On Savitri
THEME/S
Sri Aurobindo considered Savitri as his "main work"1 and out of his precious time allotted every day two and a half hours for its composition. This was in the late forties when the tempo of work had speeded up considerably. In fact he was otherwise engaged with it almost for fifty years though with some long gaps in between. Today we have a poem written in pentametric blank verse form running almost to twenty-four thousand lines. Divided into twelve Books as is the tradition for an epic, it has forty-eight Cantos and an Epilogue. Part I consisting of the first twenty-four Cantos was published about twelve weeks before Sri Aurobindo's passing away, in September 1950; Part II and Part III as a single volume appeared in May 1951.
It is significant to note that Sri Aurobindo regarded Savitri as his main work. It does not mean that he took time off from his spiritual pre-possession simply for the purposes of a happy literary pursuit. Rather it was his constant companion in the task of realisation and establishment of the dynamic Truth in this creation. He worked upon it again and again until the kind of yogic perfection he wanted was achieved in it, that it could also become a means to achieve that perfection even in a literary endeavour. We have an early letter of Sri Aurobindo to this effect: "I used Savitri as a means of ascension. I began with it on a certain mental level, each time I could, reach a higher level I rewrote from that level... . In fact Savitri has not been regarded by me as a poem to be written and finished, but as a field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written from one's own yogic consciousness and how that could be made creative."2 In another letter he writes: "Savitri is the record of a seeing."3 The birth and growth of Savitri as a "flame-child" is therefore a Yogi's spiritual autobiography. Its birth is in the Tapas-Shakti of one who is committed to discover the Word that can transform the lot of our mortality and its growth is in the action that can bring felicitous prosperity to it. Therefore
1Nirodbaran, Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo, p. 188.
2Savitri, pp. 727-28.
3Ibid., p. 794. Perspectives of Savitri, p. 13.
Savitri is also named the Sun-Word or the Daughter of Infinity.
To describe Savitri we may very well apply the epithets Vyasa used for characterising Aswapati's daughter Savitri. She is a radiant daughter, kanyā teasvini, she is a damsel of heaven, devakanyā, she is heavenly and radiant in form, devarupini; she is Goddess Fortune and one who brings the wealth of auspicious happiness, is beautiful and charming, and is also an adept in the Yoga of Meditation, dhyānayogaparāyana, thus equipped to accomplish the purpose for which she has taken this mortal birth in the world of men.4
In the Mother's words Savitri is the "supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo's vision."5 Its subject is universal and its revelation is prophetic.6 About this prophetic character she speaks elsewhere as follows: "That marvellous prophetic poem... shall be humanity's guide towards its future realisation."7 A divine fulfilment in this long and difficult evolutionary process is its theme and the assertion is that it can bring even to this existence what it confirmatively states. Therefore Savitri becomes a Yogic Word which always has the power to affirm in life the transcendental Truth it proclaims.
The more we plunge into the tranquil-emerald of Savitri's ocean the more we discover its richnesses of truth, light, beauty, joy, sweetness, harmony, strength, perfection. Even when one reads Savitri on a mental level it can open out for us prospects of lustrous spiritual realisations; it can lead us to "understand deeper things".8 Though Savitri is a text-book of the Yoga of Physical Transformation and continually needs the author's "knowledge and experience for understanding it," its esotericism in some respect can yet be grasped if we read it with a silent mind. Bhakti there is in it and the heart can also approach the wonderlands of its delight; but the mountain splendours of its climb take us to the worlds of higher spiritual illumination in the greatness of the triple glory of manifestation. The ascending and descending streams derive their waters from the secret source of its delight. It is now for us to pick up the text-book and profit from it.
And the nice thing is that the text-book has also a definite literary
4R.Y. Deshpande, Vyasa's Savitri.
5Words of the Mother, CWM, Vol. 13, p. 24.
6Ibid., p. 25.
7Some Answers from the Mother, CWM, Vol. 16, p. 294.
8 Ibid., p. 395.
form. It therefore becomes accessible to us; it makes available to us in a concrete way the profundities that can lead us along the spiritual path on and on. We have to open it and read it, we have to breathe in it. Indeed in its origin that form of Savitri is varam rupam, the auspicious form of savitra himself, the Light of the Supreme, which shall illumine us with the Truth.9 It will be therefore a mistake if we take it only as an epic written on traditional grounds.
For an epic there may be a story or there may not be a story, there may be events and physical happenings or there may be just episodes strewn together. Story and vigorous action are the conventional modes belonging to the classical poetry of this genre; then, in another age, there can also be literary presentations pertaining to a newer culture of the mind. But these need not necessarily exhaust everything; there could as well be other dimensions. An epic can be intensely subjective and at the same time can yet encompass in its fold the destiny of the world. It can bring to view the vistas that have remained far away from our sight; it can even make those wonderful realities a part of our life. An epic of action on another plane of consciousness can thus still be written in this manner. In a creative author of the future that is the newest form we expect shaping his work. The framework of its narrative can be that of a journey of the Spirit through occult and supracosmic regions, or the action of some transcendental Might facing the antagonist Power standing across the path of a desirable possibility in the manifestation of everlasting happiness. When we as a collectivity arrive at this point in our inner development we also recognise the progress that has been made in the aggregate awareness of the race. It is therefore assumed that we approach Savitri with that asset given to us by the long work of Time. It is meant for ripe souls ready to step into the days that have left the nights behind.
In one of the talks with his disciples Sri Aurobindo mentions that for "an epic one requires the power of architectural construction"10 and it is precisely that what we have in Savitri, though not in its accustomed sense; with the barest possible element of a legend on which it is based we see a majestic edifice rising from Matter's plinth to the Spirit's heights. And the remarkable
9Sri Aurobindo on Himself, SABCL, Vol. 26, p. 513.
10 (1 A. B. Purani, Evening Talks, p. 244.
thing about this Shrine of Infinity is that not only do men visit it to offer worship to the deity of their adoration or go there to breathe that atmosphere; but also the high gods long to dwell in this cherished abode that is lit by countless suns. About the nature of such an epic Sri Aurobindo clarifies the point in another talk as follows: "The idea that an epic requires a story has been there for long, but the story as a subject for an epic seems to be exhausted. It will have to be more subjective and the element of interpretation will have to be admitted. Paradise Lost has very little story and very few incidents, yet it is an epic. At present men demand something more than a great story from an epic."11 That "something more" is the expectation and that is exactly what we have in Savitri fulfilled. To appreciate it and more so to enter into it a supple quick intuitive perception and a certain wideness of consciousness are needed. When we acquire these we actually enter into plenitudes of the "poem of sacred delight." That is why to enter into Savitri is also to live in the presence of its creator.
Many are its splendours, countless indeed like the stars in the sky. We may use a most powerful telescope on the top of a mountain or put a Hubble in outer space to look at the universe which is a boundless finite. Still it seems to escape all observation. So does Savitri. Galaxies after galaxies speed beyond our keenest comprehension,—as if to reach some Unknown which they glimpse at the far edge but of which we have no knowledge. Billions and billions of suns, even as they come or go out of sight, illumine the nightly expanse of space. And whatever of that Unknown they see they expectantly communicate to us; and these communications arrive in many ways, flashes, glimmers, electromagnetic bursts, quanta of various denominations or else steady radiations extending in all the directions of the spectrum, rich in content, rich in meaning. Suddenly in that process we become one with the sky. Astonishment is gone and also the nightly sky and ultimately what remains is only the luminous wisdom ever in progress towards the interminable Unknown that is infinity-bound. We don't need any more the night for the stars even as they become a part of majesty of the purple-gold day.
That is what Savitri gives to us. No wonder Sri Aurobindo considered it as his main work. When we receive it we receive the gift from a Yogi-Poet who attempted and achieved all for us. His
11 Ibid., p. 233.
has been an untiring endeavour making all life a Yoga as well as Poetry of Delight in the fulfilment of the Divine in this earthly circumstance. It may be therefore quite relevant to know something about him in howsoever sketchy a manner that be.
All Life is Yoga
Commenting upon a biographer's attempt to present his life, Sri Aurobindo once remarked as follows: "Nobody except myself can write my life—because it has not been on the surface for man to see." Yet we should be concerned with a few worldly facts to keep our file complete. And the strange thing is that, for a discerning eye, they also bring an intuitive vision which can provide a distant bio-spiritual peep into the secrecies of the person whom we so much adore. No wonder philosophers have described him as the greatest synthesis between the East and the West; critics have acclaimed him as a poet par excellence; social scientists regard him as the builder of a new society based on enduring values of the life of the spirit; devotees throng in mute veneration offering their heart and their soul in a silent prayer that can secure for them the beatitude of the Supreme; Yogins long to live in the sunlight of his splendour to kindle in it their own suns; in the tranquil benignity of his spiritual presence is the fulfilment of all our hopes and all our keenest and noblest aspirations; gods of light and truth and joy and beauty and sweetness are busy in their tasks to carry out his will in the creation; in him the avataric incarnation becomes man to fulfil the divine in man. Such is the real birth of the Immortal in the Mortal. He comes here as Sri Aurobindo.
Sri Aurobindo was the third son of Swamalata and Dr Krishna Dhan Ghose and was bom on 15 August 1872 in the early hours of that Thursday in the aristocratic area of Calcutta. He was brought up in a highly Anglicised atmosphere at home, to the extent that he did not know even his mother tongue Bengali. His father intended to bring up his children in the perfect style and manner of the English society adopting its ways of life and thinking. Hence five-year old Auro was put in Loreto Convent School in Darjeeling which was otherwise exclusively meant for English children. In 1879, at the age of seven he, along with his brothers, was taken to England where he mostly stayed for the next fourteen years with an English family. In September 1884 Auro was admitted to St
Paul's School in London and had his education there until July 1890. Later in the same year, in October, he joined King's College at Cambridge.
Never during the entire period did young Sri Aurobindo come in contact with the traditional Indian life or culture. At the same time in England he "never was taught English as a separate subject but picked it up like a native in daily conversation. Before long he was spending much of his time reading. Almost from the start, he devoted himself to serious literature. As a ten-year-old he read the King James Bible."12 Soon the attentive and wakeful student mastered half a dozen European languages, including Greek and Latin in which he scored highest marks ever obtained in a school examination. Not only languages; he knew intimately and incomparably well the literature and culture that dominated European life and history for centuries. These classical themes later found great expression in his poetic writings, e.g., Perseus the Deliverer as a play and Ilion as an epic in Homeric quantitative hexameter based on the naturalness of temperament of the English language. Here it may be mentioned en passant that Sri Aurobindo wrote that drama, with a Grecian theme, during his most hectic political activities in Bengal. It was published in 1907 in the weekly Bande Mataram.
After his return to India in 1893 Sri Aurobindo straightaway joined the state services of Baroda accepting the invitation of Sayajirao Gaekawar. But, more importantly, he plunged into the mainstream of Indian life and literature even as he learnt several native languages including classical Sanskrit. Not only did he study the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Puranas, works of Kalidasa and other authors; he also mastered Vedic, Upanishadic and other Scriptural writings to the extent that he wrote extensively on these subjects and issues concerned with them. In fact we see on them the indelible mark of an intuitive thinker disclosing their deeper and truer sense. He offered very independent and penetrating interpretations in the spirit they were actually revealed. While we witness in them both the robust pragmatism and subtlety of the modem mind, perhaps we more pertinently recognise the seer who quite visibly stands behind them. Sri Aurobindo by now acquired the foundational basis to give expression to his own creative talents in the wide and luminous range of universality characteristic of an
12 Peter Heehs, Sri Aurobindo, p. 10.
authentic Indian personality. Knowledge flowed in as if a crystalline stream suddenly took birth in some perennial mountain-source of the hoary Wisdom. This wide-ranging and at the same time intensive Abhyasa Yoga of Sri Aurobindo prepared a thorough and strong base for his missioned task which he would soon accomplish in the future.
