On Savitri
THEME/S
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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 Yuddhishtira during the year 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 Ithan the Nalai, 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 an 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,
1The Harmony of Virtue, SABCL, Vol. 3, pp. 154-55.
Ruru seeks her out in Patala (Hades), makes a deal with the Lord of Death 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 — Part 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. As was his habit, Sri Aurobindo no 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 in 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? Those 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 discipline 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
2Savitri, p. 728. 3Sri Aurobindo Circle, XXXII, 1976. See Mona Sarkar's report of the Mother's talk to him; Perspectives of Savitri, pp. 43-44.
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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 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 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 modem 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 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 be. Left apparently unfinalised, these
4 Savitri, p. 727. 5 Ibid., pp. 728-29. 61bid., p. 730.
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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.1 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:8
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... I Sri AurobindoT 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.
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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
7K. D. Sethna, The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, p. 114.
8Raymond F. Piper, The Hungry Eye, pp. 131-32. See Mother India, November 1958.
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the embarkation on the Savitri adventure. In The Life Divine he had structured his Supramental Manifesto; in 77ie 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 supemature, 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 stem 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 importance 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
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racial memory, — perhaps as a Vision, perhaps a 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 husband and a wife, but has really a terrestrial, even acosmic, 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 fulness 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."9 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 may we hope for?" — tattva, hita and puruṣārtha
9 Sri Aurobindo Circle, XXXII, 1976. See reference 3 above.
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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 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.10
Savitri was thus Sadhana and recordation in one, and was to be the means of Sadhana: 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 from 1917 to 1920, 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 words beyond us are as fit themes as primitive was 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
10 Nirodbaran's Correspondence , pp. 543-44. Also Savitri, pp. 727-28.
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some profound 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 the man and the universe.11
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 amṛta 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 amṛta 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 amṛta 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 of 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 amrta out of fear, — the fear of death. Even after quaffing amrta, 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,
11 The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 267.
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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.12
Armed with the power of her love, she will face any threat, any adverse force, whatsoever: she will defy and defeat Death himself.
In the original Mahabharata story, as in Sri Aurobindo's, the heroine doesn't flinch at the prospect of Satyavan's foretold death, nor even in the face of death 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."13 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 its many-splendoured form.
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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
* The Discovery of the Cosmic Spirit and the Cosmic Consciousness (Revised Edition in 1993).
12 Ibid., pp. 12-19. 13 A.B. Purani, Evening Talks, First Series, p. 294.
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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 23,813 lines, though the Mother on being told of this, at once remarked to K. D. Sethna: "There should have been 24,000 lines."14 And Sethna has noted the interesting fact that together the title and subtitle — Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol — make twenty-four letters!
On the first approach, Savitri is apt to scare away the modem 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: 1-3; VI: 1-2; VII: 1; VIII: 3; and XII), while the remaining thirty-five Cantos are about Aswapati'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 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,
14 Mother India, June 1971, p. 328.
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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.15
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.16
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:
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
15 Savitri, p. 2-9. Ibid., p. 724.
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stars." In the opening lines of Paradise Lost, again, there is reference both of 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, the 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, madha, matsara 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 of 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.17
In a more detailed note on the subject, Sri Aurobindo further underlines the symbolic intention and implications:
... this legends 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
17 Nirodbaran, Talks with Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 1, p. 118 (1986).
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to save; Aswapati, 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 for 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.18
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, 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 Aswapati'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.19
nd 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 Aswapati 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
13SABCL, Vol. 26, p. 265. 19 Savitri, pp. 435-36.
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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 Avatari 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." 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:
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.20
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 Wintemitz has aptly called it "the wonderful poem of faithful Savitri."21 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:
20Ibid., pp. 7-8. 21 Wintemitz, A History of Indian Literature.
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Some day surely
The world too shall be saved from death by Love. 22
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.23
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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
22 SABCL, Vol. 6, p. 534. 23 Savitri, p. 17.
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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.24
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."25 And so we are winged back to the days of Aswapati's first awakening — his perception of the heavy and weary weight of this unintelligible world, his soul's breakthrough 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: Aswapati's Yoga (I: 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 forest (IV, V, VI, VII: 1 and VIII). The Epilogue describes Savitri's return to earth with Satyavan.
