Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

CHAPTER 26

Savitri

I

The Savitri story is of great antiquity. It was already ancient at the time of the Mahabharata events, for it was one of the stories that Rishi Markandeya narrated to Yudhishthira during the years of his exile to console him and fortify his spirits. Several of Sri Aurobindo's narrative poems or fragments - Love and Death, Vidula, Chitrangada, Uloupy, Nala - were based on, or translated from, the Mahabharata, yet the fascination was inexhaustible, and in particular the Savitri story, like the Nala story, had a special attraction for Sri Aurobindo as embodying the early morning glory of Rishi Vyasa's poetic genius:

The Savitri is a maturer and nobler work [than the Nala], perfect and restrained in detail, but it has still some glow of the same youth and grace over it. This then is the rare charm of these two poems that we find there the soul of the pale and marble Rishi.... Young, a Brahmacharin and a student, Vyasa dwelt with the green silences of earth, felt the fascination and loneliness of the forests. .. in the Savitri what a tremendous figure a romantic poet would have made of Death, what a passionate struggle between the human being and the master of tears and partings! But Vyasa would have none of this; he had one object, to paint the power of a woman's silent love.... There have been plenty of poets who could have given us imaginative and passionate pictures of Love struggling with Death, but there has been only one who could give us a Savitri.¹

Sri Aurobindo commenced a blank verse translation of the Tale of Nala, but only about 150 lines have survived. The Savitri story, however, gripped him even more, and he seems to have planned a epyllion, a companion-piece to Urvasie and Love and Death. In Urvasie, when the heroine returns to heaven, Pururavas has to follow and be united with her there, abandoning his kingdom on earth. In Love and Death, when Priyumvada dies stung by a snake, Ruru seeks her out in Patala (Hades), makes a deal with the Lord of Death's Other Kingdom, and returns with her to the earth. The theme is love, and separation, and the power of Love to achieve reunion.

But in the Savitri story, the protagonist is the heroine, not the hero, and hence among love stories it is altogether unique. It is rumoured that Sri Aurobindo started on his version of Savitri in the Baroda period, perhaps as early as the turn of the century, but presently laid it aside on account of other preoccupations. Although possibly some passages were then composed, the sole running draft in our hands is dated 1916. It is not quite complete. It was planned to be a poem in two Parts — Parts I: Earth, and Part II: Beyond - with four Books in Part I and three Books and an Epilogue in Part II.² All this was years before the Mother finally arrived in 1920 for permanent stay, and the Supramental world does not enter into its scheme.  

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As was his habit, Sri Aurobindo mo doubt returned to the poem from time to time, but it was only in the early thirties that the work of revision was taken up earnestly. He had retired into complete seclusion on 24 November 1926 having won a new height of realisation, and perhaps he wished to make the revised Savitri a channel for the communication of some ambrosial new insights or of some new power of consciousness. Sri Aurobindo seems to have told the Mother at the time he took up Savitri again:

I am impelled to launch on a new adventure.... I was hesitant at the beginning, but now I am decided. Still I do not know how far I shall succeed.... I have launched myself in a rudderless boat upon the vastness of the Infinite.³

After The Life Divine after The Synthesis of Yoga, after The Secret of the Veda and Essays on the Gita, after The Mother and The Riddle of This World, - what was there to say? Sadhaks who came to know vaguely about Sri Aurobindo's new experiment in poetic creation were duly intrigued. One or two ventured to make .'inquiries. Was the new Savitri no more than a revision of the earlier draft? Sri Aurobindo wrote to a disciple in 1931:

There is a previous draft, the result of the many retouchings... but in that form... it would have been a legend and not a symbol. I therefore started recasting the whole thing; only the best passages and lines of the old draft will remain, altered so as to fit into the new frame.⁴

He was then at "the new form of the first Book", coming to it "once a month perhaps", making such changes as inspiration dictated. And so the revision, the recasting, continued at a leisurely pace. In a letter written in 1932, he explained that the blank verse of Savitri was "an attempt to catch something of the Upanishadic and Kalidasian movement" in English, but his success could be known only when two or three Books were finished. Even in 1934, he was still at Book I, "working on it over and over again with the hope that every line may be of a perfect perfection". Two years later he wrote: "The first book has been lengthening and lengthening out"; and most of it was new. The direction of revision was towards the "Overhead" levels, and the general movement was towards "a possible Overmind poetry".⁵ On the other hand, it was not a matter of mere technical progression. Technical mastery had come to him incidentally, but still it was the force of the inspiration that decided things, the mind as such hardly intervening in the composition of the lines. Of what use, after all, was deliberate contrivance in something so unpredictable as poetry? "The two agents are sight and call," Sri Aurobindo wrote; "Also feeling - the solar plexus has to be satisfied.. ."⁶

In the course of 1936, K.D. Sethna was able to persuade Sri Aurobindo to send him a passage of 16 lines from the Exordium, both as a specimen of poetry with an Overmind influence and as a foretaste of the finished Savitri. Letters passed between Sethna and Sri Aurobindo carrying their precious load of comment and criticism and poetry and explication, and presently Sethna made a fair copy of a portion of Part I, and Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1938:

... the "Worlds" have fallen into a state of manuscript chaos, corrections upon  

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corrections, additions upon additions, rearrangements on rearrangements out of which perhaps some cosmic beauty will emerge!⁷

The original small passage about Aswapathy and the other worlds was ultimately to become, "under the oestrus of the restless urge for more and more perfection", the long second Book ('The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds') in fifteen cantos. It was all still a closely guarded secret between Sethna and Sri Aurobindo, although some - the Mother certainly and afterwards in a general way Nolini - knew very well what was in the offing.

Then, on the eve of Darshan Day in November 1938, there was an accident and Sri Aurobindo sustained a fracture:

He Was passing from... [his study} to His bedroom or the bathroom on the other side. Somehow He slipped on a tiger skin that was on the floor, and His knee struck very hard on the head of the tiger ~... He fell down and there He lay. He lay down there quietly. He was not calling anybody, there was nobody there except the Mother in the other room.... Humanly he was a person who would never disturb anybody, who would never call anybody unless absolutely necessary.... However, it seems the Mother received a strong vibration in Her sleep or in Her trance.... and felt at once that something had happened to Sri Aurobindo. This is ... unity of consciousness. And She came and found Sri Aurobindo lying on the floor. At once answering the emergency bell, Purani rushed up...⁸

Dr. Manilal and Dr. Nirod were summoned too, and Sri Aurobindo's body, lying prone on the floor, reminded Nirod of "the golden beauty of a God... the golden Purusha". The right leg had to be put in plaster, and Sri Aurobindo was conveyed to his bed. Wasn't the writing of Savitri something akin to a struggle with Death? The adverse forces were apparently up in arms, and the accident was thus no mere accident. Nolini Kanta Gupta's explanation was that there were war-clouds over Europe in late 1938 (thanks to the Czechoslovakian crisis), and very probably Sri Aurobindo "took upon Himself the shadow and avoided its falling on the world for a year".⁹

Be that as it may, when Sri Aurobindo returned to Savitri again, it was under slightly different circumstances. In course of time, Nirod became both Sri Aurobindo's medical attendant and amanuensis, and this association was to continue till the very end. There were also conversations in Sri Aurobindo's room, and some fortunate few - including Dr. Manilal, Dr. Becharlal, Dr. Satyendra, Purani, Champaklal and Nirod - were of the company. The "work in progress", Savitri came up in the course of the talks more than once. On 3 January 1939, for example, Sri Aurobindo said that in his blank verse he had gone back from Shakespeare and Milton to Marlowe:

Each line stands by itself and each sentence consists at most of five or six lines.... There are no pauses or enjambments like those in Paradise Lost.¹⁰

Again, on 5 March, to a question from Nirod, whether Sri Aurobindo would have time to finish Savitri, the answer was: "Oh, Savitri will take a lone time, I have to go all over the old ground....  

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Every time I find more and more imperfections."

The war years notwithstanding, work on Savitri progressed - revisions, cancellations, additions, interlinings, dictation of long passages, wholesale recastings - and by 1946 the first three Books constituting Part I were ready in typescript in almost final form. Of the remaining two Parts, two Books were ready, while the others had to be revised and finalised or yet to be written. "In the new form, " Sri Aurobindo explained in a letter to K.D. Sethna, "it will be a sort of poetic philosophy of the Spirit and of Life much profounder in its substance and vaster in its scope than was intended in the original poem."¹¹

Already, in his article in Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual 1943, Sethna had made a meaningful reference to Savitri, which was to be the poetic counterpart - or more than counterpart - to the philosophical treatise, The Life Divine. Surmise and expectancy were at fever-pitch when the August 1946 issue of Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual carried the first Canto 'The Symbol Dawn', along with Sri Aurobindo's essay on Mystic Poetry; and the Advent (August 1946) published fifty lines from Canto IV ('The Secret Knowledge'). How packed with epiphanic suggestiveness was the opening asseveration: It was the hour before the Gods awake\ The unfolding hour brought to our gaze the "dawn" of Savitri itself, and it was as though

A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.

One lucent corner windowing hidden things

Forced the world's blind immensity to sight.¹²

Or almost one felt, as the rhythms found their way to the ear and slowly sank in the depths of one's consciousness, that the alluring spiritscapes were uncannily invoked by the lines in "The Secret Knowledge':

Our early approaches to the Infinite

Are sunrise splendours on a marvellous verge

While lingers yet unseen the glorious sun. ...

And Nature trembles with the power, the flame.¹³

Sahrdayas or lovers of poetry were a little impatient, though; and an anonymous reviewer said in the November 1946 issue of the Advent:

But a little more does not satisfy us, whose appetite whets the more it feeds, and we look forward to the Divine whole of Savitri, at which he [Sri Aurobindo] has been working over so many years.

But truly speaking, even with the opening Canto, 'The Symbol Dawn', Savitri had arrived and begun her reign. The February 1947 issue of me Advent editorially declared:

Savitri, the Divine Grace in human form, is upon earth. The Divine Consciousness has abandoned its own Supramental transcendental status to enter

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into the human consciousness and partake of the earthly life....

More Cantos appeared in the ensuing months, and in the Advent of 1948, there was again another editorial comment, this time on the second Canto ('The Issue') of Book I:

The Divine Consciousness descending into earthly life as Grace and taking a human form is a mystic, a supremely mysterious phenomenon.... The Grace grips Evil at its very source... the Light strikes the source itself from where it issues Darkness. And the embodied Descent means the cancellation of the reign of Ignorance.

When the long Book II ('The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds') appeared, Sri Krishnaprem (Ronald Nixon) wrote in Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual (l948):

Sri Aurobindo has closed a gulf that has yawned in the human psyche for many many centuries. In the ancient world, poetry... was - above all - revelation. Its subject matter was the eternal truth which dwells in the heart of all life.... The poet... was the Seer, the Prophet, the Magician, and his speech was mantra and enchantment....