During this period Sri Aurobindo was drawn more and more into the current of the national life. Nay, he gave to it another direction, even as he gave to his own life by plunging into the thick of the active political life. Presently he left the secure life of the princely Baroda State and went to Calcutta accepting all the hardships entailed by it. The immediate provocation was the ill-conceived partition of Bengal in 1905. There he initiated a comprehensive programme of building the nation founded on its sounder values, on its ancient wisdom and culture. In it was bom Indian nationalism, in the nourishing soil of its rich past, firmly established in its worthy tradition, with its own natural disposition and governing character, its innate swabhāva and swadharma. True nationalism for Sri Aurobindo was Sanatana Dharma itself, the eternal religion based on spiritual knowledge and experience.13 He saw that in it alone grow the values that acquire merit in every respect, worldly and otherwise. To it he now committed himself completely. In a letter written to his wife Mrinalini, in 1905, he states the following:
I have three madnesses. The first is this. I firmly believe that the accomplishment, talent, education and means that God has given me, are all His. Whatever is essential and needed for the maintenance of the family has alone a claim upon me; the rest must be returned to God... The second madness which has recently seized hold of me is: I must somehow see God... If He exists there must be ways to perceive His presence, to meet Him. However arduous the way, I am determined to follow that path. In one month I have felt that the Hindu religion has not told lies—the signs and hints it has given have become a part of my experience... My third madness is that other people look upon the country as an inert piece of matter, a stretch of fields and meadows, forests and rivers. To me She is the
13 Karmayogin, SABCL, Vol. 2, p. 10.
Mother. I adore Her, worship Her. What will the son do when he sees a Rakshasa sitting on the breast of his mother and sucking her blood? Will he quietly have his meal or will he rush to deliver his mother from that grasp? I know I have the strength to redeem this fallen race. It is not physical strength, it is the strength of knowledge... This feeling is not new, I was bom with it and it is in my marrow. God has sent me to this world to accomplish this great mission.14
In this dynamic pursuit, and accepting its dangers without a second thought, he attempted all and achieved all. In the words of Nagendrakumar Guharay, Sri Aurobindo was always fearless, abhi and nothing deterred him from action.15 He spoke with God-given courage and acted unmindful of the consequences that followed in the sequel of the missioned task. Freedom as a birthright was proclaimed and war waged against the rulers of the time. He was charged for seditious activities and incarcerated for one year from May 1908. But during this period a new and glorious transformation came upon him. "That one year in Alipore jail was perhaps the most eventful for his future. The nationalist and political leader was now changed wholly into a mystic and a yogi."16 Another world opened out in front of Sri Aurobindo. A mighty hand was all the while guiding him, perhaps even without his knowledge.
Barrister C. R. Das triumphantly defended Sri Aurobindo in the Alipore Bomb Case and in his concluding argument made an inspired appeal in the following words: "My appeal to you therefore is that a man like this who is being charged with the offences imputed to him stands not only before the bar in this Court but stands before the bar of the High Court of History. And my appeal to you is this: That long after this controversy is hushed in silence, long after this turmoil, this agitation ceases, long after he is dead and gone, he will be looked upon as the poet of patriotism, as the prophet of nationalism and the lover of humanity. Long after he is dead and gone his words will be echoed and re-echoed not only in India, but across distant seas and lands."17 Prophetic words, indeed!
14 Nirodbaran, Sri Aurobindo for All Ages, p. 53.
15 Farewell to the God; quoted by Nirodbaran in his Sri Aurobindo for All
Ages, p. 121.
16Sisirkumar Ghose, The Poetry of Sri Aurobindo, p. 11.
17Mother India, March 2000, p. 189; for the complete defence argument see the previous issues.
We may say that this marks the completion of Sri Aurobindo's Jivan Yoga.
After his acquittal on 6 May 1909 Sri Aurobindo addressed a large gathering at Uttarpara: "When I went to jail the whole country was alive with the cry of Bande Mataram, alive with the hope of a nation, the hope of a million men who had newly risen out of degradation. When I came out of jail I listened for that cry, but there was instead a silence."18 He felt a deep concern for the country no doubt, but there was no trace of worry in him; he knew someone else had definitely taken the reins in his hands to guide the career and speed of events. In the course of the speech he gave a hint of what he had experienced in the jail. He was given the central truth of the Hindu religion and he knew that in it alone is the destiny of the nation, as if marked out for the fulfilment of a higher purpose. Personally, he had the experience of being surrounded by Vasudeva from all the sides. He looked around and "it was not the Magistrate whom I saw, it was Vasudeva, it was Narayana who was sitting there on the bench. I looked at the Prosecuting Counsel and it was not the Counsel for the prosecution that I saw; it was Sri Krishna who sat there, it was my Lover and Friend who sat there and smiled."19 All is Vasudeva, vāsudeva sarvam iti, became the basis for everything in life.
A new chapter had opened and soon Sri Aurobindo was to find his cave of tapasya in the South. There he was to carry out the task given to him as a Divine Command. With it Diksha Yoga stepped into the luminous Jnana Yoga of the Protagonist.
A great work awaited for him and for it he spared no effort. In a letter dated 12 July 1911, a little after one year of his coming to Pondicherry, he tells us what he was busy with.
I am developing the necessary powers for bringing down the spiritual on the material plane... What I perceive most clearly, is that the principal object of my Yoga is to remove absolutely and entirely every possible source of error and ineffectiveness... It is for this reason that I have been going through so long a discipline and that the more brilliant and mighty results of Yoga have been so long withheld. I have been kept busy laying down the foundation, a work
l8 Kamayogin, SABCL, Vol. 2, p. 1.
19 Ibid., p. 5.
severe and painful. It is only now that the edifice is beginning to rise upon the sure and perfect foundation that has been laid.20
The One who had kept him busy in the severe and painful work also arranged in 1914 for a collaborator in the Mother. In that glorious joint venture first began the announcement of the divine Agenda in the nature of a monthly, the Arya. It ran into some five-thousand pages for seventy-eight months and carried the knowledge and the power of realisation by which the lower could reach the higher, in as much as the higher manifest in the lower. The Life Divine, the Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on the Gita, Vedic and Upanishadic revelations, the nature of future Poetry, Social, Political and National themes—all these writings which he received in a silent mind brought a new vision and a possible new mode of collective life. Global in their outlook, they encompassed in their fold the worlds of men and gods and higher beings preparing themselves to participate in the terrestrial possibilities in the greatness of the triple Spirit itself. Obviously such an outcome is not conceivable in the analytical or linear method of our thinking. A new source of creativity was discovered, an infallible creativity that has its own power of expression and effectuation. Indeed, what we have in the Arya "was composed in the organ mode of Sri Aurobindo's English."21 There is no doubt that while it endures, it also attains what it attempts.
Not long after his coming to Pondicherry in 1910 Mme Alexandra David-Neel, who acquainted herself deeply with Tibetan occultism, met Sri Aurobindo in 1912. About her meeting with him she reports: "His perfect familiarity with the philosophies of India and the West wasn't what drew my attention: what was of greater importance to me was the special magnetism that flew out of his presence, and the occult hold he had over those who surrounded him."22 A glimpse of that special magnetism, which grew more and more luminous as his Yoga progressed, we may get from his diary records of the period between 1912-1920. Meticulous as a scientist's were his observations of the various spiritual siddhis or realisations achieved by him. These constitute a unique record
20Sri Aurobindo on Himself, SABCL, Vol. 26, pp. 423-24.
21Georges Van Vrekhem, Beyond Man, p. 45.
22K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Sri Aurobindo, p. 378.
in the entire annals of spirituality. About these documents, collectively called Record of Yoga, the compiler writes as follows: "This document is noteworthy in at least three respects... It provides a first-hand account of the day-to-day growth of the spiritual faculties of an advanced yogin... The language of Record of Yoga is bare, unliterary, often couched in arcane terminology... What it provides is a down-to-earth account of a multitude of events, great and small, inner and outer... It may be looked on as the laboratory notebook of an extended series of experiments in yoga."23
In the Yogic parlance we may say that this was the period when Sri Aurobindo's attempts were chiefly directed towards supramentalisation of the mental planes that presently govern our evolutionary consciousness. There was soon to follow the supramentalisation of the vital. The last stage of the great triple transformation was to be preceded in 1926 by what Sri Aurobindo called overmentalisation of the physical. But before this Siddhi Yoga we also have two remarkable poetic creations of the Master-Poet.
Sri Aurobindo had started writing his epic llion while in Alipore jail;24 he took it up again and worked upon it during the early period at Pondicherry. This was lightly revised by dictation in the late 40s. Then during 1916-1918, in the midst of his multidimensional Arya-writing, Sri Aurobindo also made a preliminary draft of his magnum opus Savitri. Eventually it "became a poetic chronicle of his yoga."25 We have similarly the record of his later yogic realisations in his poetic compositions of the 30s. But what stands out as the double autobiography, his and the Mother's spiritual realisations in the transformative Yoga of the earth-consciousness, is his supreme creation—in the Mother's phrase, supreme revelation—Savitri. That indeed marks Divya Yoga of the Supreme himself.
Sri Aurobindo left his body on 5 December 1950, Tuesday at 1.26 a.m. In crimson-gold splendour it lay there for 111 hours before it was put in the Samadhi. The Mother's prayer expresses the gratitude for all that he had done in triumphantly accomplishing the divine task. "To Thee who hast been the material envelope of
23 Peter Hees, op. tit., pp. 99-100.
24 Ibid., p. 127.
25 Ibid.
our Master, to Thee our infinite gratitude. Before Thee who hast done so much for us, who hast worked, struggled, hoped, endured so much, before Thee who hast willed all, attempted all, prepared, achieved all for us, before Thee we bow down and implore that we may never forget, even for a moment, all we owe to Thee."26 About the significance of this event the Mother said later: "He was not compelled to leave his body, he chose to do so for reasons so sublime that they are beyond" our grasp.27 As soon as Sri Aurobindo withdrew from his body the Mind of Light as the leader of the intermediate race, prior to the arrival of the gnostic being, got realised in the Mother.28 It was only by "consciously experiencing and transforming death"29 that the divine pace could be hastened in the earth consciousness. It was an occult imperative, an aspect of yogic action itself. The result was the manifestation of Supermind in the earth's subtle-physical on 29 February 1956. Thus in a bid to get things done in a most definitive way Sri Aurobindo left his body and completed the supreme or Param Yoga.
The Tale
Sri Aurobindo left his body in December 1950 but he left behind his consciousness for ever in Savitri. Through it we can get directly in touch with him. The poem is not only the narrative of a legend but is also a symbol presenting the work of its author. Rich in its spiritual contents and nuances it has full scope to winningly describe the prospects of a transformed life upon the earth. In a letter explaining the symbolism of the Savitri-legend Sri Aurobindo writes: "The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in the Mahabharata as a story of conjugal love conquering death. But this legend is, as shown by many features of the human tale, 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 bom to save; Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse, her human father, is
26Words of the Mother, CWM, Vol. 13, p.7.
