aurobindo it was written "in a I white heat of inspiration during 14 days of continuous writing - in the mornings, of course"; and he adds: "I never wrote anything with such ease and rapidity before or after."23 The story is taken from the Mahabharata, Adi Parva, but Sri Aurobindo has changed the name of the heroine from Pramadvura to Priyumvada. The story has its affiliations also with the Hellenic myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. But Sri Aurobindo has transformed the original tale, and Love and Death sweeps on its course with a precipitancy all its own.
Ruru, Sage Bhrigu's grandson, loves Priyumvada, daughter of Menaca the nymph and the Gandharva King. It is a beautiful Adam-Eve idyll out of an Indiana Garden of Eden (the serpent, of course, not far away):
In woodlands of the bright and early world
When love was to himself yet new and warm
And stainless, played like morning with a flower
Ruru with his young bride Priyumvada.
Fresh-checked and dew-eyed white Priyumvada
Opened her budded heart of crimson bloom
To love, to Ruru; Ruru, a happy flood
Of passion round a lotus dancing thrilled,
Blinded with his soul's waves Priyumvada.
To him the earth was a bed for this sole flower,
To her all the world was filled with his embrace.24
Next follow two or three pages of almost the apotheosis of sensuous poetry; the lovers are so very very happy that Ruru laughs towards the sun and cries:
how good it is to live, to love!
Surely our joy shall ever end, nor we
Grow old, but like bright rivers or pure winds
Sweetly continue, or revive with flowers,
Or live at least as long as senseless trees.25
But no; Priyumvada is suddenly stung by a snake, she pales with a pitiful cry, she collapses on the ground: Ruru rushes to her side -
As he came,
He saw a brilliant flash of coils evade
The sunlight, and with hateful gorgeous hood
Darted into green safety, hissing, death.26
Priyumvada's dying speech is touching in its lingering helplessness:
.. .I have had so little
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Of joy and the wild day and throbbing night,
Laughter, and tenderness, and strife and tears.
I have not numbered half the brilliant birds
In one green forest, nor am familiar grown
With sunrise and the progress of the eves,
Nor have with plaintive cries of birds made friends,
Cuckoo and rainlark and love-speak-to-me.27
As yet unreconciled to the event, she is borne away to "some distant greenness", and night descends upon Rum and his soul is now synonymous with the "great silence".
Although overcome by grief, Ruru will not tamely sink under it; rather will he go in quest of this new "secrecy terrific, darkness vast" that has come in the shape of Death, and he will confront its gloom and perhaps wrest from It or Him the life lately snatched away. He wanders in the forests, recapitulating moments of his life with Priyumvada, "measuring vast pain in his immortal mind". His silent agony impresses and even frightens the gods, and Agni asks the uswuttha-tree (Aswatta) to divert Rum's wrathful anguish; but the tree's amateurish attempt only infuriates Ruru who promptly casts a curse on it. Moving on and on, Ruru recalls memories and experiences that both hold promises to the ear and break them to the heart. He regrets the unreasoning anger he had directed against the well-meaning tree, whereas he had been impotent when the snake had stung Priyumvada! Who, who would take him now to the dim portal leading to Death himself? Ruru will confront him - whatever the consequences.
Coming presently to a green opening. Rum sights "a golden boy half-naked, with bright limbs all beautiful". Isn't he Kama "who makest many worlds one tire"? Kama's answer is one of the supremely great passages in the poem:
I am that Madan who inform the stars
With lustre and on life's wide canvas fill
Pictures of light and shade, of joy and tears,
Make ordinary moments wonderful
And common speech a charm: knit life to' life
With interfusions of opposing souls
And sudden meetings and slow sorceries:
Wing the boy bridegroom to that panting breast,
Smite Gods with mortal faces, dreadfully
Among great beautiful kings and watched by eyes
That bum, force on the virgin's fainting limbs
And drive her to the one face never seen,
The one breast meant eternally for her.
By me come wedded sweets, by me the wife's
Busy delight and passionate obedience,
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And loving eager service never sated,
And happy lips, and worshipping soft eyes:
And mine the husband's hungry arms and use
Unwearying of old tender words and ways,
Joy of her hair, and silent pleasure felt
Of nearness to one dear familiar shape.
Nor only these, but many affections bright
And soft glad things cluster around my name.
I plant fraternal tender yearnings, make
The sister's sweet attractiveness and leap
Of heart towards imperious kindred blood.