Aswapati's Yoga is the Yoga of self-knowledge and world-
24 Ibid., pp. 14-15. 25 Ibid.,p.22.
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knowledge, the Yoga of Aspiration, the Yoga of the Forerunner who makes Savitri's advent possible. Starting with unease and uncertainty, Aswapati 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.26
Beyond this universal or cosmic experience there is the Nirvanic absolute silence, and Aswapati 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.27
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.28
His body's cells have themselves grown conscious of their divine affiliations. From this high plane of spiritual change, Aswapati 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
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:
26 Ibid., p. 27. 27 Ibid., p. 34. 28 Ibid., p. 44.
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Death lay beneath him like a gate of sleep.
One-pointed to the immaculate Delight,
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.29
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.30
After a Divina-Commedia-like journey covering the world-stair —
Ascending and descending twixt life's poles
The seried kingdoms of the graded Law —31
Aswapati 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 mediaeval, 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 all time.
For Aswapati himself, the whole arc of occult experience between the poles of superconscience and inconscience has already been covered in its entirely, 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.32
But how about the rest of mankind? What he aspires for is not a personal solution but a universal realisation and a new creation.
29Ibid., pp. 79-80. 30Ibid., p. 91. 31 Ibid., p. 88. 32 Ibid., p. 300.
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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
Who, mediatrix, binds earth to the Supreme...
She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire.
The luminous heart of the Unknown is she.33
He is advised to content with what he has won and ask no more for the earth or the race as a whole. But Aswapati 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.34
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.35
Thus Savitri comes into the world, not simply to satisfy a childless King's desire for issue, but truly to fulfil Aswapati'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 rainly season, of the boon from heaven; the intermediate seasons, of
33 Ibid., p. 312-14. 34 Ibid., pp. 341-45. 35Ibid., p. 346.
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gestation and growth; and spring, of a 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
They symbol pageant of the changing year...
Rain-tide burst in upon torn wings of heat,
Startled with lightings air's unquiet drowse,
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.36
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.37
Albeit she is his dearly-loved daughter, Aswapati (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;
36 Ibid., pp. 349-55. 37 Ibid., p. 356.
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As in a golden vase'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.38
Recognising "the great and unknown spirit bom 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
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.39
But it is among "meditation 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.40
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."4' 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
38 Ibid., pp. 372-73. 39lbid., p. 379. 40 Ibid., p. 393.
41 The Advent, August 1964, p. 50.
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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.42
On her return to Madra to report her choice, it is Narad's intervention that opens Aswapati'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 Act of Fate that is to be played. The long speech that Narad makes, while it fails to carry conviction to the Queen, lights up Aswapathi'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," p. 474), 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.43
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,
42 Savitri, pp. 409-11. 43 Ibid., p. 475.
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In silence seek God's meaning in thy depths,
Then mortal nature change to the divine.44
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 is pierced, impersonation after impersonation is exposed — and last of all comes the recognition of her sea-green 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.45
After all these backward glances that take a sweeping view of Savitri's antecedents, Aswapathi'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 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.46
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:
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.47
44 ibid., pp. 475-76. 45 Ibid., p. 557. 46 Ibid., p. 565. 47 Ibid., p. 574.
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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 earthly! 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.48
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:
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 licked in his heart,
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 bom, his vast sustaining self:
48 Ibid., pp. 664-65.
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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.49
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 at last fulfilled: (p. 708)
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 viśvarūpa, reappears phoenix-like as a Lord of Light:
Transfigured was the formidable shape...
Night the dim mask had grown a wonderful face.50
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...
In vain thou tempest 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 bom,
To raise the world of God in deathless Light,
To bring God down to the world on earth we came,
To change the earthly life to life divine.51
The God has no option but to submit to Savitri's adamantine resolution:
49 Ibid., pp. 667-68. 50 Ibid., p. 679. 51 Ibid., pp. 686-92.
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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.52
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 fourfold 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 hast asked I give to earth and men...
O Sun-Word, thou shall raise the earth-soul to Light
And bring down God into the lives to 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.53
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 (The 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".
-5-
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 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
52Ibid., p. 694. 53Ibid., pp. 698-99.