Gradually, with the rise of this self-arrogating power (the separative mind, that 'slayer of the soul'),... one became two and head sundered itself from heart, knowledge from feeling...

In this poem the fissure has been closed. Savitri... is neither subjective fancy nor yet mere philosophical thought, but vision and revelation of the actual inner structure of the Cosmos and of the pilgrim of life within its sphere - Bhu, Bhuvar, Swar: the Stairway of the Worlds reveals itself to our gaze - worlds of Light above, worlds of Darkness below - and we see also ever-circling life ("kindled in measure and quenched in measure").... Poetry is indeed the full manifestation of the Logos, and when, as here, it is no mere iridescence dependent on some special standpoint, but the wondrous structure of the mighty Cosmos, the 'Adorned One', that is revealed, then in truth does it manifest in its full, its highest grandeur.... It is an omen of the utmost significance and hope that in these years of darkness and despair such a poem as Savitri should have appeared. Let us salute the Dawn.

The sunrise of Savitri was now hastened, and Books I-III appeared in 1950 as the first Volume of Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol. It was evident that the work as a whole too was nearing completion.

In the forties it became Sri Aurobindo's habit - and more and more as the years passed - to dictate rather than write, the unfailing Nirod being the Vinayaka for this modern Vyasa.

Savitri was now a major preoccupation with Sri Aurobindo, and once he dictated four to five hundred lines without a break, "whose beauty and flow", says Nirodbaran, "were a delight for their sweep of cosmic vision and their magical language". By 1950, it was as though a sense of urgency had seized even the unhurried imperturbable Sri Aurobindo. "I want to finish Savitri soon", he told Nirod, and the dictations continued as if there was now a race with time. Towards

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the end of 1950, Sri Aurobindo dictated the long second Canto ('The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain') of The Book of Fate'. Only The Book of Death' and the Epilogue (The Return to Earth') remained to be revised and amplified in consonance with the rest of the work. Once, on being reminded of these unfinished Books, Sri Aurobindo merely said: "Oh, that? We shall see about that afterwards." But this was not to be. Left apparently unfinalised, these Books along with the others that had been fully revised or recast, were published as the second Volume (Parts II and III) of Savitri in 1951, and the entire work came out in 1954 in a one-volume edition, followed by Sri Aurobindo's elucidatory letters on the poem. It had been almost fifty years a-growing, not in bulk alone, but even more through its conquest of ever rising heights of Consciousness, - a phenomenon in poetic creation that has been compared by K.D. Sethna with Goethe's Faust.¹⁴ When the whole epic of nearly 24,000 lines was at last revealed to the gaze, many at first felt frightened and turned away, but a few - and more and more as the months and years passed - came to feel that here was the greatest epic after Dante and Milton, perhaps the greatest epic of all time. Thus a Western philosopher-critic, Raymond Frank Piper:

We know we must resort to the art of poetry for expressing, to the fullest possible artistic limits, the yearning and battles of mankind for eternal life.... During a period of nearly fifty years... {Sri Aurobindo} created what is probably the greatest epic in the English language.... I venture the judgement that it is the most comprehensive, integrated, beautiful and perfect cosmic poem ever composed. It ranges symbolically from a primordial cosmic void, through earth's darkness and struggles, to the highest realms of Supramental spiritual existence, and illumines every important concern of man, through verse of unparalleled massiveness, magnificence, and metaphorical brilliance.

Savitri is perhaps the most powerful artistic work in the world for expanding man's mind towards the Absolute.¹⁵

II

The doubt returns: After the stupendous Arya sequences, where was the necessity for yet another massive effort of literary creation? Sri Aurobindo had written poems and plays enough, and it couldn't therefore have been any desire for fresh poetic laurels that led to the embarkation on the Savitri adventure. In The Life Divine he had structured his Supramental Manifesto; in The Human Cycle and The Ideal of Human Unity he had indicated the contours of the future society and the future humanity; and in The Synthesis of Yoga he had set forth the dynamics of the integral Yoga that were to be the means of self-perfection and world-transformation. What, then, remained?

It was decreed indeed that man should change, and his world should change, and that the Superman or the Supramentalised man of tomorrow, inhabiting a transformed world or supernature,

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should render earth and heaven equal, transfiguring our life mundane with its blots of "death, desire and incapacity" into the Life Divine with its immaculate intensities, life-movements and realisations. The Life Divine was the goal and Supramental Yoga the means, and the New Man should, as it were, break out of the shell of existing humanity. Sri Aurobindo could see it all very clearly, and he had explained everything in a manner that should carry conviction. And yet, - perhaps something more could be done; the thing decreed could be shown as happening! The drama of man's and earth's transcendence into the splendours and imperatives of the Life Divine could be enacted in terms of stern causality, involving the reader too in the dynamics of the transformation. The truths of philosophy are abstractions to be cognised by the ratiocinative mind, but the truths of poetry are to be experienced. And this is equally true of mystic poetry, which is verily of the stuff of spirituality. For Sri Aurobindo, spirituality meant no escape from reality, from the demands of life here and now; spirituality was but a creative force by means of which flawed reality could be seized and purified and transformed, and this world of division and darkness and impotence and death transfigured into the Life Divine with its soul-marks of Love and Light and Power and Immortality.

We might, on a superficial view, look upon Savitri as the account of something that happened long ago - "in far past times when the whole thing had to be opened". In the Mahabharata, it is the story of an individual victory over death; or rather, the story of Yama's boon of her husband's life to a chaste and noble wife. Surely, Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is much more than that. Is it the forecast of something that is to happen in the future? Alas, Death still stalks in our midst, his misrule is as rampant as ever! Should Savitri, then, be read only as a fantasy, or as fantasy fused with racial memory, - perhaps as a Vision, perhaps as prophecy? Perhaps, Savitri is a recordation of something actually happening right now! The fight against Death is going on - Death with its negations, corruptions, perversions; and the battle has been joined - it is now being waged before us, and we could see it had we eyes to see, or if we didn't turn them away in fear or disgust. And the whole battle is being fought to open ways to Immortality, and Love - Love armed with Power - has to fight this battle of renewal, of purification, and of glorification. Truth or the Abyss? The Life Divine - or Annihilation? The issue is joined indeed, and the struggle and the possibility are projected before us. Will Satyavan - the soul of the world that is Satyavan - be redeemed at last and will the world be made safe for the future man? Perhaps, again, Savitri is the report, not so much of a witness-poet, but of a participant! It is recordation, prophecy, report, and the unfolding action itself; and in its deepest sense, it is Sri Aurobindo's own life, and the Mother's too, in progressive unravelment.

And for the student of Savitri, isn't the very reading of the poem a kind of participation in its spiritual action? Savitri is about Satyavan and Savitri, and on a different level about Sri Aurobindo and the Mother; and it is about us too - it does something to us, it does involve us in the action that is only superficially about a

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husband and a wife, but has really a terrestrial, even a cosmic, significance. A dialectic is projected, a drama is played, before us - it is apparently concluded, but the real confusion is yet to be concluded in the fullness of time. Once we are surrendered, the currents of the poem carry us onward, and we become sharers in the action or participants in the play. Savitri is thus a new kind of poem, a poem whose making was Yoga Sadhana and whose reading too should be such Sadhana. "To read Savitri is indeed to practise Yoga," the Mother is reported to have told a disciple; "one can find there all that is needed to realise the Divine. Each step in Yoga is noted here, including the secret of other Yogas also."¹⁶ It is thus an advance on The Life Divine which is the Groundwork of Knowledge and The Synthesis of Yoga which is the manual of Integral Yoga. In Savitri, theory teams with practice. Truth is wedded to Shakti, and both career towards the goals of Realisation. We proceed from the 'what can we know?' of The Life Divine and the 'what shall we do?' of The Synthesis of Yoga to the 'what may we hope for?' - tattva, hita and purusārtha being all fused in Savitri into a veritable Life Tree Ygdrasil of spiritual poetry.

After the Overmental realisation of 24 November 1926, Sri Aurobindo probably felt that the preordained spiritual revolution and supramental transformation were likely to come about rather sooner than had seemed possible before. This was partly the reason he went into complete seclusion and concentrated on his Yoga; and the writing of Savitri became one of the means - perhaps the principal means - of accomplishing his aim. As he once wrote to Nirod:

...I used Savitri as a means of ascension. I began with it on a certain mental level, each time I could reach a higher level I rewrote from that level.... In fact, Savitri has not been regarded by me as a poem to be written and finished, but as a field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written from one's own Yogic consciousness and how that could be made creative.¹⁷

Savitri was thus sādhanā  and recordation in one, and was to be the means of sādhanā for others. It was still a fresh recital of the old legend, but a recital so charged with power by the symbol-godheads who are the protagonists in the drama that the poem itself could progressively enact in the theatre of our souls the great victory and transformation that are the theme of the poem.

There is one other circumstance, too. In The Future Poetry, which had serially appeared in the Arya, Sri Aurobindo had speculated on the future of the epic in the age of Overhead Poetry:

The epic, a great poetic story of man or world or the gods, need not necessarily be a vigorous presentation of external action: the divinely appointed creation of Rome, the struggle of the principles of good and evil as presented in the great Indian poems, the pageant of the centuries or the journey of the seer through the three worlds beyond us are as fit themes as primitive war and adventure for the imagination of the epic creator. The epics of the soul most inwardly seen as they will be by an intuitive poetry, are his greatest possible subject, and it is this supreme kind that we shall expect from some profound  

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and mighty voice of the future. His indeed may be the song of greatest flight that will reveal from the highest pinnacle and with the largest field of vision the destiny of the human spirit and the presence and ways and purpose of the Divinity in man and the universe.¹⁸

This was written in 1920. Did Sri Aurobindo feel in the years of his complete retirement that it was up to him to attempt this "song of greatest flight"?