And the young mother's passionate deep look,
Earth's high similitude of One not earth,
Teach filial heart-beats strong. These are my gifts
For which men praise me.. .28
But Kama can send forth "fiercer shafts" too -jealousy, revenge, violence, "mad insatiable longings pale", passions, lusts! He is omnipotent almost, almost, - for he is powerless against Death, and hence his very godhead becomes a lacerating doubt.
The enchanting airs of paradisal sensuality first, then - towards the end of the long passage - the chill blasts of infernal sexuality: Kama's magnificent speech comprises both; all Eden, all hell, and the earth between. Love is an altogether new dimension of experience, defying reason, defying cold calculation, defying even death; it sharpens and purifies the senses, it is a sixth sense that controls the rest; it awakens the slumbering psyche and crowns him master of the ceremonies. And yet, when things go wrong, love changes to hate, heaven dwindles to hell, and love's ecstasy becomes jealousy, hatred, death. An inspired passage surely, for this was certainly not drawn from experience; but the poet's eye does roll in a fine frenzy of intuitive understanding, glances from earth to heaven and from heaven to earth, and gives to the intangible motions of a lover's life, whether in fair weather or foul, the form, voice and colouring of actuality. Sri Aurobindo himself, when he was pressed to state his own opinion of this passage decades after he had written it, said without mincing words:
I do not think I have, elsewhere, surpassed this speech in power of language, passion and truth of feeling and nobility and felicity of rhythm all fused together into a perfect whole. And I think I have succeeded in expressing the truth of the godhead of Kama, the godhead of vital love (... I mean the love that draws lives passionately together or throws them into or upon each other) with a certain completeness of poetic sight and perfection of poetic power..29
Although Kama confesses to a certain helplessness in dealing with Death, he nevertheless gives Ruru a magic flower which is "half fire" and offers him a ray of hope: he could proceed to the nether world and redeem Priyumvada from "immitigable
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death" - but only on one fearful condition:
Life the pale ghost requires: with half thy life
Thou mayst protract the thread too early cut...
Would it be wise to enter into a contract of this remorseless nature with pitiless Death?
O Ruru, lo, thy frail precarious days,
And yet how sweet they are! simply to breathe
How warm and sweet!...
Wilt thou yield up, O lover,
Half thy sweet portion of this light and gladness,
Thy little insufficient share, and vainly
Give to another?30
Of course, he will; and so he journeys in a "white-winged boat" steered by "a sole silent helmsman" to the ocean, and exhorts her to make way for his mortal tread. A mortal undoubtedly, yet a Rishi's son, and great Bhrigu's grandson, and armed with that subtle and magnificent bloom; the sea cannot altogether ignore him, and in fact the sea makes a wondrous response:
And like a living thing the huge sea trembled,
Then rose, calling, and filled the sight with waves,
Converging all its giant crests; towards him
Innumerable waters loomed and heaven
Threatened. Horizon on horizon moved
Dreadfully swift; then with a prone wide sound
All Ocean hollowing drew him swiftly in,
Curving with monstrous menace over him.
He down the gulf where the loud waves collapsed
Descending, saw with floating hair arise
The daughters of the sea in pale green light,
A million mystic breasts suddenly bare,
And came beneath the flood and stunned beheld
A mute stupendous march of waters race
To reach some viewless pit beneath the world.31
First the journey from the Ganges to the ocean: a white-winged boat, a helmsman with dumb and marble face: water, water, everywhere, and the skies mingling vast water: M all-night rowing and gliding down, and in the morning, "the vast sea all grey": the apostrophe to the ocean, and the ready response! It is a unique piece of imaginative writing, and unlike Kama's speech which, thrillingly
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vivid as it is, only describes the name and nature and motions of Love, here in the 'Descent to Hell (Patala)' passage, we see things actually happening, and we become almost participants in the action. It may, perhaps, be said that this 'descent' , into Hell is more Greek than Hindu, recalls vaguely Hades and Tartarus and the Circles in Dante than the legendary Patala of Indian mythology. Nevertheless, merely as a poetic projection of other worlds - or nether worlds - the passage must rank among the most unforgettably vivid in the entire Sri Aurobindo canon.