27Quoted by Nirodbaran, op. cit., p. 238.
28CWM, Vol. 13, p. 64.
29Georges Van Vrekhem, op.cit., p. 278.
the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes; Dyumatsena, the lord of the Shining Hosts, father of Satyavan, is the Divine Mind here fallen blind, losing its celestial kingdom of vision, and through that loss its kingdom of glory. Still this is not a mere allegory, the characters are not personified qualities, but incarnations or 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."30
In spirituo-metaphysical terms, it is the possibility of a divine creation arising out of the inconscience, out of the nonmanifest that has become the unmanifest. If by the force of concentration or Tapas-Shakti the Supreme created a void and plunged into it to become inconscient, if he did the occult Yoga of Self-Sacrifice triumphantly chanted in the Veda as the Holocaust of the Supreme, then by another force of action he has to emerge out of this state of utter forgetfulness and establish the dynamic delight of existence everywhere. For this to happen the Supreme has to do the evolutionary Yoga, the Yoga of progressive divine manifestation in the earth-consciousness. And this has to happen in the face of his own stubbornness; for he himself has become the Inconscient. One visible sign of this stubbornness of the inconscient Supreme is the presence of Death. The manifesting Supreme thus encounters the obstacle of the antagonist Supreme. The narration of this growing divinity is what we have in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri which indeed is the Epic of the Divine Creation itself. It is the story of the birth and victorious accomplishment of the supreme Goddess in this world of our ignorant mortality.
The Goddess comes down here as an incarnate force Savitri and espouses the cause of the evolutionary travail's death-bound life in the fulfilment of the Will of the Supreme himself. But this descending ocean of dynamic consciousness has to be upborne, lest it should drown the very void out of which is intended to emerge a manifestation in richnesses of the being of delight in awareness of its multiple splendour. Aswapati's tapasya is therefore directed towards this purpose, to prepare a safe base for the fiery power's transforming action. Aswapati prays to the supreme Goddess and seeks a boon from her. In response to it she comes down as a radiant
30 On Himself, SABCL, Vol. 26, p. 265.
daughter, kanyā tejasvini as Vyasa says. In the legend of Savitri the issue is well focused in the inescapable death of her lover and husband Satyavan.
In the sequel of the narrative young Savitri is told that there is a force who is the infallible mover and guide of her life, that there is a light around her and within her to illumine her actions. Her first task is therefore to discover it. For that she should go abroad travelling distant lands and kingdoms. Then, in order to meet her fate, she is bidden to ascend from Nature to divinity's height. She has to prepare herself and answer Heaven's large question in which Love faces Death.
But she also realises that the conflict of Love and Death is intimately connected with the fate of the Earth. When she is in the company of her lover she also experiences intense pain and her benumbed body responds to a 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.31
The 'pang divine' cuts through the occult sky and stands like a crescent pointing to her the giant figure she has to meet or encounter in the night.
The event of Satyavan's death thus became pretextual in taking Savitri to the world of eternal darkness where reigns Death. Eventually in those thick occult spaces a decisive battle was fought and victory for the Divine won. In her conquering gaze Death disappeared. But it does not mean that he was destroyed or dissolved. What was until now covering him it is that which was removed. It was the dumb absolute who had put a veil on his face and it is this veil that was removed. The veil of Inconscience spread over the process of Time has now gone, thus revealing the true nature of Death. Death stands in his authentic Reality in front of Savitri who receives the boon of the Everlasting Day from Him.
Transfigured was the formidable shape.
His darkness and his sad destroying might
31 Savitri, p. 9.
Abolishing for ever and disclosing
The mystery of his high and violent deeds,
A secret splendour rose revealed to sight
Where once the vast embodied Void had stood.32
Thus has Savitri cut a door to immortality leading through this terrifying Void.
In the legend of Savitri the participation of Narad is extremely significant. There is in it also a great sense of responsibility displayed by him while announcing the death of Satyavan in the presence of Savitri. She has come to know of this future event at the most appropriate moment in her life. Now her Yoga can begin. Without this Yoga she could not have met Death to deal with the problem of this evolutionary creation. Her mission needed an instrumental prompting and it was provided by the Sage. His was a participation in the Divine Work. Vyasa's narrative makes Narad the Preceptor of Aswapati, revered as he was even by the gods.33 How great indeed! In a certain luminous sense therefore he has initiated Savitri into Yoga. This was absolutely necessary and hence we can well appreciate his role in the entire development. Without this Yoga the question of Savitri vanquishing Death would have remained unanswered.
About the Savitri-tale we may get a certain light from the Pauranic accounts also. Once Brahma beheld himself and he was astonished to see that his own lustre was becoming dimmer and dimmer. A darkness was surrounding him and it was becoming more and more thick and opaque.
He could not find the cause of it and, perplexed as he got, consulted other gods. They decided that Varuna of the far vision should undertake the task of discovering this mysterious situation.
Finally the reason for the dimming of the lustre was discovered. It was due to the fact that Brahma's Power went so far away that it got separated from him. Varuna further reported to the gods that the Power not only separated, but also got arrested in the inconscience. She lost all her old memory and remembered not the origin from which she had come.
The gods conversed amongst themselves to find a way to awaken the supreme Power. It is in their reunion, in their coming together
32 Ibid., p. 679.
33 R.Y. Deshpande, Vyasa's Savitri, pp. 19-21.
in another delight, that the lustre of Brahma will be restored to its original brightness. It may even become multiply bright.
In the beginning Brahma was alone and he desired company. There was the urge to be many, bahusyām prajāyeyeti. It is that which had caused the separation of his Power from himself.
After getting this report from Varuna the gods took the next step. They deputed Soma, the Moon-god of Delight, to awaken the inconscient Power. She was to be made aware of the sad state in which she was lying; she was also to be informed about the plight of her Lord, with his lustre getting faded. When told so, she felt concerned and agreed to join him.
The two gods, Varuna and Soma, accomplished the difficult mission, of uniting the two. The union of the Lord and the Spouse took place again in the meeting of Satyavan and Savitri in the wilderness of life here upon the earth.
This is one nice way of looking at the Savitri-legend. But being a simplistic though symbolic story it doesn't carry in it many shades and nuances that are present in the operative process. Actually it was Savitri's Lord who was caught in the stranglehold of Death. The dimming of Brahma's lustre perhaps ultimately led to this state for himself.
In the cosmic working the executive aspect is that of the dynamic Nature or Prakriti rather than of the quiescent Being, Purusha. Spinoza defined the ultimate reality God as substance and also as Nature-begetting, natura naturans, and looked upon the universe as Nature-begotten, natura naturata, which has a certain validity not only metaphysically but also occult-spiritually. But, of course, there is also the transcendental aspect to be taken note of. Pantheism generally does not recognise it and sees only the universal. In contrast to that the language of the Puranas has a certain richness and flexibility to understand things in an intuitive way.
The problem of the universe as Nature-begotten cannot be solved from within; for there is no agent present in it to tackle it when God stands outside of it as a Nature-begetting Potency. God's direct or indirect involvement in the process is not admitted in this theory. In a way, he just watches helplessly Nature working out whatever is meant to be worked out by her. It is assumed that there is a sort of self-sufficiency in her effort to reach the goal that has been set for her. But the aspect of the Divine's involvement is always there and at every crucial evolutionary stage he comes here as a special Avatar. There spiritual philosophy goes beyond all metaphysical
theses. That also makes the language of a symbol more revealing, rich in its suggestions and subtleties. No wonder Sri Aurobindo chose for his epic a legend and a symbol.
The Five Suns of Poetry
But to the modem mind symbolic art is also, in a way, distancing oneself from life as one lives in its daily rounds. It is often said that art should be realistic. Poetry, for instance, must reflect our common moods, our afflictions and our joys, pain and pleasure, hunger and surfeit, nudity and opulence, love and hatred, our failures and successes, jealousy, cruelty as much as kindness, humanitarianism. It cannot be irrelevant to us. All talk of idealism, nobility, grandeur is considered to be mere eloquence about things insubstantial and has no basis in our immediate common experience. Skylarks, daffodils, green cottages only imply escapism from the struggle and harshness of existence. Not only that; it leads to pretentious emotions and syrupyness which must be washed out from our mental make-up. There has to be a certain kind of directness and disaffected purity in our expressive creations. Modernists got tired of romanticism and turned more and more towards urban thinking and the conflicts of our daily occupations, towards existential issues. But that reaction itself was, paradoxically, indicative of a deeper search for other sets of values, of getting out of the routine and the common. While it has brought vigorous intellectualised intuition and a profoundness of thinking, it has also by its excesses made life boney and dry.
But then reality exceeds all imaginations and feelings, all ideas and fetishes. Therefore that intellectualised intuition itself is a search for a more comprehensive understanding of things in their truer essence, in the truth from which it derives itself and seeks to widen its possibilities of expression. If the voice of that ineffable, that unknown is to be seized in our language we have to set out on a new adventure. We have to make a new discovery in which the word we shall speak will carry other connotations and other associations. It will be not only loaded with thought and emotion but also will to do things in its expressive richness and opulence. When the poetic inspiration comes from an inexhaustible source of joy then it also finds its own style and technique. It could be a physical action on the battlefield, it could be a life-force asserting
itself in varied moods, it could be a justification of the creator's will in the creation, or it could be the epical song of triumph, or a search for beatitude in love that moves the sun and the other stars. For the poet all this is the discovery of the word which could be an adventure in itself. It need not be a mystic or occult or spiritual pursuit, or an intense expression of devotion, or adoration of Nature with its rivers and mountains and green pasture-lands and grazing cattle. And yet it could be all these. It could be even the deep-sounding thought that has the urge to explore itself in the domain wherefrom spring all thoughts. Thus, for example, when a modem poet {Listening in October, John Haines) says that
There are silences so deep
You can hear
The journeys of the soul,
we at once hear some authentic voice in the deeper chambers of that silence itself. We may read mysticism in it but essentially it is a realisation that has come in a secular way. Something has entered suddenly in the expression of which perhaps even the poet is not aware. Although in it is served well the Modernist's purpose, there is something more than that. It creates around us an atmosphere of silence in which is possible the birth of the Word which can express that silence in its joyous vigour and effectiveness; in it we can hear a voice that can lift us up, guide us in our search. Here is seized something of the profound and therefore it becomes meritorious, even spiritual. Yet what the poet has achieved here is simply the paraphemeliac preparation for the soul's aesthetic pilgrimage to the unknown. It sounds more like a well-rounded rhythmic thought than an intimately felt experience with its richnesses taking us on those journeys. In it the subtleties of silence are absent. In terms of Ezra Pound's rhythmic accord we do not have here overtones to set the absolute tempo of a masterpiece. If that journey has to be a soaring ascension to the snow-white peaks of silence in the ardour of climbing, in the warmth and intimacy of a vibrant experience, then it has yet to grow in the abundance of subtleties and suggestions that constitute multi-tonal harmonies, has to grow in its flaming poignancy, has yet to get in touch with the sun that lives on the summits of silence which carries us yet higher on the Vedic journey of the ascending slopes of heaven. It happens very rarely, particularly when our approach to life and
reality is entirely mind-based, mind with its thousand occupations of thought. But when given to omniscient hush unceasingly original inspiration streams forth, as we have in the following:
Oft inspiration with her lightning feet,
A sudden messenger from the all-seeing tops,
Traversed the soundless corridors of his mind
Bringing the rhythmic sense of hidden things.