The hand-picking of the Savitri legend out of the ocean of stories that is the Mahabharata is no less significant. The Mahabharata is about the sanguinary strife between the Kauravas and the Pandavas. This 'brother against brother' theme appears with numberless variations in the course of the epic. In the Adi Parva itself, the warring Devas and Asuras - both offspring of Prajapati - chum the ocean to secure amrta or the elixir of immortality. The snakes and Garuda - natural enemies - are the offspring respectively of the sisters, Kadru and Vinata; and Garuda is asked to get amrta from heaven to secure the freedom of his mother, Vinata. During his journey, he is advised to feast upon the fighting animals, a tortoise and an elephant, who had been in their earlier birth the brothers, Vibhavasu and Supratika. The wages of discord, of egoism, of sin - is death, always death. Where is the armour against death? HOW shall we make Death itself die? Anything external like amrta could prove to be a mockery, as it became to the Asuras and the snakes. All boons for self-preservation, all mechanical paraphernalia of security, all cunning contrivances and edifices of self-deception, all must fail - as fail they did with Hiranyakasipu, Parikshit or Jayadratha. Fear and terror and hate and violence and vindictiveness - like lechery - only hasten the end. But love - the power of love - has an utter sovereignty. The Asuras and the snakes seek amrta out of fear, - the fear of death. Even after quaffing amrta, the Devas are constantly "afraid". Parikshit desperately tries to Keep out the emissary of Death. Jayadratha seeks refuge in the false sundown. But Savitri - alone among the apocalyptic heroes and heroines of the Mahabharata - relies on the power within, the invincible power of love:

On the bare peak where Self is alone with Nought

And life has no sense and love no place to stand,

She must plead her case upon extinction's verge,

In the world's death-cave uphold life's helpless claim

And vindicate her right to be and love. ...

Love in her was wider than the universe,

The whole world could take refuge in her single heart. ...

She matched with the iron law her sovereign right:

Her single will opposed the cosmic rule.¹⁹

Armed with the power of her love, she will face any threat, any adverse force, whatsoever: she will defy and defeat Death itself.

In the original Mahabharata story, as in Sri Aurobindo's, the heroine doesn't  

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flinch at the prospect of Satyavan's threatened death, nor even in the face of death I or the sight of Yama the Lord of Death. She has prepared for the event, not by securing external aids, but by going within herself and forging the links with her secret Self. She doesn't falter at any time, she doesn't indulge in self-pity, and she doesn't weep when the crisis is upon her. In the course of a conversation on 19 January 1940, Sri Aurobindo remarked that, although in his English version Romesh Chunder Dutt makes Savitri weep, "in the Mahabharata there is no trace of it Even when her heart was being sawed in two, not a single tear appeared in her eye. By making her weep he took away the very strength of which Savitri is built".²⁰ It was Savitri's divine solitariness and strength, her propensity to incarnate in herself the will to triumph in a world surrendered to resignation and defeat, and her consciousness of mission and might to rectify the very engines of our incapacity and anguish - it was this radiant vision and experience of Savitri's personality and power that started Sri Aurobindo on this giant undertaking and sustained his inspiration during the long years of the thirties and forties when the supreme cosmic epic was being architectured into his many-splendoured form.

III

Savitri, as we now have it, is in twelve Books of forty-nine Cantos. One of the Cantos in Book VII ('The Book of Yoga') carries no title, in Book VIII ('The Book of Death') the solitary Canto is marked Three, and Book XII ('Epilogue; The Return to Earth) was apparently not given the final touches of revision. The twelve Books nevertheless as they stood in the 1954 edition account for over 23,814 lines, though the Mother on being told of this, at once remarked to K.D. Sethna: "There should have been 24,000 lines."²¹ And Sethna has noted the interesting fact that together the title and sub-title - Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol - make twenty-four letters!

On the first approach, Savitri is apt to scare away the modern reader who is generally too much in a hurry. Not only its sheer mass and its unconventional structure, but even more its unfamiliar content made up largely of the occult and the incomprehensible, must raise barriers between the poem and its potential readers. The main narrative takes up no more than fourteen Cantos (I. 1 and 2; IV. 1-4; V.l-3; VI.1-2; VII.l; VIII.3; and XII), while the remaining thirty-five Cantos are about Aswapathy's Yoga, Savitri's Yoga, and Savitri's redeemer's progress through the occult worlds of Eternal Night, Double Twilight and Everlasting Day. And yet such a mechanical attempt to separate the narrative from the non-narrative part could be misleading in the extreme. The poem has to be seen as a unity, an organic wholeness and fullness of revelation.

The "action" of the poem opens in the "hour before the Gods awake" - the hour presaging the "dawn", and the "dawn" itself heralding the "day when Satyavan must die". The opening Canto - 'The Symbol Dawn' - is, in Sri Aurobindo's  

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words, "a key beginning and an announcement", for the cosmic symbol dawn signifying the waking up from the swoon of Inconscience, the physical dawn over the cluster of forest hermitages, and the awakening of Savitri or her descent into earth-consciousness from the ineffable altitudes of the Spirit, all fuse into the dawn of the day "when Satyavan must die":

An unshaped consciousness desired light

And a blank prescience yearned towards distant change. ...

Arrived from the other side of boundlessness

An eye of deity pierced through the dumb deeps; ...

Then through the pallid rift that seemed at first

Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns,

Outpoured the revelation and the flame. ...

At the summons of her body's voiceless call

Her strong far-winging spirit travelled back,

Back to the yoke of ignorance and fate,

Back to the labour and stress of mortal days,

Lighting a pathway through strange symbol dreams

Across the ebbing of the seas of sleep.²²

And the poem ends, at the end of the day, in the silent night that is to precede another Dawn:

Night, splendid with the moon dreaming in heaven

In silver peace, possessed her luminous reign.

She brooded through her stillness on a thought

Deep-guarded by her mystic folds of light.

And in her bosom nursed a greater dawn.²³

From "dawn" to a "greater dawn" is the whole arc of the poem's "action", and a momentous something that happens during the day will transform the next dawn and make it a "greater dawn" - not a dawn that sees the Gods alone awake and gives the fleeting hint of a fairer future but a dawn that finds earth the kin-soil of heaven and men who are one with the Gods. The "something" that happens during the day - why it happens and how, and who makes it happen - is the theme of the poem.

What happens is the defeat - or rather the transmutation, transfiguration - of Death. Yama is not mentioned by name; always the sinister and dark Power figures as Death. Life and love and the soul's freedom are in utter jeopardy because of the seeming omnipotence of Death. It is the classic theme, the one fundamental theme, of all great poetry. We are afraid, afraid - of the dark, of defeat, of death. We are born but to die, we reason but to err, and we are daunted at every turn. Thus the first verse of The Divine Comedy:

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In the middle of my life, I found myself in a dark wood, and lost my way.... Dante is afraid, and fear is the precursor of death. He has to traverse the three worlds of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven before he can find an answer to this fear and this terror - he finds the answer in Beatrice and Love, "the love that moves the Sun and the other stars". In the opening lines of Paradise Lost, again, there is reference both to the awesome phenomenon of Death and the answer provided by the Son of Man who is also the Son of God:

Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste

Brought death into the world, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,

Sing, Heavenly Muse....

There is a fall, and there is a rise again; there is death, and death is exceeded by the power of the Redeemer's love. In the Mahabharata, it is fear, fear, all the time - and the other passions too: Kāma, krodha, lobha, and moha - and, above all, the failure of compassion and love. In Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, the Evil - not its endless manifestations - the Evil itself is confronted and checkmated, and not so much destroyed as radically changed in its character: Death the Lord of Darkness becomes the Lord of Light, and death gives place to Everlasting Life!

Death, Love, Truth -Yama, Savitri, Satyavan - the symbols and the legendary characters simultaneously fill the expanse of the epic, and it is not easy, it is not wise, to separate the symbol from the legend. In the course of a conversation, Sri Aurobindo said in 1939 that, even in the Mahabharata, the Savitri story was symbolic, although the popular view was to take it merely as a tale of conjugal fidelity. Asked to spell out the symbolism, he went on:

Well, Satyavan whom Savitri marries, is the symbol of the Soul descended into the Kingdom of Death; and Savitri... the Goddess of Divine Light and Knowledge comes down to redeem Satyavan from Death's grasp.²⁴

In a more detailed note on the subject, Sri Aurobindo further underlines the symbolic intention and implications:

...this legend is... one of the many symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle. Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance; Savitri is the Divine Word, daughter of the sun, goddess of the supreme Truth who comes down and is born to save; Aswapathy, the Lord of the Horse, her human father, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes; Dyumatsena, Lord of the Shining Hosts, father of Satyavan is the Divine Mind here fallen blind, losing its celestial kingdom of vision, and through that loss its kingdom of glory. Still this is not a mere allegory, the characters are not personified qualities, but incarnations or

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emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch and they take human bodies in order to help man and show him the way from his mortal state to a divine consciousness and immortal life.²⁵

The characters, then, are at once symbol-powers and real human beings. They didn't figure in the mythic past alone, but are also constituents of the current climate of striving and pressing towards the future. And what - or who - is Narad, the other important character in the drama? Isn't he the necessary catalytic agent that prods the "action" towards the desired consummation? Narad in Aswapathy's Court affects King, Queen and Savitri differently, yet the diverse reactions coalesce towards the same end: the crystallisation of Savitri's shining purpose to stake all for the Soul of Truth and -win all through the Power of Love:

My will is part of the eternal will,

My fate is what my spirit's strength can make,

My fate is what my spirit's strength can bear;

My strength is not the titan's, it is God's....

I have seen God smile at me in Satyavan;

I have seen the Eternal in a human face.²⁶

And the poet adds: "Then none could answer to her words."

Dyumatsena, the fallen King caged in the mind, sees if at all as through a fog dimly, but Aswapathy the King-Forerunner breaks out of the mental cage, explores the "vasts of God", confronts the Divine Mother, and secures the boon of Her descent to earth. It may be asked: Why should the Infinite, the omnipotent, thus agree to limit itself? Omnipotence, however, includes also the power of self-limitation, and the power of uniting the finite and the infinite. The Avatar both brings the heavens down and raises the earth to heaven; he (or she) is a living example for humanity, the average in appearance who is a positive ideal as well, the normal by birth and upbringing who grows supernormal dimensions of consciousness - the bringer of light and love and power, and above all the advanced Scout for the race as a whole. As the Advent wrote editorially in its April 1948 issue:

The personality that incarnates it [the Avatar] belongs at the same time to two apparently incompatible and contrary worlds and possesses a dual character. Within, it harbours the Divine, is the Divine, fully conscious of its sovereign potency above the laws of a mortal life of ignorance; without, it embraces this world too, this play of inconscience and limitation. The two confront each other in the Incarnation with equal potency and in magic interaction.

So it is with Savitri. On the fateful day - "Twelve passionate months led in a day of fate"²⁷ - Savitri wakes up too like the rest of the forest folk, wakes up from her withdrawn divinity to conscious humanity; and slowly her double role becomes clear to her:  

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To live with grief, to confront death on her road, -

The mortal's lot became the Immortal's share.