Ruru's faltering steps take him to the hopeless, the immutable country, Patala, and he becomes aware of strange and hideous shapes, and he comes at last to a world of mad or maddened human voices, and pale faces, and princes, priests, and women too:
Then Ruru, his young cheeks with pity wan, Half moaned: "0 miserable race of men, ;
With violent and passionate souls you come '
Foredoomed upon the earth and live brief days
In fear and anguish, catching at stray beams
Of sunlight, little fragrances of flowers;
Then from your spacious earth in a great horror
Descend into this night, and here too soon
Must expiate your few inadequate joys."32
Patala has its mansions too, many regions, divers gradations of suffering, and Ruru makes his dismal progress; at one place his human heart half bursts with the "burden of so many sorrows", and he understands "That terrible and wordless sympathy/ Of dead souls for the living"; and moving further on, and his passage not obstructed because of Madan's flower, he approaches the throne of Hades. There are muttered exclamations and explanations; there are giant dogs, four-eyed and mysterious; and there is Yama himself whom Ruru confronts at last.
Once more a Temptation Scene breathlessly unfolds itself before us. Pururavas was willing to abandon his kingly dharma on earth in order to rejoin Urvasie in heaven; Ruru likewise is ready to give up the mature "fruitbearing" years of his
*In the course of a letter to Prema Nandakumar, Mr. K. D. Sethna has compared this passage from Love and Death with the following passage from Tennyson's Idylls:
O purblind race of miserable men,
How many among us at this very hour
Do forge a life-long trouble for ourselves,
By taking true for false, or false for true;
Here, thro' the feeble twilight of this world
Groping, how many, until we pass and reach
That other, where we see as we are seen...
Sethna adds that, while Sri Aurobindo's "take-off" is Tennysonian, "immediately he soars up into an intoxicating ozone and his touch-down is still with 'trailing clouds of glory'."
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life in return for Priyumvada's life. Like Goddess Luxmie in Urvasie who regrets the hero's failure to live up to the Aryan ideal of King, Yama too is overcome by disappointment. Neither Luxmie nor Yama actually plays the role of a Tempter; rather do they place the alternatives squarely before Pururavas and Ruru, who are alike poised on the crest of the dread predicament "Either - Or". In vain Yama tries to persuade Ruru to give up Priyumvada, in vain he expatiates on the privileges of old age:
Yet thou bethink thee, mortal, ,
Not as a tedious evil nor to be
Lightly rejected gave the gods old age,
But tranquil, but august, but making easy
The steep ascent to God. Therefore must Time
Still batter down the glory and form of youth
And animal magnificent strong ease,
To warn the earthward man that he is spirit
Dallying with transience, nor by death he ends,
Nor to the dumb warm mother's arms is bound,
But called unborn into the unborn skies.33
Ruru should not forget that youth is but half the story; he should not lightly renounce the latter half of his life. On the contrary, he should grow old wisely living the full quota of his appointed life. Then he was shown glimpses of the future in which he
saw himself divine with age,
A Rishi to whom infinity is close,
Rejoicing in some green song-haunted glade
Or boundless mountain-top where most we feel
Wideness....34
Ruru even catches the vision splendid, sees "the dawn of that mysterious Face/And all the universe in beauty merge"; and yet - he will not accept the promised e Felicity; he would give back, in Ivan Karamazov's deadly expression, "the ticket". It is Priyumvada he wants, and he must have her back; the rest is nothing - less than nothing - to Ruru.
Ruru is now once again in the world of Common sight and sound, Priyumvada is alive and is by his side:
For many moments comforting his soul
With all her jasmine body sun-ensnared
He fed his longing eyes...
She stretched
Her arms up, yearning, and their souls embraced;
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Then twixt brief sobbing laughter and blissful tears,
Clinging with all her limbs to him, "O love,
The green green world! the warm sunlight!" and ceased,
Finding no words; but the earth breathed round them,
Glad of her children, and the koil's voice
Persisted in the morning of the world.35
Love's labour's won! But the victory - is it only a defeat in disguise? In one sense, "Pururavas and Ruru - the former by beyonding earth's confines to find his felicity in the world above, the latter by penetrating to the den of Yama in the underworld to rescue lost Priyumvada and bring her back to the earth - both of them attain their heart's desire, setting at nought every other consideration. Yet isn't a King - isn't a Rishi - a forerunner too? Doesn't he carry in his grasp, not his own happiness, merely, but the future destiny of the race as well? In this sense, Pururavas the Kshatriya, and Ruru the Brahmin Rishi have both failed. Of either of them it might be sand, modifying Goldsmith's lines on Burke:
Born for the universe, he narrowed up his mind,
And to himself gave what was meant for mankind.