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various heights and degrees and so much varying substance of thought and feeling and descriptive matter and narrative,"54 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 on 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.55
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...56
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
54Ibid., p. 759. 55Ibid., p. 794. 56 Ibid., p. 1.
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I might as well abandon the symbol altogether...57*
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 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.58
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 sky59
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.... The last line ("The high boughs...") is
* In terms of Copemican astronomy, of course, 'dawn' is not really the "rise" of the sun; it is only the earth getting into a position when the Sun can illuminate the exposed part. The earth 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!
57 Ibid., pp. 733-34. 58 Ibid., pp. 734-35, 753, 736. 59Ibid., p. 4.
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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.60
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 the followers 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 — 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 and sublimates it; it has an essential aesthesis which is not limited by rules and canons; it sees a universal and eternal beauty while it takes up and transforms all that it 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.61
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."62 The Overmind touch, even the touch of anything else Overhead (which comprises all the above-mind states of consciousness: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind,
60Ibid., pp. 788-90. 61Ibid., p. 743. 62lbid., p. 759.
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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 or close to the front."63 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."64
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."65
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 and 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
63 Ibid., p. 804. 64Ibid., p. 802. 65 Ibid., pp. 813-14.
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and reality... It might even enter into the domain of the infinite and inexhaustible, catch some word of the Ineffable, show us revealing images which bring us near to the Reality that is secret in us and in all.66
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...
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.67
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 Aswapati:
As shines a solitary witness star
That bums 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.68
Thus of Savitri, as seen by Narad:
...Who is this that comes, the bride,
The flame-bom, and round her illumined head
Pouring their lights her hymeneal pomps
66 Ibid., pp. 814-16. 67 Ibid., pp. 1,4, 15, 74, 119. 68 Ibid., p. 137.
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Move flashing about her? From what green glimmer of glades
Retreating into dewy silences
Or half-seen verge of waters moon-betrayed
Bringst thou this glory of enchanted eyes?69
And thus of the tremendous event of Christ's incarnation and crucifixion:
The Son of God bom 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.70
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 freedom, not admitting "any mental rule of what is or is not poetic." 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.71
This might be the description of a Ministry of Truth in Big Brother's
69Ibid., p. 418. 70 Ibid., p. 445. 71 Ibid., p. 206-07.
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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.
There each in his own darkness walked alone...72
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 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...73
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.74
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 bedpost! Accustomed to the dark, light itself becomes an intruding impertinence. Attuned to falsehood's syllogisms, Truth's axioms
72 Ibid., p. 208. 73 Ibid., pp. 211-12. 74 Ibid., p. 216.
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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,
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.75
Aswapati (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 discipline—
75 Ibid., pp. 291-92.
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as a body of Mantra to be read and pondered and translated into realisation.
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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.76
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' sDivina Commedia, Shakespeare's King Lear, Milton's Paradise Lost, 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."77
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. Aswapati's Yoga takes up 22 Cantos or about 370 pages (out of a total of 714). There is the Yoga of the
76 Ibid., p. 785. 77 ibid., p. 750.
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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, Aswapati, did tapsaya 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 Aswapati's Yoga, very largely drawing upon his own experiences and realisations at Baroda, Alipur, Chandemagore 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 Aswapati's Yoga with Sri Aurobindo's should not, however, mean equating Aswapati'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' vow (trirātra), 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 Aswapati'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 once cosmic or supramental consciousness. Aswapati is the Forerunner, Savitri is the Avatar; and they are both necessary for
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the manifestation, and the dual act of redemption and new creation.
With repeated re-readings of Savitri and a greater intimacy with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother's writings, these early surmises seem to gain only further corroboration. 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 mediate 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.78
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."
... it is the "God-touch" alone that determines everything: the coming of avatar alter 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 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
78 Huta, Meditations on Savitri.
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the material creation." And she adds, underlining the deeper implications 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.
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About the 'matter' of Savitri, and of its author's mantric mode of communication the Mother to Mona Sarkar:
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,
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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 Sadhana 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 Malte 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?
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
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Death, and projects man's 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 I' altissimo poeta: Honour the Poet of Highest Eminence, honour the Ultimate Poet!79
K.R. SRINIVASA IYENGAR
79 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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