Thus trapped in the gin of earthly destinies,

Awaiting her ordeal's hour abode,

Outcast from her inborn felicity,

Accepting life's obscure terrestrial robe,

Hiding herself even from those she loved,

The godhead greater by a human fate.²⁸

The familiar Mahabharata story of Savitri and Satyavan certainly brings out the compelling power of a wife's chastity to effect a change of heart even in the obdurate Lord of Death. That tale itself, with its clear bold outlines, partakes of the sublime, and Winternitz has aptly called it "the wonderful poem of faithful Savitri".²⁹ The incommensurable power of love was constantly in Sri Aurobindo's mind, as may be inferred from the role given to it in Sri Aurobindo's earlier poems and plays. For example, these words are put into the mouth of Eric King of Norway:

Some day surely

The world too shall be saved from death by Love.³⁰

But in Sri Aurobindo's epic, Savitri is the Avatar of the Divine Mother and not alone Satyavan's wife. The aim of her great endeavour would be, not just to fulfil a personal need or to resist a personal danger, but primarily to hasten the cosmic evolution and to promote a global human realisation. On the day of days, she is in readiness, certainly to fight the danger to Satyavan's life, but even more to get at the Evil itself, and purify and change it altogether:

To wrestle with the Shadow she had come

And must confront the riddle of man's birth

And life's brief struggle in dumb Matter's night.³¹

Dyumatsena's "blindness", Satyavan's "death", - gradations and intensities of darkness! Must one acquiesce in their finality? But utterly to defeat darkness anywhere is to destroy it everywhere. Not Dyumatsena's blindness, nor Satyavan's death, is the problem; these are but the ripples on the surface, not the unplumbed ocean itself. It is Death - the evil Shadow - the giant Ignorance - that has to be frontally tackled, beaten back, and forced to knuckle under. It is much more than a distressing conjugal problem, more even that a recurring human problem; it is a cosmic problem, it is a crisis in earth's evolutionary history. And the Divine Mother has come down as Power and Grace to defeat the Shadow and redeem the "soul of the world that is Satyavan".  

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The background infinities and cosmic significances notwithstanding, the splendour of the eternal feminine that is Savitri is not ignored either. She is divine, she is human; and she is all the more divine because she is human too, and she is the more adorably human because she is also radiantly divine:

Near to earth's wideness, intimate with heaven,

Exalted and swift her young large-visioned spirit

Voyaging through worlds of splendour and of calm

Overflew the ways of Thought to unborn things.

Ardent was her self-poised unstumbling will;

Her mind, a sea of white sincerity,

Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave.

As in a mystic and dynamic dance

A priestess of immaculate ecstasies

Inspired and ruled from Truth's revealing vault

Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,

A heart of silence in the hands of joy

Inhabited with rich creative beats

A body like a parable of dawn

That seemed a niche for veiled divinity

Or golden temple door to things beyond.

Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-born steps;

Her look, her smile awoke celestial sense

Even in earth-stuff, and their intense delight

Poured a supernal beauty on men's lives.. .³²

The predestined "day", the imminent trial of strength between the cosmic protagonists, and Savitri's self-poised sublime alertness for the event: the 'exposition' of the drama to be played in the symbol theatre of evolutionary possibilities is now almost complete. There is now a halt in the action. Time suddenly takes a leap backwards, and we are permitted to peer into the origins or the aetiology of the threatened confrontation: A world's desire compelled her mortal birth. And so we are winged back to the days of Aswapathy's first awakening - his perception of the heavy and weary weight of this unintelligible world, his soul's break-through to freedom, his crystal-gazing into the 'Secret Knowledge', his exploration of the occult stairway of the worlds.

The main bulk of Savitri is made up of three hard blocks: Aswapathy's Yoga (1.3-5, II and III), Savitri's Yoga (VII. 2-7), and the Savitri-Yama confrontation (IX, X and XI). In between, there is the story of Savitri's birth and blossoming into womanhood, of her choice of Satyavan as her spouse, of Narad's peep into predestination, of the year of holy wedded life, and of Satyavan's death in the  

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forest (IV, V, VI, VII. 1 and VIII). The 'Epilogue' describes Savitri's "return to earth" with Satyavan.

Aswapathy's Yoga is the Yoga of self-knowledge and world-knowledge, the Yoga of Aspiration, the Yoga of the Forerunner who makes Savitri's advent possible. Starting with unease and uncertainty, Aswapathy achieves his soul's release through a psychic opening and spiritual change. He is able to break through the shell of egoistic separativity:

He felt the beating life in other men

Invade him with their happiness and their grief;

Their love, their anger, their unspoken hopes

Entered in currents or in pouring waves

Into the immobile ocean of his calm.³⁴

Beyond this universal or cosmic experience there is the Nirvanic absolute silence, and Aswapathy wins his way to its supernal calm:

There only were Silence and the Absolute....

He plunged his roots into the Infinite,

He based his life upon Eternity.³⁵

And when he returns to the outer consciousness after this baptism in the waters of transcendence, he has won "his soul's release from Ignorance";

A wide God-knowledge poured down from above,

A new world-knowledge broadened from within:...

A genius heightened in his body's cells

That knew the meaning of his fate-hedged works...³⁶

His body's cells have themselves grown conscious of their divine affiliations. From this high plane of spiritual change, Aswapathy seeks corroboration in the 'Secret Knowledge' or the received perennial philosophy, and he proceeds from the Ground of such knowledge to a heightened spiritual power of penetration into all the continents of cosmic life and experience. But before the start of his adventure into the occult worlds he is for a while caught between primordial opposing forces:

He climbed to meet the infinite more above. ...

Opponent of that glory of escape,

The black Inconscient swung its dragon tail

Lashing a slumberous Infinite by its force

 Into the deep obscurities of form:

Death lay beneath him like a gate of sleep.

One-pointed to the immaculate Delight,

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Questing for God as for a splendid prey,

He mounted burning like a cone of fire. .

To a few is given that godlike rare release.³⁷

As he rises thus, shaking off the Inconscient, he is met by "a Might, a Flame, /A Beauty half-visible with deathless eyes", which envelops him "with its stupendous limbs", and he is now able to invade the occult Invisible:

A voyager upon uncharted routes

Fronting the viewless danger of the Unknown,

Adventuring across enormous realms,

He broke into another Space and Time.³⁸

After a divina-commedia-like. journey covering the world-stair -

Ascending and descending twixt life's poles

The seried kingdoms of the graded Law - ³⁹

Aswapathy dares yet another ascent of aspiration as leader and representative of the race. The world-stair is not one world but all possible worlds, all the worlds together, and beyond our notions of space and time; the centre is everywhere, the circumference is nowhere. Dante's triple worlds, although superficially geographical, are actually psychological states. Where Dante is religious, theological and medieval, Sri Aurobindo is spiritual, scientific and modem; what Dante did with such superb psychological and clinical precision for his time, Sri Aurobindo has done for our time.

For Aswapathy himself, the whole arc of occult experience between the poles of superconscience and inconscience has already been covered in its entirety, and he is beyond all knowledges, all experiences:

He had reached the top of all that can be known:

His sight surpassed creation's head and base;

Ablaze the triple heavens revealed their suns,

The obscure Abyss exposed its monstrous rule.⁴⁰

But how about the rest of mankind? What he aspires for is not a personal solution but a universal realisation and a new creation. And so he continues his search for this ultimate solution, and his efforts are rewarded at last:

The Presence he yearned for suddenly drew close...

The undying Truth appeared, the enduring Power

Of all that here is made and then destroyed,

The Mother of all godheads and all strengths

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Who, mediatrix, binds earth to the Supreme....

She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire.

The luminous heart of the Unknown is she...⁴¹

He is advised to content with what he has won but ask no more for the earth or the race as a whole. But Aswapathy will not be so easily put off, and he makes reply to the Divine Mother:

How shall I rest content with mortal days

And the dull measure of terrestrial things,

I who have seen behind the cosmic mask

The glory and the beauty of thy face? ...

Let thy infinity in one body live,

All-Knowledge wrap one mind in seas of light,

All-Love throb single in one human heart. ...

Let a great word be spoken from the heights

And one great act unlock the doors of Fate.⁴²

And the Mother gives her consenting voice:

O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry.

One shall descend and break the iron Law,

Change Nature's doom by the lone Spirit's power. ...

A seed shall be sown in Death's tremendous hour,

A branch of heaven transplant to human soil;

Nature shall overleap her mortal step;

Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will.⁴³

Thus Savitri comes into the world, not simply to satisfy a childless King's desire for issue, but truly to fulfil Aswapathy's great aspiration and prayer on behalf of long-suffering earth.

There is now Nature's preparation for the Advent, and the seasons begin with summer and end with spring. The seasons are symbolic too, summer of aspiration by earth, the field of manifestation, a looking-up to the Sun-God for fulfilment, the rainy season, of the boon from heaven; the intermediate seasons, of gestation and growth; and spring, of the fruit or the new-born Child;

Answering earth's yearning and her cry for bliss

A greatness from our other countries came. ...

The seasons drew in linked significant dance

The symbol pageant of the changing year. ...

Rain-tide burst in upon torn wings of heat,

Startled with lightnings air's unquiet drowse,

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Lashed with life-giving streams the torpid soil....

Three thoughtful seasons passed with shining tread

And scanning one by one the pregnant Hours

Watched for a flame that lurked in luminous depths,

The vigil of some mighty birth to come.....

The seed grew into a delicate marvellous bud,

The bud disclosed a great and heavenly bloom.⁴⁴

From the very moment of her birth, Savitri seems a Child apart, dwelling in a "strong separate air":

An invisible sunlight ran within her veins

And flooded her brain with heavenly brilliancies

That woke a wider sight than earth could know.⁴⁵

Albeit she is his dearly-loved daughter, Aswapathy (though not his Queen) is well aware of her divine mission on earth, but not the exact moment in time and of time when time shall be beyonded; nor the manner and place of confrontation of the Shadow; and Savitri knows too, but as yet only obscurely, for the godhead is yet veiled within, her avatar-role among the other protagonists is still a closed book to her. As the years pass and she grows into the perfection of woman's beauty, she no doubt compels admiration, but awes even more; "all worshipped marvellingly, none dared to claim". And once, when she approaches her father, he suddenly sees her with newly-opened eyes:

There came the gift of a revealing hour:...

Transformed the delicate image-face became

A deeper Nature's self-revealing sign,

A gold-leaf palimpsest of sacred births,

A grave world-symbol chiselled out of life. ...

A deathless meaning filled her mortal limbs;

As in a golden base's poignant line

They seemed to carry the rhythmic sob of bliss

Of earth's mute adoration towards heaven

Released in beauty's cry of living form

Towards the perfection of eternal things.⁴⁶

Recognising "the great and unknown spirit born his child", he asks her to go out into the wide world all alone and choose by her soul's light her partner for life. Her quest is a feast of experience enough:

Her carven chariot with its fretted wheels

Threaded through clamorous marts and sentinel towers  

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Past figured gates and high dream-sculptured fronts

And gardens hung in the sapphire of the skies,

Pillared assembly halls with armoured guards,

Small fanes where one calm Image watched man's life

And temples hewn as if by exiled gods

To imitate their lost eternity.⁴⁷

But it is among "meditation's seats" that she met the "one for whom her heart had come so far":

A tablet of young wisdom was his brow,

Freedom's imperious beauty curved his limbs,

The joy of life was on his open face.