It was not Satan, nor Achitophel, nor Manthara, nor Iago that tempted Pururavas or Ruru; they were but betrayed by the infinitesimal egoistic false within themselves. The Temptation was enacted, in the last resort, only in the theatre of their souls,; and it is the more dramatic and significant for that very reason.
Written in 1899, first published in a journal in 1921, reprinted as a book in 24 Love and Death had the "misfortune" to appear at a time when a different aesthetic atmosphere - conditioned by Prufrock, The Waste Land and the later Yeats - prevailed in England. But, perhaps, the fashion of anti-romanticism has passer already, and it should be possible now at least to recognise in Urvasie and Love and Death truly indubitable poetic creations in the epic genre.
III
If Urvasie and Love and Death are romances or romantic epics, Baji Prabhou is quite obvious a heroic poem. Like Vidula, Baji Prabhou also was written during the period of active political life, and first appeared, not long after, in February-March 1910 in the Karmayogin; but it was during his stay at Baroda that Sri Aurobindo first received the impact of the story, drawn from Maratha history.
Baji Prabhou is a story of Maratha heroism that, in effect, must have struck its readers when it first appeared as a veritable salvo of patriotism. It could be called an epic fragment if not a mini-epic in itself, and the story is told with a breathlessness and power of language that are of a piece with its sanguinary theme.
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Following the Western epic tradition, Sri Aurobindo will not give us a moment's respite, but fairly plunges - in medias res - into the middle of things. After fighting a disastrous battle, Shivaji is in hot retreat, with the. enemy in close pursuit:
Silently with set
And quiet faces grim drew fighting back
The strong Mahrattas to their hills; only
Their rear sometimes with shouted slogan leaped
At the pursuer's throat, or on some rise
Or covered vantage stayed! the Moghul flood
A moment. Ever foremost where men fought,
Was Baji Prabhou seen, like a wild wave
Of onset or a cliff against the surge.
At last they reached a tiger-throated gorge;
Upon the way to Raigurh.. Narrowing there
The hills draw close... 36
Shivaji, in dire extremity, entrusts to Baji Prabhou the defence of that crucial gorge. Baji accepts the charge with an eloquent asseveration (of his faith to Malsure:
not in this living net
Is a man's manhood seated. God within
Rules us, who in the Brahman and the dog
Can, if He will, show equal godhead. Not
By men is mightiness achieved; Baji
Or Malsure is but a name,, a robe,
And covers One alone. We but employ
Bhavani's strength, who in an arm of flesh
Is mighty as in the thunder and the storm.37
Shivaji goes back to Raigurh to bring reinforcements?, leaving Baji and his fifty men to guard the pass. Presently the enemy is sighted in the distance -
...a mingled mass.
Pathan and Mogul and the Rajput clans,
All clamorous with the brazen throats of war
And spitting smoke and fiire.38
But the determined group of defensive Marathas hurls back wave upon wave of enemy detachments; and still they come, wave after wave -
They came, they died; still on the previous dead
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New dead fell thickening. Yet by paces slow
The lines advanced with labour infinite
And merciless expense of valiant men.39
And so Sri Aurobindo describes the vicissitudes of this modern Thermopylae with remorseless particularity, with the suspense mounting moment by moment. The Pathan infantry, "a formidable array"; the "hero sons" of Rajasthan who are the "playmate of death"; the chivalrous sons of Agra - they all come, one horde after another, with the stem determination to force the pass, regardless of expense; and in the result -
...the fatal gorge
Filled with the clamour of the close-locked fight.
Sword rang on sword, the slogan shout, the cry
Of guns, the hiss of bullets filled the air,
And murderous strife heaped up the scanty space,
Rajput and strong Mahratta breathing hard
In desperate battle.40
The narrative proceeds through the shocks of the battle, the alternations between horror and heroism, and there is a thrilling if inhuman precipitancy in the recordation of the seesaw of the grapple. Numbers seem to tell at last; Baji's bullets fail, and all his store of shot and powder is nearly exhausted. But Baji undaunted cries:
Make iron of your souls.
Yet if Bhavani wills, strength and the sword
Can stay our nation's future from o'erthrow
Till victory with Shivaji return.41
While thus the afternoon mellows into evening, Baji's men continue to fight with fanatic courage and desperate determination against "Agra's chivalry glancing with gold"; and Maratha mountaineers prove ultimately more than a match for the city-dwellers of Agra:
So fought they for a while; then suddenly y
Upon the Prabhou all the Goddess came.