A music spoke transcending mortal speech.34
Or expression has actually its origin in silence,
Silence the nurse of the Almighty's power,
The omniscient hush, womb of the immortal Word.35
It is in this context that we have to recognise what Sri Aurobindo tells us about the future poetry with its intuitive and revealing character, poetry that descends from the all-seeing heights with the rhythmic sense of the creative Word. While describing the nature of this poetry he speaks of its five suns which shall illumine our skies,—the splendid Suns of Truth, Beauty, Delight, Life and the Spirit.36
This poetry of the future is a secret search for the Reality that is present behind all our thinking and understanding, our longings, our life and the rich world around us, our possibilities that can open out in its discovery, behind our gainful sense of dedication to it. In fact it could be more than a search; it could be an expression of the ineffable, of the all-beautiful. The more we shall try to know it the more we will begin to realise that there is much as yet to be secured, much to be won. It is a spiritual quest. "A poetic mind sees at once in a flood of coloured light, in a moved experience, in an ecstasy of the coming of the word, in splendours of form, in a spontaneous leaping out of inspired idea upon idea, sparks of the hoof-beats of the white horse Dadhikravan galloping up the mountain of the gods or breath and hue of wing striking into wing of the irised broods of Thought flying over earth or up towards
34 Savitri, p. 38.
35 Ibid., p. 41.
36 The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 204.(N.B. pp. 199-256 describe these five suns of poetry.)
heaven."37 One need not be a Yogi to be such a poet because the creative rhythm and the word-image can be received by one who is sufficiently perceptive of things revealingly aesthetic. Though the creative soul of man with his keen intellectualised intuition has a certain inner mental penetration in its persuasiveness, a certain flight of thoughtful imagination, yet it does not have this sure and inevitable sweep of expression, many-extended in its implications, and hence cannot hold the joy it has the power to hold. It has to grow and therefore also have to grow with that our perceptions of poetry, our appreciations of the broad new dimensions that arrive in its luminous as well as sweet melodious wake, in the emerald of its surge, in its moods of temperate or else swift-pacing happinesses.
Thought-content and pursuit of Truth apart, there are also things warmly spiritual and they bring out flavours and flames and felicities which are always there behind Truth and Life and the Spirit. In Beauty and Delight are the soul and the origin of all art, of poetry; the creative and expressive nature of the free self is in them. Indeed, in the poetry of a large spiritual inspiration we shall hear "the song of the growing godhead... of human unity, of spiritual freedom, of the coming supermanhood of man, of the divine idea seeking to actualise itself in the life of the earth, of the call to the individual to rise to his godlike possibility and to the race to live in the greatness of that which humanity feels within itself as a power of the spirit which it has to deliver into some yet ungrasped perfect form of clearness... to make life more intimately beautiful and noble and great and full of meaning is its higher office, but its highest comes when the poet becomes the seer and reveals to man his eternal self and the godheads of its manifestation."38 The poet of the spirit becomes a seer and a hearer of the voices of the Truth, satyaśrutah.
But this great poetry is possible only by opening ourselves to the higher planes from where comes the inspired utterance. In that inspired utterance there is also a certain kind of inevitability which in its resolute manner confirms the revelatory truth that it is proposing to establish here. It becomes the Word of Knowledge and Power wearing a form of Beauty and having the soul of Delight. About this Overhead Poetry with its objective to express some inmost truth of things, the deeper reality which is behind them, Sri
37 Ibid., p. 213.
38 Ibid., p. 255.
Aurobindo writes as follows: "The voice of poetry comes from a region above us, a plane of our being above and beyond our personal intelligence, a supermind which sees things in their innermost and largest truth by a spiritual identity and with a lustrous effulgency and rapture and its native language is a revelatory, inspired, intuitive word limpid or subtly vibrant or densely packed with the glory of this ecstasy and lustre... The inspired word comes, as of the old Vedic seers, from the home of Truth... The word comes secretly from above the mind, but it is plunged into the intuitive depths and emerges imperfectly to be shaped by the poetic feeling and intelligence."39 It is bom as the Mantra. In a letter written to Amal Kiran Sri Aurobindo explains that the Mantra is "a word of power and light that comes from the overmind inspiration or from some very high plane of Intuition. Its characteristics are a largeness that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is bom out of the Infinite and disappears into it... and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater."40
Seers and hearers of the Truth are those who shall receive this Word from the transcendental Muse in the delight of the truth-existent. It is in the greatness of the Mantra that the Upanishadic golden lid gets removed and is then received the higher power of expression. The suns of poetry can then freely pour their radiances in our creative expression. In it the "rhythmic revelation or intuition arising out of the soul's sight of God and Nature and the world and the inner truth—occult to the outward eye—of all that peoples it, the secret of inner life and being"41 gives value to our life and thought and to our aesthetic existence. In the completeness of its expression poetry is not only word and rhythm but is also vision. In it has to be the expressive power carrying sense and sound and sight all together borne by the spirit of joyous creation. Such a worship of the divine Muse also means our being able to receive
39 Ibid., p. 279.
40 Ibid., pp. 369-70. See also The Secret of the Veda, SABCL, Vol. 10, pp. 303-13; The Upanishads, SABCL, Vol. 12, pp. 168-72; Sri Aurobindo Archives and Research, Vol. 3, p. 19, April 1979.
41 Ibid., p. 34.
more and more of her inexhaustible gifts. Savitri is that. To grow in it, to explore our inner potentialities, to climb the peaks of creation and live on those heights as their happy and bright denizens we have to be the worshippers of that golden-tongued Muse of Felicity. Joy grows in that growth and
The sun of Beauty and the sun of Power42
bestow their greatnesses in the abundance of the dynamic spirit that wishes to be in its living expression. That also implies our being perceptive of the new taste, new aesthetic pleasure, new meanings and shades, new sounds and new rhythms, new subtleties that are offered to us by such a creation. We have to open ourselves to it.
Overmind Aesthesis
When in the 1940s Sri Aurobindo was extensively revising Savitri and giving to it the final shape, he also took some time off for writing detailed letters or notes to explain the various criticisms that were levelled on certain aspects of his poetry, particularly his magnum opus. During this period some texts were sent to Amal Kiran at his request when, at that time, he was staying in Bombay. He used to raise several literary or technical points and seek elucidation from the Master. About this correspondence between them Nirodbaran writes as follows: Sri Aurobindo's "long answers and illuminating self-commentary on his own poetry dictated at this time, consumed much of our time but we could see from the reply how Sri Aurobindo welcomed such remarks from Amal whom he had prepared in the art of poetry. No one except Amal, or perhaps Arjava had he lived, could have talked with Sri Aurobindo almost as equals on English poetry and drawn out many intricate movements on rhythm, overhead poetry, etc., which are now a permanent treasure in English literature."43 We should indeed be quite thankful to Amal Kiran for these invaluable letters most of which now form the Letters-section of Savitri. After completing
42Savitri, p. 631.
43 Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo, pp. 190-91; see also Perspectives of Savitri, p. 80.
Savitri Sri Aurobindo actually intended to write a long introduction to it but it never happened. These letters with their tone of informality, at the same time possessing an inspired professional tightness, serve that purpose of the introduction well. In this mode the writer can, dispossessing pedantism, present his point of view in a more intuitive way to the perceptive reader who has also the necessary background to understand and appreciate its nuances and subtleties. The correspondence is undoubtedly of rare literary eminence forming "a great poet's informal self-commentary."44
About the overhead note in poetry and particularly the nature of overmind aesthesis we have a number of expressive revelations made by Sri Aurobindo in his 1946 letter written to Amal Kiran. We shall first briefly summarise these in the following.45 One significant character of the Overmind Poetry is that there is something behind it which comes from the cosmic self that puts us also in direct contact with that greater consciousness. There is a wide and happy globality in it which luminously comprehends the play of multiplicity in the creative delight of the one in its relationship with all. A language that has its joy of the beautifully true has also the power to express that true beautifully."... there is always an unusual quality in the rhythm... often in the very building and constantly in the intonation and the association of sounds... linked together by a sort of inevitable felicity. There is also an inspired selection or an unusual bringing together of words which has the power to force a deeper sense on the mind.. .46 The second characteristic is that the overmind "thinks in a mass; its thought, feeling, vision is high or deep or wide or all these things together... it goes vast on its way to bring the divine riches, and it has a corresponding language and rhythm."47 These are present on a great sustained scale in the Vedic poetry.
Maintaining that the aesthesis is the very soul and essence of poetry, Sri Aurobindo writes that it brings us a Rasa not only "of word and sound but also of the idea and, through the idea, of the things expressed by the word and sound and thought, a mental or vital or sometimes the spiritual image of their form, quality, impact upon us or even, if the poet is strong enough, of their world-essence,
44Note in the 1954-edition of Savitri, p. 817.
45Savitri, SABCL, Vol. 29, pp. 802-16; see also Perspectives of Savitri, pp. 28-43.
46Perspectives of Savitri, pp. 30-31.
47Ibid., 32.
their cosmic reality, the very soul of them, the spirit that resides in them as it resides in all things."48 In the overmental aesthesis Rasa or essence and its enjoyment can get linked up with the Ananda that creates everything in this world.
As the growing aesthetic enjoyment enters in, he further adds, "the overhead planes the ordinary aesthesis turns into a pure delight and becomes capable of a high, a large or deep abiding ecstasy. The ground is... a spiritual ease and happiness upon which the special tones of the aesthetic consciousness come out or from which they arise... In the overmind we have a first firm foundation of experience of a universal beauty, a universal love, a universal delight... This universal aesthesis of beauty and delight... draws a Rasa from them and with that comes the enjoyment, Bhoga, and the touch or the mass of the Ananda."49 There is a completeness of the expression and of the sense of beauty; the truth of things and the underlying harmony become natural in that delight of creation.
In another letter Sri Aurobindo writes: "Overmind in all its dealings puts truth first; it brings out the essential truth (and truths) in things and also its infinite possibilities... When it speaks through poetry, this remains its first essential quality."50 These considerations demand a certain kind of readiness on the part of the writer in order to receive that overhead inspiration. It is not that he should be a spiritual person but perhaps that can extend to him the possibility of receiving such inspiration on a sustained basis. There is also a sufficiently important demand as far as the recipient or the reader is concerned. He too has to be quite alert to the moods and manners of that aesthesis.
When the overmind word finds its natural expression we have the supreme Mantra with the power to speak the Truth and give to that Truth the means to assert itself in life. In the transmission of that word there has to be no distortion, no mutilation, no discordant element to take away its executive harmonies. When received thus its metrical movement can set into motion newer worlds. "In the system of the Mystics... the Word is a power, the Word creates." We should also recognise that "the sacred mantras as symbolic of the rhythms in which the universal movement of things is cast"51
48 Ibid., 35.
49Ibid., pp. 36-37.