His look was a wide daybreak of the gods...⁴⁸

It is the re-enactment of the ancient miracle of the dawn and sunrise of Love's marvellous hour. "The meeting and union of Satyavan and Savitri," writes M.V. Seetaraman, "blend all the qualities of romantic, platonic and Christian lovers."⁴⁹ Like the marriage of heaven and earth at dawn ("All grew a consecration and a rite") in the opening Canto, here too the destined meeting of Savitri and Satyavan grows into a mutual consecration and a rite:

Then down she came from her high carven car

Descending with a soft and faltering haste;...

A candid garland set with simple forms

Her rapid fingers taught a flower song,

The stanzaed movement of a marriage hymn.

Profound in perfume and immersed in hue

They mixed their yearning's coloured signs and made

The bloom of their purity and passion one.

A sacrament of joy in treasuring palms

She brought, flower-symbol of her offered life,...

On the high glowing cupola of the day

Fate tied a knot with mornings' halo threads

While by the ministry of an auspice-hour

Heart-bound before the sun, their marriage fire,

The wedding of the eternal Lord and Spouse

Took place again on earth in human forms:...⁵⁰

On her return to Madra to report her choice, it is Narad's intervention that opens Aswapathy's eyes - and Savitri's own - to the precise nature of the encounter ahead. Narad's warning is thus no warning at all, but merely the adroit opening of the drama of the Book of Fate that is to be played. The long speech that Narad

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makes, while it fails to carry conviction to the Queen, lights up Aswapathy's eyes with recognition of the unfolding Moment and also helps Savitri to grow aware of her larger role and the direction of the future course of her action. She is already the perfect human wife to Satyavan, and she will presently get ready to confront and confound the Shadow when, as preordained, it chooses to make its appearance. The twelve months of wedded life pass serenely enough, and nobody - not even Satyavan - knows anything about her invisible burden of terrible expectancy. But shortly before the appointed day, Savitri is almost all-human, and feels like giving up the fight. When a Voice summons her to her mission in life ("Arise, O soul, and vanquish Time and Death"), Savitri poses the tell-tale question:

Why should I strive with earth's unyielding laws

Or stave off death's inevitable hour?

This surely is best to practise with my fate

And follow close behind my lover's steps... .⁵¹

The Voice almost admonishes Savitri:

Is this enough, O Spirit?

And what shall thy soul say when it wakes and knows

The work was left undone for which it came?...

Find out thy soul, recover thy hid self,

In silence seek God's meaning in thy depths,

Then mortal nature change to the divine.⁵²

It is then that Savitri commences her interiorised Yoga of self-knowledge and preparation for her ordeal. What is she? Surely, not just the immaculate girl-wife of Satyavan apprehensive of the approaching 'Hour of Fate'! Then what is she? She now traverses the "inner countries" of matter, life and mind - encounters the triple soul-forces (Madonna of Suffering, Mother of Might, Mother of Light) - door after door opens, veil after veil is pierced, impersonation after impersonation is exposed - and last of all comes the recognition of her seagreen oneness with the Whole:

She was the godhead hid in the heart of man,

She was the climbing of his soul to God.

The cosmos flowered in her, she was its bed. ...

Eternity looked out from her on Time.⁵³

After all these backward glances that take a sweeping view of Savitri's antecedents, Aswapathy's Yoga, the whole architecture and inner substance of the stairway of the worlds, after these long backward leaps into personal history and cosmic evolutionary geography, the main action springs forward in Book VIII ('The

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Book of Death'), and Savitri follows Satyavan to the forest in the morning of the fateful day, and there is sudden darkness at noon:

Near her she felt a silent shade immense

Chilling the noon with darkness for its back. ...

She knew that visible Death was standing there

And Satyavan had passed from her embrace.⁵⁴

Left alone in the huge wood, despair doesn't assail her, and tears do not dim her eyes; on the other hand, all in her is taut to face "that mighty hour". Leaving Satyavan's body to rest on the forest soil, she raises her noble head:

...fronting her gaze

Something stood there, unearthly, sombre, grand,

A limitless denial of all being

That wore the terror and wonder of a shape.

In its appalling eyes the tenebrous Form

Bore the deep pity of destroying gods.⁵⁵

Now follows the occult Kurukshetra where Savitri and Death are the arch-antagonists. It is a journey and a struggle, a debate and a dialectic, marked by the steady progression in Death's discomfiture. This Kurukshetra is, indeed, a battlefield on divers fronts: Eternal Night, Double Twilight, Everlasting Day. These symbol worlds signify varieties of temptation, challenge and victory for Savitri. Death tells her that Love is expendable - it is but a foolish sentiment - it is impermanent - it is too much of the earth earthy! But Savitri has the right answers for all Death's sinister and seductive sophistries. Negations and sophistries failing, Death challenges Savitri at last to reveal the true Power hiding behind her deceptive human guise: let her lay bare the Truth, then he will yield Satyavan back. And Savitri „ takes Death at his word and -

A mighty transformation came on her.

A halo of the indwelling Deity,

The Immortal's lustre that had lit her face

And tented its radiance in her body's house,

Overflowing made the air a luminous sea.

In a flaming moment of apocalypse

The Incarnation thrust aside its veil. ...

Eternity looked into the eyes of Death,

And Darkness saw God's living Reality.⁵⁶

She asks Death to free the "soul of the world called Satyavan" from the "clutch of pain and ignorance", but the Shadow resists Light a little longer:

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The two opposed each other face to face.

His being like a huge fort of darkness towered;

Around it her life grew, an ocean's siege.'...

Light like a burning tongue licked up his thoughts,

Light was a luminous torture in his heart,

Light coursed, a splendid agony, through his nerves;

His darkness muttered perishing in her blaze.

Her mastering Word commanded every limb

And left no room for his enormous will...

He called to Night but she fell shuddering back,

He called to Hell but sullenly it retired:

He turned to the Inconscient for support,

From which he was born, his vast sustaining self:

It drew him back towards boundless vacancy

As if by himself to swallow up himself:

He called to his strength, but it refused his call.

His body was eaten by light, his spirit devoured.

At last he knew defeat inevitable...

Afar he fled...

The dire universal Shadow disappeared

Vanishing into the Void from which it came.⁵⁷

His last defiance has been but a show of desperation, he is baffled, he loses his dark armour, the soul's Light eats up the outer body of Death, and the prophecy foretold is now fulfilled at last:

Even there shall come as a high crown of all

The end of Death, the death of Ignorance.

Eternal Night and Double Twilight have thus both been beyonded, but Savitri has yet to cross some more hurdles in the field of Everlasting Day before she can return to earth with Satyavan. First the Power, who had died in the flames of Savitri's blaze of viśva-rūpa, reappears phoenix-like as a Lord of Light:

Transfigured was the formidable shape. ...

Night the dim mask had grown a wonderful face.⁵⁸

He changes his tactics, and now offers the ultimate bliss in heaven to Savitri. But she will not be tempted:

I climb not to thy everlasting Day,

Even as I have shunned thy eternal Night. ...

Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls;

Earth is the heroic spirit's battlefield,...  

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In vain thou temptst with solitary bliss

Two spirits saved out of a suffering world;

My soul and his indissolubly linked

In the one task for which our lives were born,

To raise the world to God in deathless Light,

To bring God down to the world on earth we came,

To change the earthly life to life divine.⁵⁹

The God has no option but to submit to Savitri's adamantine resolution:

As I have taken from thee my load of night

And taken from thee my twilight's doubts and dreams,

So now I take my light of utter Day.⁶⁰

He withdraws into his triple symbol-worlds, and Savitri presently grows aware of the primordial invisible Mother-Spirit, who poses four times the choice between the four-fold beatitudes of Peace, Oneness, Power, Joy and the infinite uncertainties of life upon earth. But Savitri is still a rock of adamant; she is only for "earth and men", and she must share the heavenly felicities with men on earth. Then breaks forth from the Silence the blissful sanction and decree:

O beautiful body of the incarnate Word,

Thy thoughts are mine, I have spoken with thy Voice. ...

All thou has asked I give to earth and men....

O Sun-Word, thou shalt raise the earth-soul to Light

And bring down God into the lives of men;...

When all thy work in human time is done,

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.⁶¹

Benediction is doubled with prophecy, and as Savitri and Satyavan re-awaken on the bosom of the earth they are surprised with joy and they are deeply content, and "over wide earth brooded the infinite bliss". The last Book ('Epilogue') describes their return to Dyumatsena's place - a Dyumatsena restored to his sight and throne - and they retire for the night full of expectancy of "a greater dawn".

V

Savitri, a poem like no other, is based on vision and experience that do not come in everybody's way, and is sustained by an aesthesis that is geared to the quality of this vision and the nature of this experience. Large tracts of the poem  

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raise difficulties for the 'common reader' as much by the unfamiliarity of the subject-matter as by the knotted pregnancy of the poetic utterance. Sri Aurobindo himself has admitted that the poem deals with "so many various heights and degrees and so much varying substance of thought and feeling and descriptive matter and narrative",⁶² that any attempt to apply stereotyped criteria of evaluation must prove infructuous. Nor can we expect a uniform level of articulation in a poem of nearly 24,000 lines. Also exercises in commentary or elucidation would be in vain, unless the critic too has had the same range of mystic experience, or is at least conditioned by his psychic and intellectual training to enter into the spirit of such experience. In this predicament it is hardly surprising that Sri Aurobindo should be his own best annotator and interpreter, as may be seen from his numerous letters on Savitri, many of which are now appended to the one-volume edition of the poem. Touching or the essential character of the poem, Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1947:

Savitri is the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind and is often very far from what the general human mind sees and experiences....there must be a new extension of consciousness and aesthesis to appreciate a new kind of mystic poetry.⁶³

For example, when objection was taken to Sri Aurobindo's impressionistic description of the earth -

Athwart the vain enormous trance of Space,

Its formless stupor without mind or life,

A shadow spinning through a soulless Void,

Thrown back once more into unthinking dreams,

Earth wheeled abandoned in the hollow gulfs...⁶⁴

because, after all, only half the earth is dark at any time, Sri Aurobindo answered:

I am not writing a scientific treatise, I am selecting certain ideas and impressions to form a symbol of a partial and temporary darkness of the soul and Nature which seems to a temporary feeling of that which is caught in the Night as if it were universal and eternal. One who is lost in that Night does not think of the other half of the earth as full of light; to him all is Night and the earth a foresaken wanderer in an enduring darkness. If I sacrifice his impressionism and abandon the image of the earth wheeling through dark space I might as well abandon the symbol altogether... .⁶⁵*

Again, the criticism of the expression "teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance", called forth these comments:

The Inconscient and the Ignorance... to me they are realities, concrete powers

* In terms of Copemican astronomy, of course, 'dawn' is nor really the "rise" of (he Sun; it is only the earth getting into a position when the Sun can illuminate the exposed part. The eartt1 continues to revolve, and the exposed hemisphere changes too; the Gods are, after all, always awake. And all 'dawn' is self-unfolding, all knowledge is self-discovery!