Loud like a lion hungry on the hills
He shouted, and his stature seemed to increase
Striding upon the foe. Rapid his sword
Like lightning playing with a cloud made void
The crest before him...42
The assault peters out, and soon another starts, but this time the Goddess withdraws
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from him, his real work being over:
And passing out of him a mighty form
Stood visible. Titanic, scarlet-clad,
Dark as a thunder-cloud, with streaming hair
Obscuring heaven, and in her sovran grasp
The sword, the flower, the boon, the bleeding head, -
Bhavani. Then she vanished....43
A sword now finds out Baji's shoulder, "sharp a Mogul lance ran grinding through his arm". Mortally wounded, yet Baji is but broken - not bent. The battle rages as wild as ever, Baji's fifty men are reduced to a mere fifteen. Not minding his own wound, Baji charges the enemy for the last time, "like a bull with lowered horns that runs"; the Mogul wall yields again, but now eight men alone are left, and none unwounded. Already, however, Shivaji is back with a formidable force, and the Raigurh lances glisten in the "glory of the sinking sun". Baji with the accession of Bhavani's strength has indeed saved the situation, although only three of the defenders are now left:
Then suddenly
Baji stood still and sank upon the ground.
Quenched was the fiery gaze, nerveless the arm: :
Baji lay dead in the unconquered gorge,
But ere he fell, upon the rocks behind
The horse-hooves rang and, as the latest left
Of the half hundred died, the bullets thronged
Through the too narrow mouth and hurled those down
Who entered....
The Mogul rout began. Sure-footed, swift Shouting aloud and singing to the hills
A song of Ramdas as he smote and slew.44
But Shivaji himself stands silent by Baji's prone body, and a vision - terrible and inspiring at once - overwhelms and sustains him:
But Shivaji beside the dead beheld
A dim and mighty cloud that held a sword
And in its other hand, where once the head
Depended bleeding, raised the turban bright
From Baji's brows, still glittering with its gems,
And placed it on the chief's. But as it rose
Blood-stained with the heroic sacrifice,
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Round the aigrette he saw a golden crown.45
Written in blank verse that is "granite in its suggestion of strength and at the same time as brightly flexible and resonant as a Damascus blade"46, , Baji Prabhou has a vigour and precision of phrasing and a sheer energy of movement appropriate to the life and death struggle in the "tiger-throated gorge". The exordium is this arresting description of midday:
A noon of Deccan with its tyrant glare
Oppressed the earth; the hills stood deep in haze,
And sweltering athirst the fields glared up
Longing for water in the courses parched
Of streams long dead.47
and the poem closes at the moment when death is turned into victory, and Baji Prabhou becomes, by the very act of losing his life, an heir to immortality. The poem is thus rich in tragedy and triumph, and it both ennobles and exalts the subject. .
In Sri Aurobindo, Baji Prabhou has indeed found a minstrel worthy of his imperishable sacrifice; but the poet has carefully refrained from diminishing the stature or the heroism of Baji's antagonists: Pathan, or Rajput, or Mogul, the enemy is brave, even as the defending Maratha is, but Baji out-tops them all and his fifty men feel charged by his own sovereign strength of purpose. Sri Aurobindo seems to say - though he does not say it in so many words - that whoever would save his soul must be first prepared to lose his life for a worthy cause; sacrifice offered at the altar of a noble ideal is alone the true gateway to the soul's freedom and immortality. By dying, Baji Prabhou really won a deathless place for himself in the annals of his motherland, and he will for ever live in men's memories and bosoms. And a country that would redeem itself and live greatly needs heroes of the stamp of Baji Prabhou who can break through the shell of the ego and live a larger, richer and nobler life.
There is also the potent suggestion that it is really Bhavani - Bharat Shakti - that takes charge of the situation, invades and possesses Baji with her invincible strength, and accomplishes the miraculous rout of the Mogul and Rajput hordes. There is the further suggestion that, behind Shivaji's incomparable leadership of the Marathas, there was also Ramdas's spiritual power of personality. Suryaji sings a song of Ramdas while smiting and slaying the enemy. In his moment of victory, Shivaji is humble before Baji's dead body but is reconciled to the event by the Vision that is vouchsafed to him. Baji Prabhou is a great heroic poem touched with religious symbolism. It is thus a stirring paean of patriotism that is also a song of adoration of Bhavani Bharati.
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