50 Savitri, p. 743.
51 The Secret of the Veda, SABCL, Vol. 10, p. 258.
is an ancient Vedic knowledge based on spiritual experience. Indeed, the Sanskrit word Brahma also means the creative Word, the sacred and mystic syllable Om. In its manifestive-expressive sense it connotes the Gayatri Mantra. Thus it is in the dynamic breath of Gayatri as Chhanda-Devata, Goddess of the Metre, that the universe grows more and more in Light. This transcendental Gayatri, the radiant Spouse of Brahma,52 in Truth-movement the Force of the Supreme, comes to the evolutionary world and takes the name of Savitri, the Daughter of the Sun; she becomes the incarnate Word.53 It is she who upon the earth sets those ever-widening movements of Light into truth-rhythms. The Symbol Dawn with which Sri Aurobindo's epic Savitri opens is actually the hour before the gods awake, the early dawn, brahmarātra, in which the manifestation is about to take place, a new creation is soon to begin, to get going. It will happen by the double action of Yajna and Mantra which recover the lost Sun of the Veda;54 it will happen by the holy sacrifice and the affirmative will in creation, by Aswapati's Brahmic tapasya and Savitri's assertive Truth-dynamism.
In his exposition of the poetry of the future Sri Aurobindo writes about the Mantra as follows: It is ".. .a direct and most heightened, an intensest and most divinely burdened rhythmic word which embodies an intuitive and revelatory inspiration and ensouls the mind with the sight and the presence of the very self, the inmost reality of things and with its truth and the divine soul-forms of it, the Godheads which are bom from the living Truth. Or, let us say, it is a supreme rhythmic language which seizes hold upon all that is finite and brings into each the light and voice of its own infinite."55
This is precisely what we have in Savitri. There is no doubt that it is by entering into that Mantra that we shall spiritually profit from it in the completest manner conceivable. Indeed "Savitri is a Song of Joy, the Spirit of Delight itself borne by the might of the Calm. It is the Mantra of the Real in whose body of Silence is enshrined the soul of Rapture, Ananda Rasa flowing in the ocean of Shanta Rasa."56 In it is present "all that is needed to realise the
52 Savitri, p. 525. 53 Ibid., p. 175; p. 693.
54The Secret of the Veda, SABCL, Vol. 10, p. 147.
55The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 200.
56R.Y. Deshpande, Sri Aurobindo and the New Millennium, p. 178.
Divine,"57—the Divine not only in the radiant world, divyaloka, but also in the mortal world, mrityuloka. Thus when the truest and the widest sense of the overmind aesthesis arrives at this satyamantra, the Mantra of the Real, the Word of Truth-Revelation, then in the evolutionary everlastingness is also achieved at once the highest possible realisation.
The Composition of Savitri
But how exactly did the Mantra arrive in our midst? In a letter dated 1934 Sri Aurobindo wrote: "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."58 This remark was essentially concerned with the epic as it stood then, basically consisting of a few portions of the first part. In 1947 he writes 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."59 The Book of Yoga, for instance, had yet to be written at this time. About his earlier drafts we get some idea from the letter written in 1936. The first five Books of Part I, he writes, "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."60 Then, in 1948, he writes to Dilip Kumar Roy: "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."61
57The Mother's Talk, Perspectives of Savitri, pp. 45-46.
58Savitri, p. 728. 59 Ibid., p. 759.
60Ibid., pp. 728-29.
61Sri Aurobindo Came to Me, p. 492.
Indeed, the composition of Savitri spans several years, almost over fifty years interspersed with many long gaps in between. The significant periods could be 1916-18, the thirties now and then, and of course the last eight years of the forties. The first draft perhaps belongs to the Baroda-period when Sri Aurobindo was writing poetry picking up themes from the Mahabharata. In 1936 he recalls in a letter that Savitri was "originally written many years ago before the Mother came."62 This "many years ago" before 1914 could therefore correspond only to the period,—mostly the Baroda period,—when he was engaged in writing narrative poems with similar themes drawn from Indian history and mythology. We have in this group poems such as Urvasie (1896) and Love and Death (1899) where the style as well as the similarity of spellings of the Indian names bears plausible confirmation of Savitri as a composition of that time, around 1900. There is also a reasonable and hence quite acceptable corroboration of it from a Bengali literary man Dinendra Kumar Roy who lived with Sri Aurobindo in Baroda to assist him in Bengali conversation.63 In a letter written to Amal Kiran in 1931 Sri Aurobindo mentions that there was "a previous draft" which would have made Savitri just "a legend and not a symbol".64
In this context it will be quite interesting to know when exactly Sri Aurobindo made that Tale a Symbol. In a pertinent letter when he tells Nirodbaran that he began writing Savitri "on a certain mental level",65 then we have to definitely go to the period prior to the Arya which was launched on 15 August 1915. The suggestion that Sri Aurobindo began working on Savitri from August 1916 is based on a certain question mark (?) in the margin against "Baroda" on some sheet of paper found among his papers.66 That he did not strike it out later only means that, perhaps, he intended to add there something more apropos of it. In any case the non-existence of any such draft today does not necessarily rule out the possibility of the first composition belonging to this period.67 However, for
62 Savitri, p. 728.
63 Nirodbaran, Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo, p. 171; see also Perspectives of Savitri, p. 68.
64 Savitri., p.m.65 Ibid.
66Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research, December 1986, Vol. 10, No. 2, p. 169.
67Ibid., December 1981, Vol. 5, No. 2, p. 190.
the purposes of comparative studies we can now take only the available 1916-compostion as the starting point. This implies that the work on Savitri could be considered to have spread over thirty-four years. But there was not much done on it till the thirties, thus compressing the span to the last fifteen years or so, with the intensive effort really put forth during the forties.
The composition of Savitri during its final stages was as follows: "In its first dozen or so drafts the work does not exceed fifty handwritten pages. During the thirties the first of this narrative poem's 'cantos' was developed into three 'books' consisting each of many cantos. By 1944 a draft of the first 'part' of the poem consisting of three books (twenty-four cantos) had been completed. This draft, handwritten by Sri Aurobindo in two columns on standard-size bond paper, was then revised. Many of the extensive alterations were taken down by Nirodbaran. Some of the revision is on the double-column manuscript; longer passages were written on small sheets of a 'chit-pad', which were later pinned to the manuscript, or else written in separate notebooks. The work did not stop here. The entire first part was now hand-transcribed by Nirodbaran into a 393-page ledger. This transcription was then read out to Sri Aurobindo and revised at his dictation. After this a typed copy incorporating the new revision was made. This was revised in its turn; sometimes two stages (top and carbon copy) or even three stages of revision exist. At this point, in the year 1946, separate cantos began to be printed... . The proofs... were read out and corrected by him. He also heard and corrected the printed text of each of the cantos after it was published. Finally, in 1950, the whole of the first part was printed in book form by the Ashram press. The proofs of this first edition were read out to Sri Aurobindo and he made some changes and additions."68 Part I consisting of the first three Books was published in September 1950 just before Sri Aurobindo withdrew from his physical body in December that year; the publication of Part II and Part III as the second volume of the epic can be taken, from the date available from the printer's page, to be May 1951. Which means that a major part of the manuscripts must have already gone to the press while Sri Aurobindo was still giving final revision to certain portions. The Book of Fate was the last to be revised and it is there that we see many of the prophetic statements made by him about the yogic
68 Ibid.
nature of the work to be done and the danger involved in it.
A brief first-hand account of how the work on Savitri proceeded during the forties is described by Nirodbaran in his Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo.69 He gives a graphic picture of how Sri Aurobindo went on with the magnum opus. "He would be sitting in a small armchair with a straight back where now the present big armchair stands, and listen to my reading. The work proceeded very slowly to start with, and for a long time, either because he didn't seem to be in a hurry or because there was not much time left after attending to the miscellaneous correspondence. Later on, the time was changed to the morning... He would dictate line after line, and ask me to add selected lines and passages in their proper places, but they were not always kept in their old order. I wonder how he could go on dictating lines of poetry in this way, as if a tap had been turned on and the water flowed, not in a jet of course, but slowly, very slowly indeed. Passages sometimes had to be re-read in order to get the link or sequence, but when the turn came of The Book of Yoga and The Book of Everlasting Day, line after line began to flow from his lips like a smooth and gentle stream and it was on the next day that a revision was done to get the link for further continuation."70 In this way the seal of "incomplete completion" was put on Savitri just before about three weeks of Sri Aurobindo's passing away. 1950 thus marks a double event.
It is hard for us to imagine the complexity of the procedure through which the composition of Savitri went.71 Draft after draft and revision after revision and handling of thousands of pages or sheets of various sizes have practically made the whole sequence intractable. The unfortunate result 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 Word72
69 See Perspectives of Savitri, pp. 68-85. 70 Ibid., p.78.
71The facsimile of a manuscript page reproduced in Appendix I may give some idea about it. Refer also Mother India, May 2000, p. 351.
72Sri Aurobindo Archives and Research, Vol. 10, No 2, (December 1986), p. 150. See also Supplement to the Revised Edition of Savitri, pp. 112-13.
charged with occult-spiritual power have unhappily remained unused.
Recently Richard Hartz has made an elaborate and painstaking study of the several drafts of Savitri and indicated the manner in which a reasonably faithful text of the epic could be edited. In his introduction to The Composition of Savitri he writes: "The story of the composition of Savitri is almost an epic in itself. Much work will have to be done before this story can be told in detail. Now only a broad overview can be given, tracing the development of a few passages as examples. But even this should enrich our understanding of the poem."73 True, and it is felt that the whole effort will bear meritorious fruits. There might be differences in approach but they should not stand in the way of researches that could be pursued in examining the texts of Savitri.
In this context we may look into some factual details which are revealing in many ways. The first available draft of Savitri, dated 8/9 August 1916, has only 1637 lines which became in the final printed version 23,837 lines. Part I which was mostly written by Sri Aurobindo himself in his own hand had, in 1944, about 9000 lines; but as the revision by dictation proceeded it grew to 11,683 lines in the printed text of 1950. This kept on happening in the fair copy made by Nirodbaran, in the typescripts, proofs, and the printed versions which had come out either in the Ashram journals or as fascicles. The very first line of the epic in the twenty-first version appears as follows:
It was the hour before the gods awake.
While it continued to be in that form in the later drafts the only change made was to replace "gods" with "Gods".
The fact that Savitri went back and forth through so many stages of composition entails, inevitably, that a few possible slips or mistakes would creep into the printed version. There could be copying, typing, proof-reading mistakes, or else mistakes due to wrong hearing of words, or using a wrong homophonic, or wrong positioning of newly dictated lines. The present editorial task therefore becomes very daunting. In that sense there is a certain
73 Mother India, p. 989, October 1999. The series is still continuing in the periodical. See also Invocation, Savitri Bhavan Study Notes, April 1999.
justification also in the archival statement that "an author is not responsible for every point, indeed not even for every word that is printed as his."74 Too many hands have entered into the entire business each, quite unconsciously but always with a sense of devotion to the Master, contributing its share of departures from the original.
But this archival statement about 'an author not responsible for every word that is printed' needs to be seen more carefully. The intention is perhaps only to bring into discussion the contextual aspect; it cannot have validity or acceptability in any absolute sense. Otherwise we shall simply prove ourselves to be like Newton's famous contemporary Richard Bentley, the classical scholar. He was five when Paradise Lost was published in 1667. Later Bentley rewrote the poem entirely to his taste, thinking that it was the printer who had made all those hundreds of blunders in it. But then, eventually, what he rewrote also carried in it an awkward "gawkishness". As an example let us take his last two lines of the epic:
Then hand in hand, with social steps their way
Through Eden took, with Heav'nly Comfort cheer'd.