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whose resistance is present everywhere and at all times in its tremendous and boundless mass....

Men have not learnt yet to recognise the Inconscient on which the whole material world they see is built, or the Ignorance of which their whole nature including their knowledge is built....

The mystical poet can only describe what he has felt, seen in himself or others or in the world just as he has felt or seen it or experienced through exact vision, close contact or identity and leave it to the general reader to understand or not understand or misunderstand according to his capacity... .66

When a later passage in the same Canto -

All grew a consecration and a rite.

Air was a vibrant link between earth and heaven;

The wide-winged hymn of a great priestly wind

Arose and failed upon the altar hills;

The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky.

was adversely commented upon by a critic, Sri Aurobindo remarked almost disarmingly:

I was not seeking for originality but for truth and the effective poetical expression of my vision. He finds no vision there, and that may be because I could not express myself with any power; but it may also be because of his temperamental failure to feel and see what I felt and saw.... The picture is that of a conscious adoration offered by Nature and in that each element is conscious in its own way, the wind and its hymn, the hills, the trees.... This last line ["The high boughs..."] is an expression of an experience which I often had whether in the mountains or on the plains of Gujarat or looking from my window in Pondicherry... and I am unable to find any feebleness either in the experience or in the words that express it.⁶⁷

One reason why parts of Savitri, especially those that try to project spiritual experiences, cause puzzlement to the average reader, why lines and sometimes whole passages strike him as "unpoetic" or not particularly poetic, is the nature of the "Overhead" aesthesis, its tantalising knot of power and limitation. Even sadhaks of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga or committed Aurobindonians, unless happily endowed, have experienced this difficulty, and hence Sri Aurobindo has been at pains to explain what they should look for in Savitri. Poetry no doubt is concerned with beauty, and aesthetics - when it does not degenerate into aestheticism of the "Art for Art's sake" variety - looks for the rasa or taste of beauty. But poetry should be for Truth's sake too, not only for Beauty's sake, though of course - at the highest level of apprehension L the two may be indistinguishable. Sri Aurobindo adds:

Aesthetics belongs to the mental range and all that depends upon it.... The Overmind is essentially a spiritual power. Mind in it surpasses its ordinary self and rises and takes its stand on a spiritual foundation. It embraces beauty  

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and sublimates it; it has an essential aesthesis which is not limited by rules and canons; it sees a universal and an eternal beauty while it takes up and transforms all that is limited and particular. ... Overmind in all its dealings puts truth first; it brings out the essential truth (and truths) in things and also its infinite possibilities; it brings out even the truth that lies behind falsehood and error....⁶⁸

Poetic appreciation cannot be mechanically cultivated; and some kinds of poetry are bound to prove caviare to the general. To be able to appreciate Savitri, one has to be "open to this kind of poetry, able to see the spiritual vision it conveys, capable too of feeling the Overhead touch when it comes".⁶⁹ The Overmind touch, even the touch of anything else 'overhead' (which comprises all the above-mind states of consciousness: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition) must involve, in some measure at least, a "cosmic consciousness", a background consciousness to which the million particulars of phenomenal life perceived by the mind or the vital emotion or the physical seeing are ultimately related: "In the direct Overmind transmission this something behind is usually forced to the front or close to the front..."⁷⁰ But, then, as with Arnold's 'Grand Style' or the Longinian 'Sublime', the Overhead touch or note too "has to be felt and cannot be explained or accounted for".⁷¹

Sri Aurobindo is, however, careful to add that "Overhead poetry is not necessarily greater or more perfect than any other kind of poetry". And yet, although perfection is perfection - whether it be perfection of the language, or of the word-music and rhythm, or of the feeling or thought communicated - "there is also the quality of the thing said which counts for something".⁷² A pebble has its beauty, and snow-clad Himalayas are beautiful too bordering on the mystical sublime. How do we "grade" perfection and greatness in poetry? Sri Aurobindo ventures to formulate some criteria, giving importance to the inrush of the higher Overhead consciousness that heightens or greatens what it touches and illumines. But how about a poet's greatest possible effort? -

...sometimes a felicitous turn or an unusual force of language or a deeper note of feeling brings in the Overhead touch. More often it is the power of the rhythm that lifts up language that is simple and common or a feeling or idea that has often been expressed and awakes something which is not ordinarily there. ... But sometimes there comes down a supreme voice, the Overmind voice and the Overmind music.... But its greatest work will be to express adequately and constantly what is now only occasionally and inadequately some kind of utterance of the things above, the things beyond, the things behind the apparent world and its external or superficial happenings and phenomena. It would not only bring in the occult in its larger and deeper ranges but the truths of the spiritual heights, the spiritual depths, the spiritual intimacies and vastnesses as also the truths of the inner mind, the inner life, an inner or subtle physical beauty and reality. ... It might even enter into the domain of the infinite and inexhaustible, catch some word of the Ineffable, show us

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revealing images which bring us near to the Reality that is secret in us and in ' all....⁷³

There is no infallible Geiger counter to detect perfect perfection that is also supreme utterance. Recognition could come as in a blinding lightning flash: or it could steal over and fill the consciousness like rare unforgettable perfume: or course through the bloodstreams causing a sudden splendid exhilaration and ecstasy. All over Savitri are scattered lines that seem to be charged with this drive of power and grace of Grace:

A fathomless zero occupied the world.

Dawn built her aura of magnificent hues

And buried its seed of grandeur in the hours.

A body like a parable of dawn

That seemed a niche for veiled divinity...

He found the occult cave, the mystic door

Near to the well of vision in the soul,

And entered where the Wings of Glory brood...

A nebula of the splendours of the gods

Made from the musings of eternity.⁷⁴

Sometimes a cosmic simile or the evocation of a deathless moment of the mythic past (which is also the living eternal present) - many lines in sequence or a whole passage - may cumulatively carry the sovereign Overmind ambience. Thus of Aswapathy:

As shines a solitary witness star

That burns apart. Light's lonely sentinel,

In the drift and teeming of a mindless Night,

A single thinker in an aimless world

Awaiting some tremendous dawn of God,

He saw the purpose in the works of Time.⁷⁵

Thus of Savitri, as seen by Narad:

...Who is this that comes, the bride,

The flame-born, and round her illumined head

Pouring their lights her hymeneal pomps

Move flashing about her? From what green glimmer of glades

Retreating into dewy silences  

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Or half-seen verge of waters moon-betrayed

Bringst thou this glory of enchanted eyes?⁷⁶

And thus of the tremendous event of Christ's incarnation and crucifixion:

The Son of God born as the Son of man

Has drunk the bitter cup, owned Godhead's debt,...

Now is the debt paid, wiped off the original score.

The Eternal suffers in a human form,

He has signed salvation's testament with his blood:

He has opened the doors of his undying peace.

The Deity compensates the creature's claim,

The Creator bears the law of pain and death;

A retribution smites the incarnate God.⁷⁷

In this cosmic epic that aims at projecting "a total and many-sided vision and experience of all the planes of being and their action upon each other", Sri Aurobindo has used language with unlimited freedom, not "admitting any mental rule of what is or is not poetic".78 Fidelity to the vision and experience has been the only governing consideration. There are clarities of vision and varieties of experience - covering the whole arc from the Inconscient to the Superconscient - not all of which are within the average reader's range of comprehension. Where our vision or experience coincides with the poet's, recognition is immediate, as with the description of our own sordid and sullied world of follies, falsities, fatuities and futilities - an evil house of many mansions:

It was a no-man's land of evil air,

A crowded neighbourhood without one home,

A borderland between the world and hell. ...

The Fiend was visible, but cloaked in light;

He seemed a helping angel from the skies:

He armed untruth with Scripture and the Law;

He deceived with wisdom, with virtue slew the soul

And led to perdition by the heavenward path.⁷⁹

This might be the description of a Ministry of Truth in Big Brother's Government Somewhere (that's almost Everywhere). Again, these images of the modem city, poised on perilous uncertainty and anxiety, and enacting unending lechery, greed and hate:

A capital was there without a State:

It had no ruler, only groups that strove.

He saw a city of ancient Ignorance

Founded upon a soil that knew not Light.  

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There each in his own darkness walked alone...⁸⁰

Around him crowded grey and squalid huts

Neighbouring proud palaces of perverted Power,

Inhuman quarters and demoniac wards. ...

A glut of hideous forms and hideous deeds

Paralysed pity in the hardened breast.

In booths of sin and night-repairs of vice

Styled infamies of the body's concupiscence

And sordid imaginations etched in flesh,

Turned lust into a decorative art.. .⁸¹

A barriered autarchy excluded light;...

Flaunting its cross of servitude like a crown,

It clung to its dismal harsh autonomy.

A bull-throat bellowed with its brazen tongue;...

A deafened acquiescence gave its vote,

And braggart dogmas shouted in the night

Kept for the fallen soul once deemed a god

The pride of its abysmal absolute.⁸²

On the other hand, there are also harmonies and intensities and fulfilments not less real than the discords and frivolities and falsities; yet these are not within our everyday range of experience. And when Sri Aurobindo - because he has visioned them and experienced them as clearly and as vividly as we experience the sights and movements on our earthly inferno - when Sri Aurobindo describes these higher and purer altitudes, we are merely dazed, as in a dream or by a fantasy. It is not something, we feel, that touches us on the raw. Words, words, words, we say; mysticism, perhaps, but not something to hold on to - like a bed-post! Accustomed to the dark, light itself becomes an intruding impertinence. Attuned to falsehood's syllogisms. Truth's axioms sound like unrealities. At best there is but a willing suspension of disbelief:

All there was soul or made of sheer soul-stuff:

A sky of soul covered a deep soul-ground.

All here was known by a spiritual sense:...

Body was not there, for bodies were needed not,

The soul itself was its own deathless form

And met at once the touch of other souls

Close, blissful, concrete, wonderfully true. ...

He met and communed without bar of speech

With beings unveiled by a material frame.

