Man-handling of Savitri

Apropos of Savitri

The composition of Savitri has a long history; definitely it has a history of thirty-four years, beginning with August 1916 till mid-November 1950. The poem started as a narrative tale picked up from the Mahabharata. It had in the beginning some eight hundred lines. Eventually it grew into a full epic and consists of twelve books running into twenty-four thousand lines. In the process it acquired the significance of a symbolic transformative legend which is also the luminous medium for presenting yogic-spiritual experiences and realisations of the Author. Several versions in the form of manuscripts and typescripts add up to about eight thousand sheets; with repeated drafting and revisions the poem continued to grow almost till the end. Savitri in its creative intensity and universality of the theme embraces possibilities of the immense, of the deathless spirit entering deathlessly into the mortal creation; it triumphantly expresses them in it. Its triumph is in the conquest of Death, it opening the pathway of immortality for the manifestation of love, truth, beauty, joy, strength, knowledge here in this mortal world.

While this is just a broad thematic aspect of Savitri, there is another one also though much less significant,—the compositional. It arises due to the nature of the writing of the poem itself. We might say that though the first part is essentially in Sri Aurobindo own hand, later it did undergo revisions by dictation, after 1944 or so; the remaining parts were practically composed newly by dictations. Then, of course, fair copies of these dictated passages were made and typed. At every stage, when these were read out to the poet there were revisions and additions, including the stages of the final proofs coming from the press. On one occasion when a proof sheet came to check punctuation, Sri Aurobindo instead added several lines by dictation! The growth of Savitri was never monotonic, was never mathematically linear.

In a letter dated 1934 Sri Aurobindo writes: “Savitri is a work by itself unlike all the others. I made some eight or ten recasts of it originally under the old insufficient inspiration.” This remark was essentially concerned with the Savitri as it stood at that time, consisting of just a very few portions of the first part, kind of a trial version. The progress is marked in a letter written thirteen years later, in 1947; he reveals to Amal Kiran: “… I have made successive so many drafts and continual alterations till I felt that I had got the thing intended by the higher inspiration in every line and passage.” But even at this stage many Books had to be written, the Book of Yoga for instance was hardly there. About the status of his earlier drafts, we get some idea from a letter written by him in 1936. The five Books of Part I of that time, he tells us, “will be, as I conceive them now, the Book of Birth, the Book of Quest, the Book of Love, the Book of Fate, the Book of Death. As for the second Part, I have not touched it yet. There was no climbing of planes there in the first version—rather Savitri moved through the worlds of Night, of Twilight, of Day—all of course in a spiritual sense—and ended by calling down the power of the Highest Worlds of Sachchidananda. I had no idea of what the supramental World could be like at that time, so it could not enter into the scheme. As for expressing the supramental inspiration, that is a matter of the future.” In July 1948, in a letter to Dilip Kumar Roy, he avows: “Savitri is going slow, confined mainly to revision of what has already been written, and I am as yet unable to take up the completion of Part II and Part III which are not finally revised and for which a considerable amount of new matter has to be written.” The seal of “incomplete completion” was put on Savitri just before three weeks of Sri Aurobindo’s passing away on 5 December 1950 which thus marks a doubly significant event.

It is hard to imagine the complexity of the process through which the massive Savitri opus had proceeded, developed, grown. The author at one stage speaks of the “chaos of manuscripts”. Draft after draft, and revision after revision, and handling of thousands of pages or sheets of various sizes have practically made now the whole sequence intractable. These drafts quite often went back and forth, to the typist, to the press, and back to the author, and the author took every opportunity to expand or revise the earlier text. Obviously, from the point of view of editing, this led to difficult situations. But that was the part of the process, and it has to be accepted as things do stand. However, one of the unfortunate results is, at times the loss of unusually wonderful passages which should have really come in some proper place in the final text. Thus the following lines

Voices that seemed to come from unseen worlds
Uttered the syllables of the Unmanifest
And clothed the body of the mystic Word—

lines charged with occult-spiritual power have regrettably, remained unused.

Three known distinct periods of the composition of Savitri can thus be seen. During the Arya-phase, before 1920, Savitri was a narrative poem retelling the ancient story of Savitri and Satyavan. This draft began in August 1916. The second phase was during the 1930s when Sri Aurobindo gave it an altogether different turn, making this narrative an epic. It was about this time that the Tale of Savitri became a Legend and a Symbol. There is a date bearing on the Book of Beginnings; a 110-page draft of it was completed on 6 September 1942. During the last phase, roughly six-seven years prior to his departure in 1950, enormous amount of new material was added; this was essentially by dictation. There were heavy revisions also at various stages. In fact, as late at November 1950 three new dictations belonging to Book Six, the Book of Fate, Canto Two were given. These mark absolutely the last to be added to the epic, the last line being “But leave her to her mighty self and Fate”; here Narad is admonishing Savitri’s mother not to intrude in the matter, too superhuman for human comprehension. He is almost assuring that Savitri with her mighty self and with the God-given strength will undeniably meet the challenge of Fate. Earlier, the long and futuristic Book Eleven, The Book of Everlasting Day, was almost entirely done by dictation. About these dictations Nirodbaran says: “I am now amazed to see that so many lines could have been dictated day after day, like The Book of Everlasting Day.” he also speaks of the “colossal labour” Sri Aurobindo had put into Savitri.

However, the involved process through which the final version of Savitri came out in 1950-51 could entail, understandably, variations in the readings of the acceptable text. It is said that a “substantial number of discrepancies” have thus crept into it, due to the involved process of composition, that even in Part One which came out during the time of Sri Aurobindo himself, in September 1950, a few weeks before his withdrawal that year, contained “serious errors”. It is here that judgemental aspects enter in; opinions start differing, these causing great doubt about the whole editing done recently, about twenty years ago, resulting in the Revised Edition in 1993. It is claimed that this 1993-Edition was “the outcome of a systematic comparison of the printed text of Savitri with the manuscripts. Each line was traced through all stages of copying, typing and printing in which errors could have occurred. Readings found to have come about through inaccurate transcription or misprinting were corrected. Accidentally omitted lines were restored to the text. This has resulted in a very slight increase in the length of the poem to its present 23,837 lines.” However, even while taking this in good faith, validity of the claim needs independent verification. It is hoped that this will happen.