But the task of Savitri-editing is a serious matter. It becomes hazardous also in view of the complexity of going through pages and pages of the provisional drafts, with revision and new dictation going on almost at every stage.
Based on very careful studies and researches an attempt was made in the 1980s to bring out a critical edition of Savitri; but it proved abortive. By any reckoning this was an enormous amount of work, of going through all the 'manuscripts' and noting down with respect to them the departures present in the 1972 version. Instead of the critical edition of Savitri we have now, established on these textual examinations and collations, a revised edition (1993). This revised edition is also accompanied by a supplement that lists several editorial details. These provide, as well as explain, the method of approach adopted while accepting the readings as given in the edited work. There are, however, certain issues which need another look to take care of objections that could be raised in some particular contexts.
74 Sri Aurobindo Archives and Research, Vol. 5, No. 2, (December 1981), p. 191.
Let us first take an example from Canto Four Book Three about Aswapati's return to the mortal world after receiving an assurance from the Divine Mother:
Once more he moved amid material scenes,
Lifted by intimations from the heights
And twixt the pauses of the building brain
Touched by the thoughts that skim the fathomless surge
Of Nature and wing back to hidden shores.75
He by his yogic tapasya climbed the summits of spirituality and reached the top of creation where he met the supreme Goddess who alone, Aswapati knew, could change the circumstance of our transience and suffering, of our life in ignorance that has bound us to death, and bring to it the transforming felicity of immortality. The course of the evolutionary Fate could be altered only if she would incarnate herself here and deal with the one who stands as an antagonist against a happy manifestation in the possibilities of the superconscient. An exceptional boon has now been granted to him. He got the Word, that things shall be fulfilled in Time; this shall be so by herself taking birth as his unfaltering and radiant daughter. Aswapati returns to the earth, now with a splendid certitude, and attends to his kingly office of governance. Presently he is no more an apprentice, a "seeker" to tread the hazardous path of a beginner with its slow and arduous climb; he is a Master, an accomplished, in fact a fulfilled Siddha with the forces of Life under his full command,—he has become Aswapati. All his actions flow in the dynamism of the spirit and the higher intimations that he gets are received not only in a quiescent state, but also when he is preoccupied with the thousand problems that afflict us here in our daily transactions. He is spiritual even in these secular matters. The poetic expression Sri Aurobindo has given to this greatness of the Yogi is very precise in its connotation and we have to be pretty alert to its implications.
But from the editors who examined the Savitri-manuscripts in detail we have rather an unfortunate statement about the third line of this passage. While proposing the replacement of "twixt" by "in", this is what they say: "The last emendation of a handwritten line was necessitated by what the editors consider to be a slip made
75Savitri, p. 347.
by the author while revising. All handwritten versions, except the last, of line 491 [p. 347] of Book Three, Canto 4, run as follows:
And in the pauses of the building brain.
When he copied this line in the 'final version', Sri Aurobindo wrote 'twixt' instead of 'in'. This word, although somewhat archaic, is perfectly legitimate, and 'in fact of fairly frequent occurrence in Savitri. But here it does not make sense. The 'pauses' of the brain are what come between, or twixt, its ordinary activities. Sri Aurobindo's intention surely was that it is in these pauses that, as the sequel says, 'thoughts' from hidden shores come in and touch the seeker. Perhaps he meant to alter 'pauses' when he substituted 'twixt' for 'in'. At any rate, the unrevised version of the line, as given above, seems to represent Sri Aurobindo's intentions better than the revised one, and it has therefore been restored to the text."76 The editors seem to be too confident to say that "twixt" for "in" was a slip on the part of Sri Aurobindo. We do not know.
But this "twixt" must have been read out to Sri Aurobindo at least on three or four occasions later. The typescript, the proofs of the Canto when it was published in the Advent in 1947, the fascicle that had come out again in 1947, and finally when the proofs of the 1950-edition of Part I of Savitri were read out to Sri Aurobindo. We cannot say that in the sequence the same slip kept on happening at every stage. Further, in the last version that is in Sri Aurobindo's own handwriting, the copy-text, as well as in the ledger in which Nirodbaran copied the text the word concerned is "twixt"; it is also noticed that this word has been underlined in the ledger and that there is a tick mark in the margin. From this we can be reasonably certain that a reference about "twixt" was made to Sri Aurobindo and that he deliberately retained it as the correct expression. In other words, this was not an accidental departure from the earlier drafts, though these had "in" at least on thirteen occasions. Nor can we say that Sri Aurobindo was unconscious while he made this change or when he heard it a number of times subsequently.
76 Sri Aurobindo Archives and Research, Vol. 10, No. 2, (December 1986), p. 186.
For a discussion about this passage reference may be made to R.Y. Deshpande, Sri Aurobindo and the New Millennium, pp. 173-74. See also K. D. Sethna, Mother India, November 1990, pp. 745-54.
We may take another example, that of the Book of Death. Basically this is a 1916-18 version which was very lightly revised during the forties. The first fair copy has just 133 lines of which 108 are identical to what they are now. Presently, we have 177 lines with 25 lines altered and 44 added by dictation.77 On a page belonging to this manuscript Sri Aurobindo also dictated "Book of Death / III / Death in the Forest". Regarding this nomenclature of III some doubt has arisen whether it can be taken as Canto III of the present Book of Death with the first two cantos having remained unwritten, or that it is simply a third part of the earlier version of the epic that belongs to the Arya-period.
Added to the Book of Death there is a footnote in the 1954-edition of Savitri which runs as follows: "This Book was not completed. This Canto which the author named Canto III was compiled by him from an earlier version and rewritten at places." A further clarification was presented in the footnote of the 1972-edition: "This Canto was compiled by the poet from an early version of Savitri in which it had been called Canto Three. It was the third Canto of that poem, not the third canto of any particular Book. When, after being rewritten at places, it was included in the present version, its number remained unchanged." But this statement seems to be misrepresentative of the available facts. The 1993 revised edition has a more explicit statement: "The Book of Death was taken from Canto Three of an early version of Savitri which had only six cantos and an epilogue. It was slightly revised at a later stage and a number of new lines were added, but it was never fully worked into the final version of the poem. Its original designation, 'Canto Three', has been retained as a reminder of this."78
But while attending to the Book of Death in 1946 Sri Aurobindo dictated, in three rows, "Book of Death / III/ Death in the Forest" and hence all is in Nirodbaran's hand ; this was done on a page of the earlier draft that was taken for revising. There is also a double tick mark at this place. To reiterate: from the facsimile of this page it is clear that all this forms a revised draft prepared on the original manuscript page. Seeing the abruptness of III at this place, in the absence of I and II anywhere, perhaps a doubt had arisen in the mind of the typist, Nolini Kanta Gupta, and he must have sought clarification from Sri Aurobindo. The double tick mark is
77Richard Hartz, Mother India, November 1999, p. 1072.
78Ibid., August, 2000, p. .
undoubtedly a confirmation of what Sri Aurobindo had originally dictated to Nirodbaran, that it is meant to be the third canto of the present Book and not something belonging to the earlier version. Being a provisional revision of the draft we should take the existing Book of Death as incomplete.
Apropos of this situation Richard Hartz, who has done extensive studies of the Savitri-manuscripts, writes: "At the place in the manuscript where the present Book Eight begins, a roman numeral III was written by the scribe under the heading Book of Death, as if Death in the Forest was meant to be the third canto of that Book. It is possible that when Sri Aurobindo revised this manuscript, he had begun to envisage a description of the Yoga of Savitri, but had not yet conceived of The Book of Yoga as a separate Book. The Book of Death would then have become an expanded version of the whole of the old canto entitled 'Death', and would have been numbered Book Seven. Its first canto might have been similar to the present Book Seven, Canto One. The second canto could have been an account of Savitri's Yoga much shorter than what was eventually written, while Death in the Forest would have been the third canto. But this explanation is purely speculative."79
The cautious approach in this note is commendable indeed. But we should also remember what Sri Aurobindo had told Nirodbaran when the final revision of the Book of Fate was completed. This was during the last session of his work on Savitri in 1950. Sri Aurobindo had asked Nirodbaran if there was still something to be revised. When told about the Book of Death and Epilogue, Sri Aurobindo said: "We shall see about that later on."80 That perhaps adds quite a bit of significance to the abruptness of number three of the canto; it definitely shows that this Book would have had considerable additional matter which Sri Aurobindo, had he attended to it, would have incorporated at the time of taking it up again: we can be reasonably certain that Sri Aurobindo intended to expand the 1916-18 draft later. This may even imply that he would disclose in the epic some other occult aspects connected with the role of death in this creation. These aspects could possibly indicate the difficulties of transformation of the physical nature governed by decay, disintegration and death, difficulties at the
79Ibid.
80Nirodbaran, Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo (1988), p. 266.
cellular level itself.81 From the point of view of composition we need not therefore necessarily tie this 'III / Death in the Forest' with the Book of Yoga which was practically not present in any earlier draft, a fact which is clear from Sri Aurobindo's letters also.
In a letter written to Amal Kiran in 1946 Sri Aurobindo summarises the position of the two Books concerned as follows: "The Book of Yoga and the Book of Death have still to be written, though a part needs only a thorough recasting."82 At this point of time the Book of Yoga, as we have already seen, did not exist and as there was an early draft of the Book of Death, this "thorough recasting" only indicates the latter which Sri Aurobindo wanted to take up again at a suitable stage afterwards. But this didn't happen. Perhaps that disclosure would have been too early for us to understand as a spiritual fact in life.
There seems to be another kind of hieratic logic behind the sudden appearance of canto three in the Book of Death. If we consider that the poem is specifically a spiritual tale of Savitri,— and we know it is so,—then we have at the end of the first canto— the Symbol Dawn—an announcement about the inevitability of her husband Satyavan's death. The second canto—the Issue— speaks of the awakening of the great World-Mother in Savitri, an awakening which is to happen on the fated day as foretold by Narad. The central theme of the narrative has thus already been introduced by now. The long intervening description in the next thirty-eight cantos, from page 22 to page 557 consisting of 535 pages or about 19,000 lines, then forms a kind of necessary interlude in the story; it is a sort of desirable digression. With that the announced death occurs in the third canto of the Book of Death. From this point onward the story, of death, runs in direct relationship with the theme. There is thus an inner consistency in the entire scheme, making it very appealing to the aesthetic sense of superior poetry. If someone has proposed such an argument then surely there is a certain merit in his line of thinking; but despite its charm and the plausibility of an occult occurrence it sounds rather a wild tour de force.
However, in view of such features,—and more important from the point of editing the Savitri-text,—we must take due care of the
8l R.Y. Deshpande, Perspectives of Savitri, pp. 546-49, Notes 8 and 9.
82 Savitri (1993), p. 733.
complexities and many possible dimensions that are present in the entire work. In this regard perhaps the best procedure for the editors of the Savitri-text could be to compile all the data and leave things for the perceptive reader to take readings according to his judgement. This entails an enormous amount of labour but the gain is a certain scientific documentation that can stand permanently as reference material for generations to come who may have another approach towards the epic. That will thus satisfy the intention of an objective researcher who is always keen to have facts at his disposal rather than judgments which generally carry the element of subjectivity in them being invariably based on a given line of approach. But these are issues rather of a minor kind and may have generally a relevance only in their academic contexts. What is significant is the authenticity as well as the validity of the Word of Savitri in its pristine glory and the power that can give expression to the Real-Idea in our life. That is the true merit of its poetry and that will always remain undeformed,—because behind it is the yogic force of its creator.