There was a strange spiritual scenery,  

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A loveliness of lakes and streams and hills,

A flow, a fixity in a soul-space,

And plains and valleys, stretches of soul-joy,

And gardens that were flower-tracts of the spirit,

Its meditations of tinged reverie.⁸³

Aswapathy (or Sri Aurobindo) has seen something, it is as living a thing to him as is the table on which I write, it becomes as much a part of his treasured experience as a city we have lived in, a memorable face that we had once seen in a crowd, or a deathless moment - whether of joy or pain - in our otherwise humdrum lives. All the same, Sri Aurobindo's words may leave us cold because we haven't seen what he has seen, we haven't the beatific certitudes that had come to him as the crown of his Yoga. If we had a feeling for words but no sympathy - or aptitude - for arduous climbs of Yoga, we might find in the descriptions some power of observation, some word-embroidery, some colouring of the imagination, but no more. But unless the reader at least concedes the reality of spiritual values - unless the reader has felt a psychic opening to the intuitions of the spirit - large areas of Savitri must remain opaque, or without positive relevance, to him; and the poem as a whole, too, will fail to make the intended total effect. Certainly, any reader almost can get something - something of profound significance - out of Savitri or some sections of the poem. But for it to yield all its secrets and to effect the cathartic alchemic change in our consciousness, Savitri should be approached, not alone as great poetry, but equally as a means of Yoga sādhanā  - as a body of mantra to be read and pondered and translated into realisation.

VI

In a long spiritual epic like Savitri, in which the subjective element is more dominant than the merely narrative, in which psychological states and occult realities take far more space than descriptions of physical actualities, it is inevitable that the poet should put more of himself into the poem than in the traditional heroic epic. Commenting on the animadversions of a critic, Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1947:

.. .the poet writes for his own satisfaction, his own delight in poetical creation or to express himself and he leaves his work for the world, and rather for posterity than for the contemporary world, to recognise or to ignore, to judge and value according to its perception or its pleasure.⁸⁴

But a great poet, although he may write for his own satisfaction, writes also for the future. He is not just recording something that is past and done with, but is presenting the permanent essence of his experience, and this only gains in significance with the passage of time. The completion of a poem or its first publication marks no more than the beginning of its unpredictable life. Dante's Commedia,  

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Shakespeare's King Lear, Milton's epic, Goethe's Faust, not to mention works like the Gita: have we yet come to the end of our 'understanding' of these constituents of the human heritage? This applies even more, perhaps, to a cosmic epic like Savitri, which Sri Aurobindo himself once described as "an experiment in mystic poetry, spiritual poetry cast into a symbolic figure".⁸⁵

Attentive readers of Savitri who were reasonably familiar with the principal landmarks of Sri Aurobindo's life could no doubt see that the poem was in some measure - perhaps in substantial measure - his own spiritual autobiography. In an epic pronouncedly psychological, the poet must necessarily draw upon the reserves of his inner life. Aswapathy's Yoga takes up 22 Cantos or about 370 pages (out of a total of 814). There is the Yoga of the King (itself divided into three stages), there is the exhaustive exploration of the occult world-stair, there is the adoration of the Divine Mother, and there is the boon of her promised incarnation in a human form. According to the Mahabharata story, the childless King, Aswapathy, did tapasya for eighteen years till the Goddess Savitri appeared and promised a daughter to him. It is on this that Sri Aurobindo has built the whole many-chambered edifice of Aswapathy's Yoga, very largely drawing upon his own experiences and realisations at Baroda, Alipur, Chandernagore and Pondicherry. The scientist with a microscope in a laboratory, the astronomer with a telescope in an observatory, these specially equipped men are able to see the infinitely small or the infinitely distant: the particles, the constellations, the speeds, the orbits are photographed or calculated, and these photographs and calculations are ready for our scrutiny. Don't we believe them? The secrets of the occult world are likewise revealed to us by Sri Aurobindo, for with his special gift of double vision or universal sight he had seen them and been them, and he has brought us news from the Invisible - from zero and from infinity! The identification of Aswapathy's Yoga with Sri Aurobindo's should not, however, mean equating Aswapathy's with Sri Aurobindo's life at all points or in every particular.

There is, then, Savitri and her Yoga. In the Mahabharata, when the first year of wedded life is about to draw to a close, Savitri undertakes a three nights' (trirāttra) vow, fasting, praying and keeping vigil throughout. This is transformed in Sri Aurobindo's poem into Savitri's Yoga - her journey into the "inner countries", her search for her soul, and her coalescement of herself with the Infinite. To readers of these Cantos, it seemed a plausible identification to see Savitri's Yoga as the Mother's own. Again, it would be wrong to make the Savitri-Mirra parallel go all the way. It is also necessary to remember that, although Aswapathy's is superficially an exteriorised Yoga and Savitri's an interiorised Yoga, the spiritual realities affirmed or experienced by them are the same. The individual, universal and transcendent realisations are common features, but there is no repetition; there is seeming variation and there is also oneness behind the play of variation. Quintessentially, it is the same consciousness, although it may seem to divide itself into two: the two complementary halves of the one cosmic or supramental consciousness. Aswapathy is the Forerunner, Savitri is the avatar; and they  

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are both necessary for the manifestation, and the dual act of redemption and new creation.

With repeated re-readings of Savitri and a greater intimacy with Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's writings, these early surmises seemed to gain only further corroboration. Presently Huta - an aspirant who had felt the call of the Mother from Miwani in far-off Africa - came to the Ashram at Pondicherry, and the Mother and Huta began a truly unique tapasya of collaboration: rendering Savitri in painting. As the Mother later wrote:

Savitri, this prophetic vision of the world's history, including the announcement of the earth's future - Who can ever dare to put it in pictures?

Yet, the Mother and Huta have tried it, this way.

We simply meditate together on the lines chosen, and when the image becomes clear, I describe it with the help of a few strokes, then Huta goes to her studio and brushes the painting.

It is in a meditative mood that these 'meditations' must be looked at to find the feeling they contain behind their appearance.⁸⁶

A selection of twenty-three of these paintings, illustrating Canto I, appeared as a superb publication. Meditations on Savitri, on 15 August 1962; the second volume with thirty-five paintings on Cantos 2 and 3, came out in 1963; the third volume with forty-nine paintings, in 1965; and the fourth with twenty on Canto 5, in 1966 - in all 127 plates illustrating Book One. On 10 February 1967, an Exhibition of 460 paintings was held in Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry, with the Mother's brief announcement: HERE is SAVITRI. And Huta's succinct comment was in the poet's own words: "All can be done if the God-touch is there."

There is always a slight difference in emphasis between the poetic treatment of a theme and a painter's (or sculptor's) interpretation of the same theme. In Meditations on Savitri — the very title 'Meditations' hints at sādhanā  - we have the Mother's interpretations of some of the life-lines, or seminal passages, in the earlier Cantos of Savitri. The 'interpretations' are not at the intellectual but at a high Overhead level; it is vision and experience again as stimulated by Sri Aurobindo's poem, and rendered in line and colour by the Mother and Huta. Readers who had encountered a wall of resistance between themselves and the poem now saw, or thought they saw, the images, the symbol-actions, the occult-situations. The paintings were not "realistic", they subscribed to no "school", - perhaps they only signified the emergence of an Overhead School. And what they achieved was to bring out the inner reality behind the material façade by giving arresting form,' movement, colour, life and mind - shall we call it the "Mind of Light"? - to psychological, occult and spiritual phenomena. The Mother herself has said, introducing the fourth volume of Meditations on Savitri: "Behind the appearances there is a subtle reality much closer to Truth; it is that one we are trying to show you." And yet, how is one to bring out the contours of the Divine? Leonardo da Vinci found it no easy matter to paint the figure of Christ in 'The Last Supper', the problem being to charge a human face with the aura of the Divine. How, then,  

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does a painter translate into line and colour apocalyptic visions or psychic realities like these:

Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred...

An eye of deity pierced through the dumb deeps...

A great nude arm of splendour suddenly rose;

It rent the gauze opaque of Nescience...

Along a path of aeons serpentine

In the coiled blackness of her nescient course

The Earth-Goddess toils across the sands of Time.

A sailor on the Inconscient's fathomless sea,

He voyages through a starry world of thought

On Matter's deck to a spiritual sun...

The mantra knocks at the inner door, and there is a call, and some projection on the film of consciousness. Huta's paintings corroborate the intuitions and quicken the vibrations, but all must be re-enacted in the reader's meditative poise of stillness and spiritual apprehension. It is sādhanā - or nothing. And how does one visualise Life and Death? Huta's illustration of "Death slays the journeying discoverer, Life" is the attempted answer. And of course there are the superlative challenges to the painter: how should she figure out Aswapathy, and how Savitri? In Book I, Canto 5, a climactic point is reached in the Yoga of the King when he achieves cosmic consciousness:

A universal light was in his eyes,

A golden influx flowed through heart and brain...

This is a challenge to the painter's art, and the challenge is squarely met and mastered with the help of "the God-touch". Aswapathy as the Mother sees him - as Huta paints him - is visible Sri Aurobindo, but still it is no photograph, no laborious portrait, but rather the soul of that "living centre of the Illimitable" recreated and thrown on the sensitive film of the psychic self. And even as Sri Aurobindo visualised Savitri in her avatar role in the image of the Mother herself, for Huta too - when she meditates with the Mother and when she tries to realise in colour the Mother's suggestions and interpretations - Savitri is verily reincarnated as the Mother: again, no mere mimicry of the visible physical form, but rather realisation after realisation of the kaleidoscopic inscape of the infinitudes of the Mother's soul:  

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And Savitri too awoke among these tribes...

Her passion-flower of love and doom she gave.

Of her pangs she made a mystic poignant sword.

All came back to her: Earth and Love and Doom...

A priestess of immaculate ecstasies...

To wrestle with the Shadow she had come...

Immobile in herself, she gathered force.

This was the day when Satyavan must die.

Everywhere it is the same Savitri: Vyasa's, Sri Aurobindo's, the Mother's. Huta's - the wonder-wife Savitri, the incarnate Divine Mother, the visibly living Mother, the Mother infallibly evoked in line and colour and symbolic suggestion. And in the illustrations to Cantos 3,4 and 5, Aswapathy too appears again and again, the word-power of the poet now translated into ikon in colour, and as we turn page after page - plate after plate - Aswapathy is seen to grow dimension on dimension, till he is poised to plan the remaking of man and his world:

His was a spirit that stooped from larger spheres

Into our province of ephemeral sight,

A colonist from immortality.

The landmarks of the little person fell,

The island ego joined its continent...

He sat in secret chambers looking out

Into the luminous countries of the unborn...

He stood upon a threshold serpent-watched,

And peered into gleaming endless corridors...

