Man-handling of Savitri

Some Statistics

A false impression has been promoted by the Archives Team by stating that 99.75% of Savitri is unaltered. It is said: “Savitri contained more than 1, 80, 000 words and 99.75% of these are the same in all Editions Between 1951 and 1993 Edition, there are about 1974 differences of which 476 are verbal. The others are punctuation, capitalisation, hyphenation, spelling and others.” To the scientifically and statistically minded people it would mean that 0.25% change is negligible and for practical purposes we may consider it to be zero. But the devil is in the false perspective of taking poetry as a linear form with words as the linear unit. It would be here exposed as just another branch of editorial arrogance of the Archival Team in the space of Statistics.

And if we do investigate considering a stanza with a full stop as the affected 'unit of fullness' then a total of 1464 stanzas are affected directly. If we take the stanzas for which lines have been added as also being affected, then total number swells to 1478. Total stanzas in the First Edition are 5771. Therefore the percentage of alterations comes out to be (1478/5771)x100= 25.61%. This means, every fourth stanza has been affected!