The Musician of the Spirit
About Savitri Raymond Franck Piper writes as follows: "We know that we must resort to the art of poetry for expressing, to the fullest possible artistic limits, the yearnings and battles of mankind for eternal life. And fortunately a tremendous new body of metaphysical and mystical poetry has already inaugurated the new Age of Illumination. This poetry radiates from the master metaphysician, mystic, and poet, Sri Aurobindo, and his Ashram in Pondicherry, India. During a period of nearly fifty years before his passing in 1950, he created what is probably the greatest epic in the English language and the longest poem (23, 837 lines of iambic blank verse) in any language of the modem world. 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 metaphysical brilliance.
This epic is called Savitri, A Legend and a Symbol, 1951 published by the Ashram. A sentence from K. D. Sethna [Amal Kiran] indicates its plot. 'Savitri fighting Satyavan's death, is in Sri Aurobindo's hands an avatar of the immortal Beauty and Love plunging into the trials of terrestrial life and seeking to overcome them not only in herself but also in the world she has embraced as her own: she is sworn to put an utter end to earth's estrangement from God.'83 The poem begins,
It was the hour before the Gods awake...
A fathomless zero occupied the world.
And it ends
She brooded through her stillness on a thought
Deep-guarded by her mystic folds of light,
And in her bosom nursed a greater dawn.
Savitri is perhaps the most powerful artistic work in the world for expanding man's mind towards the Absolute."84
In contrast to this we also meet not infrequently very , knowledgeable critics who assert that Sri Aurobindo might have been a great writer, thinker, or a spiritual person, but was never a poet. Even if they happen to read his three thousand pages of poetry including Savitri, they yet refuse to consider him as capable of writing genuine poetry in a medium which was not his mother tongue. "English learned as a foreign language can never nourish the invisible roots of poetry," so states Kathleen Raine.85 She clarifies further that "its beauty lies in its ability to convey the very nature of England, its woods and flowers and weather and animals and people with their peculiarly English attitudes."86 In that case "to wish to write in an alien language seems to me," she maintains, "a failure to perceive and experience that which poetry is... words in their feeling-content and their local sense-impression.
83The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, p. 119(1947).
84The Hungry Eye, Ch 15 Expansions of Aesthetic Experience. See also Mother India, November 1958.
85The English Language and the Indian Spirit,
Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K. D. Sethna, (1986), p. 7.
86Ibid., p. 30.
There is involved, in such a wish, a separation of abstractions from words—the very antithesis of poetry."87 Again, "... the language of the poet is a language of image and symbol—there must be forms to contain the abstractions which are, without these containing vessels, what Yeats has called 'Asiatic vague immensities'. Blake writes of the 'minute particulars' and of these there are virtually none in Sri Aurobindo's poem... . Certainly Savitri is an ambitious and impressive attempt—an impressive failure."88 Also, whereas Sri Aurobindo "understands poetry in general, he has little sense of the precise—or rather of the associative magic of the words themselves."89
Here we have another comment, from P. Lai as quoted by V. K. Gokak.90 P. Lai considered that Indo-Anglian romanticism ended with Sarojini Niadu. "Now, waking up we must more and more aim at a realistic poetry reflecting, poetically and pleasingly, the din and hubbub, the confusion and indecision, the flashes of beauty and goodness, of our age. And leave the fireflies to dance through the neem." "The entire game is reminiscent of Roget's Thesaurus where redundant familiars like 'soul', 'spiritual', 'subtle', 'deeps', and 'deathless' enjoy a private tea-party." He sees "vague luminosity of form" in Sri Aurobindo.
Is Savitri a failure then?"
In response to such criticisms Amal Kiran argued extensively, from all angles, positive and negative, but his untiring attempts did not avail anything worthwhile. In the face of such a deafness should then one sing for that person the glories of Musa Spiritus who ever offers her gifts in great abundance which, in whatever language it be, we can receive only if we can breathe in her living presence?
If we strictly analyse the statement that English learned as a foreign language can never nourish the invisible roots of poetry, it just means that Sri Aurobindo might have been a poet but he was a bad poet in English because, unfortunately, he chose a medium
87Ibid., p. 46.
88Indian Poets and English Poetry,
Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K. D. Sethna, (1994), pp. 29-30. See also Mother India, pp. 753-58, September 1996. 89 Ibid., p. 131.
90 Sri Aurobindo - Seer and Poet, pp. 64-65, (1973); Perspectives of Savitri, p. 223.
that was not his own,—which we also know that it is not true. He employed "words for uses they never were born for." Perhaps that was the tragedy of Tagore and Yeats too when they wrote in English. But then words are not frozen icebergs. They are capable of growing and acquiring newer warmer shades of meaning and newer powers of expression, newer associations and subtleties, rich in many proportions. Indeed for English a new possibility been opened out by Sri Aurobindo, a possibility which Tagore could not open out even for his own native Bengali? After all, words can take new birth and can gain new sense and sound and sensibility, new joys and new significances which they have been always doing in their ever-widening urge to reach out that which is happy and felicitous, unfalsifiably true and unmutably beautiful.
But the most amazing thing is that Kathleen Raine passed judgements without reading Sri Aurobindo! If we apply Eliot's dictum that a good critic should have a great "sense of fact", then we are constrained to say that she did not have facts with her. It is also strange that several decades ago a critic in the The Times Literary Supplement said that Sri Aurobindo's poetry did not have the magical rhythm of Tagore, Iqbal and Sarojini Naidu,—which only shows that he was not perceptive of the deeper and subtler rhythms that go far beyond just the lyrical. However, in his defence it may be said that much of Sri Aurobindo's poetry including Savitri appeared only afterwards.
The question is, whether Sri Aurobindo has brought the greatness of the soul to Savitri's blank verse. If so, it would immediately take care of Blake's "minute particulars", "minute discrimination on which is founded all sublimity of creation"; at the same time it would embrace "language of image and symbol" disposing of Yeats's "Asiatic vague immensities". It would also take care of Hegel's "concrete universals" that are otherwise too abstract or philosophic. Spiritual experience, as vast as the universe and as detailed as counting each star with its brightness in countless galaxies, always takes care of all such aesthetic stipulations which otherwise seem to be just mind-set.
In the over-all subjective and artistic experience it is the poet's personality that matters the most; it stamps his uniqueness, even his presence in the enjoyment of poetic delight that flows from it. But there is an aspect of impersonality too, impersonality not of aloofness but of universality, even of the transcendent. Savitri has all the three. That makes the poetic work minutely elaborate; also.
being an experience, there does not remain any question of vagueness.
Let us take one or two illustrative examples. When image and symbol crowd in a great succession of subjective feelings—and feelings are always poignantly subjective—we at once open ourselves to a vision that we never had earlier. Thus we see a new wonder in the beauty of romanticism, as in the following:
Mastered by the honey of a strange flower-mouth,
Drawn to soul-spaces opening round a brow,
He turned to the vision like a sea to the moon
And suffered a dream of beauty and of change,
Discovered the aureole round a mortal's head,
Adored a new divinity in things.91
Such an abundance of honey-thick sweetness can flow only when spiritual felicity drunk in the delight of existence finds its true native expression which is the essence or Rasa of poetic creation. In it one is sure that the poet has seen "a new divinity in things."
There is a universality emerging from the very specificity of symbol and image. If the light that illumines everything is found then all that is living or inanimate opens out its secrecies and wonder after wonder begins to flood our awareness. What has been enigmatic all along ceases to be so and there is only the working of one miraculous cosmic Force.
Even a simple line like
Savitri, Savitri, O Savitri92
pierces with the power of that name all the three worlds of Ignorance existing in us and in its cry takes us to the Safe and the Beatific. This may sound rather hyperbolic, an excitedly exaggerated observation; but the line is remarkably direct in its statement and content and is charged with the power of the mantric name itself. It combines in its art the charge of the supernatural. We do not have to know Sanskrit but only listen to the sound that can fill the inner skies with its outspreading sovereignty of force. In fact, lying in the lap of Savitri and uttering her name means that death cannot
91Savitri, p. 396.
92Ibid., p. 765.
touch us; if it should, it is death who would then get destroyed,— and that is exactly what happened in the case of Satyavan.
Now and then the poet comes out with the inspired artistry that is elaborate in design but sure in its effect. So is the Immortals' vision drawn closer to us:
Only the Immortals on their deathless heights
Dwelling beyond the walls of Time and Space,
Masters of living, free from the bonds of Thought,
Who are overseers of Fate and Chance and Will
And experts of the theorem of world-need,
Can see the Idea, the Might that changes Time's course,
Come maned with light from undiscovered worlds,
Hear, while the world toils on with its deep blind heart,
The galloping hooves of the unforeseen event,
Bearing the superhuman rider, near
And, impassive to earth's din and startled cry,
Return to the silence of the hills of God;
As lightning leaps, as thunder sweeps, they pass
And leave their mark on the trampled breast of Life.93
Suggestion upon suggestion with the finest sweep of poetry is piled with great skill and artistry in a statement that can be simply paraphrased thus: the Immortals come maned with light and hear the nearing of the unforeseen event and return. The whole passage is exact, is to the point, and is most perfect in its mystico-spiritual details. Only one who is a master of language and a seer of visions can accomplish such a task. The subtlety and many-sidedness of thought running through this 14-line sentence is absolutely marvellous, in the sense that the more we ponder on it the more of the truth it brings out. That is the power of spiritual poetry. It is also a fine example of intuitive thought reaching an absolute of the Truth. One wonders whether such descriptions exist anywhere else in English poetry.
In this context we may also recall what Sri Aurobindo wrote to Amal Kiran regarding his blank verse style in Savitri. "... when I attempted the single line blank verse on a large scale in Savitri I found myself falling involuntarily into a series of four-line
93Ibid., pp. 53-54.
movement. But even though I was careful in the building, I found it led to a stiff monotony and had to make a principle of variation—-one line, two line, three line, four line or longer passages (paragraphs as it were) alternating with each other; otherwise the system would be a failure." The above-quoted passage is an excellent example of the technique illustrating the success he achieved with the blank verse in Savitri.94
There are levels of inspiration in Savitri, but nowhere does the poet go below a certain mark set by him for the poem. The landscapes have many vistas and many variations, green grasses and tall trees and smiling valleys and tranquil mountains climbing in a prayer of offering to the skies; there are primroses and cottages as well as sandy deserts and caravans with their slow tinkling paces. There may even appear 'arid' tracts here and there; but they have their own beauty of bareness. Savitri's aesthetic enjoyment or Rasa has many flavours and hues and cadences and it is the enjoyer who has to develop the taste for its richnesses, for its varied sweetnesses of the joy that flows from the spirit of creativity.
Not only thoughts and images but many sounds go to make the body of the poem. We are reminded of Mallarme's le Musicien de Silence who is also le Musicien de Son. After having counted all the sounds in the World-Soul what we wonder at is that, paradoxically, they all become countless! What the poet has done, it appears, is simply given a few suggestive examples of these innumerable notes and intonations, each one with its own timbre and pitch. Each matter has its own manner and each substance its sense and when poetry attempts to describe these then there no mental rule can really be applied. Style and technique are an integral part of the poet's inspiration and one has to go entirely by its force; obviously any critical appreciation has to be fully cognisant of it.