Always the power poured back like sudden rain,

Or slowly in his breast a presence grew...

Already in him was seen that task of Power:

Life made its home on the high tops of self;

His soul, mind, heart became a single sun;

Only life's lower reaches remained dim....

Even on the struggling Nature left below  

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Strong periods of illumination came...

Splendours of insight filled the blank of thought...

Thus came his soul's release from Ignorance...

The universal strengths were linked with his;

Filling earth's smallness with their boundless breadths,

He drew the energies that transmute an age.

The fittings, the electric bulb, the lampshade are necessary things; but if the switch itself fails to click, there is no light, no illumination of the open page, no leap of understanding for the mind or soul. Likewise, the ikon - be it verbal or a projection in colour or form - can leap to significance only if the soul within clicks to attention and re-enacts the divina commedia of the death of Death and the return to absolute sovereignty of the Soul that is Truth as well as Love.

Later still, on 18 January 1968, the Mother commenced another sādhanā: reading out key passages, meditating for a while, then making explanatory comments which were tape-recorded. Her words on the opening Canto have now been published as About Savitri (1972), with some more of Huta's paintings. The Mother describes Savitri as verily "the supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo's vision"; and hence to read the poem, as it were in a trance of meditation, must involve an attempt to re-capture the vision and re-enact in the Mind of Light awakened out of the Mind of Night that "supreme revelation". The Mother's comment on the very first line lightningly projects the sublime spiritual perspectives of the poem. The first emanations from the Supreme Mother - Consciousness, Bliss, Truth, Life - lose contact with their Origin, get immersed in Darkness, and in consequence dwindle into Unconsciousness, Suffering, Falsehood, Death. To redeem these four perverted and lost emanations, the Supreme Mother sends out a new series of emanations, the Gods. The exordium thus describes in the cosmic context the interval between the 'first and the second series of Divine emanations, - "the hour before the Gods awake".

From the Divine Summits, the descent to the Nadir of Inconscience: but in the Earth - albeit apparently an abandoned mass of inconscience - the Divine is actually veiled, secreted, benumbed, asleep, petrified, yet also awaiting the reverse movement of Evolution or return to Consciousness. Something stirs at last in the "inscrutable darkness", it is a new beginning of beginnings; "it is the starting-point, the first movement in evolution - the evolution that is the turning back of the Inconscient to return to the full Consciousness". Millions of years pass, then with the eruption of Mind in Man, there is an insistent sense of time, a feverish quickening of the pace. On the other hand, it is the "God-touch" alone that determines everything; the coming of avatar after avatar, the emergence of newer and newer cones of light, the growth of wider and wider wings of consciousness. The story of the Earth, the stir of awakening life, the repeated coming and rejection of the Ray, the surge and sweep of the evolutionary adventure, the culminating  

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definitive divine-action of Savitri - all somehow mix and mingle and merge marvellously in the impressionistic Revelation of 'The Symbol Dawn'.

"It is a symbolic work," says the Mother, "not the telling of a story of something that happened; it is the illustration in a condensed and imaged form of this effort of the Divine to divinise the material creation." And she adds, underlining the deeper implication of the Legend and the Symbol:

It is this terrible story of the creation of earth and man as the means to save the world from suffering and destruction.

The death of Satyavan becomes the symbol of the misery of the earth's creation, of its fate and, through Savitri, of its liberation. She faces the doom in order to give the solution.

The creation is plunged in misery, suffering and death. But it can and will be saved through Her intervention.

An ambrosial assurance, this: "will be saved"! Poetry, meditation, exegesis: these are movements of the same Consciousness, efflorescence of the same Revelation. The Divine Zenith, the Inconscient Nadir, the whole realm between: the way down, the way up, the whole stairway: the linking up of the extremities, the One Consciousness dividing only to unite again: the mystery and miracle of Creation, the Fall, the Ascension - all, all are suggested, all are invoked, all are shown in action in this unique and wonderful poem.

VII

During the two decades between the publication of the opening Canto of Savitri (August 1946) and the Exhibition of Huta's 460 "meditations" (February 1967), not only had the enormous epic been published in full, first in two volumes and then in a single volume (along with the letters), it had also provoked intelligent and increasing interest in India and abroad. A doctoral dissertation on Savitri, of which he was one of the referees, led Professor H.O. White of Trinity College, Dublin, to make a deep study of the poem itself, and he was profoundly enough affected to call it "a truly remarkable poem", and add:

I was immensely impressed by the extraordinary combination of East and West in the poem, of ancient Indian lore with the thought and experience of the modem cosmopolitan world.⁸⁷

Again:

The poem has impressed me by its sublimity, richness of imagery, and lofty spiritual level, allied with great skill in interpreting unusual psychic experiences through appropriate imagery.

Another of the referees. Professor Vivian de Sola Pinto of the University of Nottingham, described Savitri in the Modern Language Review (July 1963) as a "remarkable epic... surely among the greatest poetic achievements of the present century".  

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By this time, A.B. Purani's valuable commentary - Savitri: An Approach and a Study - had appeared and gone into a second edition (1956), and during his visits to England, Africa and the United States, he often discoursed eloquently on the poem and succeeded in bringing about a diffusion of interest in Sri Aurobindo and his work. His literary contacts too were valuable, and Sir Herbert Read wrote to him, after reading llion:

It is a remarkable achievement by any standard, and I am full of amazement that some one not of English origin should have such a wonderful command, not only over language as such, but of its skilful elaboration into poetic diction of such high quality.

In India, although some of the younger poets could not or would not see anything in Savitri, the epic nevertheless found more and more readers, and scholars like Nolini Kanta Gupta, K.D. Sethna, V.K. Gokak, Prema Nandakumar, M.P. Pandit, Rameshwar Gupta, Sisirkumar Ghose and Ravindra Khanna - steadily extended the frontiers of Savitri studies, and many a leading poet in the regional languages has gratefully acknowledged his debt of inspiration to the creator of Savitri. Translations of parts of Savitri also appeared, including a Sanskrit rendering of the first Canto by T.V. Kapali Sastry. Huta's paintings thus only raised such dedicated attention to a new level of meditative absorption. By now all but the wilfully or congenitally blind could see that Savitri was truly an indubitable world classic, an epic with a cosmic range and a prophetic appeal, - "a happy compensation" for the sick hurry and feverish aims of our diseased times.

Savitri has been read as poetry, as poetised philosophy, as symbolistic and mystic poetry, as an example of the Overhead inspiration at work over prolonged jets of utterance, and as an experiment in blank verse that avoids the Miltonic polyphonic paragraphs and returns to the clarities of Tennyson and the pre-Shakespearean Marlowe, and more particularly the Kalidasian and Upanishadic fusion of finish and power. Even people with no academic background - perhaps they far more than the mere academics - have felt drawn to Savitri, reading and re-reading and memorising and reciting, although not fully - not always - understanding everything. Some are content with opening Savitri somewhere at random, reading a few lines, and trying to withdraw into an inner world. Doesn't Aswapathy himself move from experience to doctrine, and from 'The Secret Knowledge' to still profounder experience? In this favourable climate of Savitri studies, Huta's paintings - the result of joint meditations by the Mother and Huta on particular passages or self-sufficing mantric utterances - have underlined the supreme importance of Savitri for sādhanā. The Mother herself had participated in these "meditations"! - that surely was vastly significant. When a sadhak at last asked the Mother for guidance some nine months after the Exhibition of the Savitri paintings, she took the opportunity to make some revelations - and what marvellous revelations! - that at once threw a new light both on the composition of the poem and on its singular efficacy for sādhanā. The words were spoken, as by a mother to a child, with love, with intimacy, with authority. It is not the tone of the academic critic,  

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nor of the sophisticated lecturer, nor of the supercilious seminar-participant; there is here no argument, no attempt at exegesis; there is only simple statement and a call for reliance on the inner guide. First about the 'matter' of Savitri, and of its author's mantric mode of communication:

He has crammed the whole universe into a single book. It is a marvellous work, magnificent, and of an incomparable perfection....

My child, yes, everything is there, mysticism, occultism, philosophy, the history of evolution, the history of man, of the gods, of creation, of nature - why, for what purpose, what destiny? All is there....

Each verse of Savitri is like a revealed mantra... the rhythm leads you to the origin of sound which is OM.... It gives out vibrations for him who can receive them, the true vibrations of each stage of consciousness.

About Savitri as Sri Aurobindo's (and her own) spiritual autobiography, the Mother was equally explicit:

These are experiences lived by him, - realities, cosmic truths. He experienced all this, as one experiences joys or sorrows physically. He walked in the darkness of inconscience, even in the neighbourhood of death, endured the sufferings of perdition and emerged from the mud, the earth's misery, to breathe the sovereign plenitude and enter the supreme Ananda....

He accepted suffering to transform suffering with the joy of union with the Supreme....

All this is his own experience, and what is most surprising is that it is my own experience also.... It is the picture of our joint adventure into the Unknown, or rather into the Supermind....

And, finally, about the way Savitri should be read, and about what one might hope for through the sādhanā of such reading:

Savitri is the whole Yoga of transformation, and this Yoga now comes for the first time in the earth consciousness....

Whoever is willing to practise Yoga, tries sincerely, and finds the necessity for it, will be able to climb with the help of Savitri to the highest step of the ladder of Yoga, will be able to find the secret that Savitri represents....

But you must not read it as you read other books, or newspapers. You must read with an empty head, a blank and vacant mind, without there being any other thought, you must concentrate much, remain empty, calm and open: then the words, rhythms, vibrations will penetrate directly....

The direct method is by the heart... if you try to concentrate really with this aspiration, you can light a flame, the psychic flame, the flame of purification....

The great German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, once said that the meaning and purpose of his Matte Laurids Brigge amounted to this:

this, how is it possible to live, when the very elements of this life are unintelligible to us? when we're everlastingly inadequate in love, uncertain in resolve, and incapable in the presence of death, how is it possible to exist?⁸⁸  

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But Rilke himself had no final answer to give in terms of poetic art

The completely satisfying answer is Savitri, which makes intelligible man's life in the cosmos, shows Love as Power wedded to Grace, demonstrates the possibility of the death of Death and projects mans future in a changed and transformed earth.

Might we not, then, salute the author of Savitri - as the poets salute Virgil in Dante's poem Onorate l'altissimo peota: Honour of Highest Eminence, honour the Ultimate Poet!*

* Cf. the American poet D.R. Cameron's tribute to Savitri:

...the mantra's bard

Silvers a way over almighty abysms

To epic a world behind the soul's paroxysms.

The words are stars shooting across a mind

More vast than galaxies of the blind

Who may touch one day after time's long famine

The rare and occult flesh of Savitri and Satyavan.

(Mother India, August 1966, p. 76)  

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