We are dealing with Overhead Poetry which Sri Aurobindo explained in great detail in his letters on poetry. It is an utterance that comes from some higher plane carrying with it its rhythm and tonal resonances as much as its substance and flavour. It is a creative word that sets into motion new worlds of perception; also it initiates the surge of new ideas and their forces to shape our lives in their likeness. In terms of the Savitri-phrase it is "a voice that carries the sound of infinity."95 To understand and enjoy it is needed
94Sri Aurobindo on Himself, SABCL, Vol. 26, p. 308.
95p. 663.
another kind of aesthetic sensibility, to hear it speak to us in its many nuances we have to keep aside our own preferences, we have to listen to it in the inner silence which is the real receiver of its imports and its significances. An intuitive association with things and images and sounds can alone put us in direct contact with it. A new spirit in poetry can be appreciated only with a new taste.
The failure of the modem mind is characteristically due to its insensitivity to things supraphysical. It has the least notion or idea of Overhead Poetry, to such an extent that it cannot identify it even in works that have come down to us. The Theory of Aesthesis based on parameters of the multifold Word in its joyous mellifluity demands a new outlook towards things. Everybody is not open to it nor is expected to be open to it, but certainly a perceptive critic cannot neglect or bypass it. At times even a well-versed Aurobindonian can miss it.
There are Victorian elements in Sri Aurobindo no doubt, but Savitri is an epic crowded with several echoes, Indian and European, ancient and modem, and is full of several Rasas, essences of aesthetic enjoyment in their unadulterated purity, and nothing would be taboo just because it may belong to the forms of the past. This poetry can be "modem" too. The glorious Victorian can be as much a city-dweller with a perfectly urban mind: thus, for example, 'nothingness' becomes 'the waste stuff from which all is made. The ultra-modernism comes out with full violence when
... bodies bom out of some Nihil's womb
Ensnare the spirit in the moment's dreams,
Then perish vomiting the immortal soul
Out of Matter's belly into the sink of Nought.96
Or take the miasma-description, Euclidean in precision, epically elaborate, yet Keatsian in execution of art:
Grey forces like a thin miasma creep
Stealing through chinks in his closed mansion's doors,
Discolouring the walls of upper mind
In which he lives his fair and specious life,
And leaves behind a stench of sin and death.97
96 Ibid., p. 494. 97 Ibid., p. 480.
Savitri's modernism does not rest at all in the sordid and the ugly although there is a certain necessity to represent their psychological character in the totality of functioning. The point is, Sri Aurobindo is not a Victorian that some people make of him. If these strains do come in, they only add to its assimilated richness. He exploits, so to say, everything that can serve tellingly if not revealingly his purpose. Kalidasian moods of seasons and the featurelessness of Nirvana, for example, are as important to it as Homeric similes or the correlative expressions of the Modernists. It is so because Savitri is an epic and the standards of short lyrical verses cannot be applied to it. Besides, it is another kind of epic. The Epic of the Universal is full of Rasas—madhura, karuna, vātsalya, adbhuta, vira, bibhatsa, shānta, etc. But, at the same time, it is the Epic of the Individual,—and also the Transcendental,—with the Rasa of Shantam pervading all through. It is in this great Silence that the Epic was bom,—Silence the true home of Overhead Poetry. To really appreciate it one has to enter into it.
But the modem mind has no patience for that; that is its tragedy. It even declares that now the days of the epic are over. In the mood of a rightful reaction against Victorianism the modem mind has certainly brought mental profundity and penetration which were very desirable. It has won a new freedom also. When it touches Eliot-wise the Gita's core that "the time of death is every moment" and therefore one must remember Krishna always, we have here another possibility opened out for poetry, a possibility of the inner mental expression coming to the fore with its gifts even of the occult. But, unfortunately, in that search for newer moods and manners it leaned on Freudian psychology and got totally misled. It took the path of the inconscient Nirvana. The Overhead planes remained sealed; in fact, they started receding.
The rise of Modernism, though in its "final orientation" as yet undetermined (written in 1919), was necessary against the "Victorian type".98 Something had to be done and Modem Poetry was that attempt. But it has not delivered the goods and even today man's deepest aspirations have remained unfulfilled. "Empty and barren is the sea," but it must find new waters and new tides. Modernism was after all a total reaction against all traditions, even against future possibilities. Therefore, when Sri Aurobindo
98 The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, pp. 144; 133-34.
essentially leaps from the traditions into the Overhead he gets bypassed in the current aesthesis. Obviously, this is a passing phase and the aesthesis will have to change and gather itself into a future form. To recognise it perhaps a certain temporal separation from it is needed.
Poetry is not only image and symbol, but is also sound and silence; if there is sight's sound, there is also sound's sight. And when le Musicien de Silence becomes one with le Musicien de Son we have an unsurpassable marvel. Listen to Ezra Pound: "When we know more of overtones we shall see that the tempo of every masterpiece is absolute, and is exactly set by some further law of rhythmic accord. Whence it should be possible to show that any given rhythm implies about it a complete musical form, perfect, complete. Ergo, the rhythm set in a line of poetry connects its symphony, which, had we a little more skill, we could score for orchestra."
If one is deaf to these sounds, to these rhythmic accords, to the happinesses that intend to rush out from the creative possibilities not just of the "easy-come" but "inevitable" Word, then what can the poor symbol do? And in the Overhead Poetry as proposed and most convincingly demonstrated by Sri Aurobindo what we have are the perfect rhythm, thought-substance, and the soul-vision fused into one, the supreme Mantra itself. Reading Savitri is entering into that mantric world and living in it is to live in the manifestive Truth itself.
Some Studies of Savitri
What we have considered so far are just a few aspects of Savitri. The most important is of course its affirmation of the Spirit as dynamic Truth shaping the destiny of this creation. This also implies that to enter into it we have to make considerable yogic-spiritual progress. While Savitri itself can become a means for that progress, there is needed the equally important basis of our willingness to undertake such a task. We have to be also prepared to undergo the hardships of its discipline by keeping ready all the instrumental aspects of our personality—with the mind capable of receiving intimations of luminous knowledge and the heart responding to the ardencies of life-movements in their thousand moods of magnificence and dignity and the will steady in its intent like a
blight flame of sacrifice burning upward to heaven. There has to be a "call" to live in Savitri who shall give us the Truth and the things of the Truth. Rare are such souls who have that urge, have received that call, and rarer still who will practise its Yoga.
In the meanwhile, however, we can live in its presence in several expectant ways. In Savitri there is spiritual philosophy put in the revealing language of a poet, its expression carrying the inspired and inevitable Word. We have in it mysticism, occult knowledge, religion, metaphysics, art, science, literature, history of man and history of earth, all that is noble and living, that can impart to our perception the sense of infinity which can give meaning to our daily occupations. Any one of these can become our foundational engagement; in fact it has thus already opened out an altogether new world of creative action for us. Based on Savitri we already have Sunil Bhattacharya's music and Huta Hindocha's paintings under the direct guidance of the Mother. These are examples of the new art that is to come in its wake and there shall be many more creations to bring Savitri itself closer to us. We thus envisage the coming of new schools of thought, choreography, poetry, criticism, comparative research and studies, fiction, songs, oratorical dissertations, discourses, recitations and readings all welling up from this inexhaustible fountain of creativity. The poem has also been translated into several languages mostly in verse-form but also at times as prose renderings. Maybe some of these are rudimentary attempts and much will have to be done to achieve some minimum aesthetic satisfaction that is to be expected from a work connected with it; nonetheless these attempts do demonstrate the possibilities that have sprung up from Savitri's world of delight. If around the stone-still statue of Buddha in Ellora there is the calm of infinity that nothing can disturb, we shall expect a crystalline stream of sweetness and joy rushing from the marble face of Savitri halo'd by the moon of beauty, or carved in the heart of amethyst she shall prove to be "the Sun from which we kindle all our suns."99
During the last fifty years an enormous amount of literature has gathered around Savitri. Even before it came out as a complete poem articles based on a few cantos that were published in some periodicals had started appearing. Since then picking up one theme or another, any number of studies and reflections have been
99Savitri, p. 314.
presented. Either giving expository details or taking the occasion to get into the spirit of Savitri, they bring out several shades of meaning that are there in its secret depths; or else we suddenly have at times marvellous insights and revelations that can lift us to higher planes of awareness. On a research level there are also doctoral theses dealing with one or other specific literary aspect of the epic. A good number of books are now available and they offer certain features that have an important bearing on our approaching and understanding the subjects it delineates.
In this compilation we propose to bring together some of these representative studies in two edited volumes under the common title Perspectives of Savitri. The first volume consists of articles essentially written by the first generation authors. One or two from this group will be included in the second volume. We are fortunate in this respect that many of them came directly in contact with Sri Aurobindo and therefore in them is the glow of intimacy providing a rarer personal feeling which is so valuable in a work of the kind that Savitri is. For instance, we have Nirodbaran who acted as a scribe and took down the Savitri-dictation as Sri Aurobindo, because of his failing eyesight, was not able to write himself. Being a man of literature trained by the Master himself his account provides the sweet story of its composition which is so endearipg to us. Amal Kiran had the extraordinary privilege of discussing several literary aspects and fine points of poetry with the Poet-Critic and, in the process, he drew out a number of important letters from him; these invaluable letters can now be treated as the author's preface or introduction to the epic. This introduction gives us an idea about the theory of poetry proposed by Sri Aurobindo and more so how he put it in practice. That all genuine poetry derives its inspiration from some high Overhead plane is something new to the general aesthetic world and it is that which has been compellingly brought out in them. A foundation for the appreciation of the future poetry with Savitri as its example has been laid and we should now approach it on that basis. Similarly, Nolini Kanta Gupta had been a long-time associate of Sri Aurobindo since his political days and was himself a person with high attainments. His writings are extensive, both in Bengali and in English, and provide a deep insight into literary, cultural and spiritual matters. His own direct connection with the Savitri-work was to prepare its typescript which would be eventually sent to the press. What we get from them all is the gold of the touch they received directly from the
divine Guru. For that we shall always remain thankful to them. We are fortunate that the first two in their late nineties are amongst us today.
While making a selection of articles from various authors in the present volume the working thumb-rule followed was to see that the compilation is sufficiently broad-based to cover in an over-all way the numerous aspects of the epic. However, from a given author only one or two selections could be picked up, essentially because of space limitations. But care was taken to make sure that due justice was done to the author concerned, that the selected pieces would be quite representative of his established style and manner of thematic development. For the sake of general editorial uniformity very minor changes were made here and there without affecting the textual contents; at times it was also necessary to change the original title of the article or chapter heading to avoid repetition or to make the contents more explicit. But for a few minor exceptions, all the references to Sri Aurobindo's works in this compilation have been made uptodate by quoting from the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library that was brought out as a 30-volume publication in 1972. For the sake of a certain completeness of the present work a couple of articles not belonging to the 'first generation' have also been included here.
Perspectives of Savitri as we have in the first volume is broadly divided into six parts. A definite internal affinity amongst the articles has been the guideline for grouping them together. Not that this arrangement has always been successful to highlight or project several topical aspects in their totality; but it is believed that a fairly good picture will emerge from it for doing the concentrated work that lies ahead of us in order to enter into the worlds of Savitri, its realms of gold. A companion volume soon to follow will contain articles by the present-day authors.
R. Y. DESHPANDE
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