On Savitri
THEME/S
Once speaking at the Lingaraj College, Belgaum, on Sri Aurobindo's personality I said that looking round for a personality of the past with whom Sri Aurobindo can be compared in the wideness and the versatility of his genius, in the grandeur of revelation, in a superhuman atmosphere of sympathy for humanity which pervades his temperament and works, in high poetic achievement, in complexity and subtlety of intellect, in a rare synthesising and integrating power, in a total view of human perfection individual and collective, I could not find anybody except perhaps Veda-Vyasa, the great seer-poet of India. But, Veda-Vyasa has been regarded as a mythical figure by European scholars, for they could not believe that one single person could have written all the various works ascribed to him. They admit he must have written some works, but believe that subsequent generations have gone on adding to his works in order to borrow the halo of his genius and authority. But, if ever I believe now in the existence of Veda-Vyasa as one single personality responsible for all the works ascribed to him, it is because I know Sri Aurobindo today. It is not easily possible to believe that one and the same person could have written not only the greatest masterpiece of philosophy of the time but also indicated solutions for social problems and international politics, laid down new lines of poetical criticism and written not only short poems of striking merit both from the point of view of poetical substance and form — some of them ranking equal to the highest lyrical expression in the English language — but also a great epic poem of humanity.
This is an age of what is called "modernist" poetry and even the possibility of an epic being written in modem times is strongly discounted. It is supposed that the epic requires a certain primitive atmosphere for its birth and growth and, as modem times are anything but primitive, it is impossible for an epic to be written now. Even though in some of their latest tendencies in painting, sculpture and poetry the modernists are trying hard to reproduce or create according to primitivism with a vengeance, still, this being a critical age in which reason dominates and materialism is a living force, it is considered a practical impossibility to attempt a great epic and succeed. But we should be prepared for agreeable surprises
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from the creative spirit which can burst forth at the most unexpected moments in human history; for, the breath of the Lord bloweth where it listeth.
The conclusion about the impossibility of writing an epic in modem times rests mainly upon the examination of the trend of poetical spirit by European critics. They have taken for granted the cultural domination of the world by Europe as they took its economic and political domination. But culture is something much deeper than economics and politics. There are historical instances where a declining culture, politically dominated by another nation, has revived with a remarkable power of creativity. Very often the literary impact of an alien culture stimulates, invigorates and resuscitates the dormant creative possibilities of the subject race. This seems to have happened in the case of modem India. It is true that the various literatures of regional Indian languages were stagnant on account of the decline of national life, and all of them received a powerful impetus by the impact of European culture, especially as represented by the English language. Novel, drama, poetry, criticism, history, research along all the lines of literary effort have received an unprecedented inspiration as a means for the expression of national genius. A remarkable degree of literary progress has been achieved in every Indian language. But apart from these regional languages, English was adopted all over the vast continent not only as a medium of instruction but also as a vehicle of literary expression by its most advanced writers and thinkers. This gave rise to what has been termed Indo-English literature*, and has led to a curious literary phenomenon which is a very hopeful prelude to the cultural unification of mankind.
While the creative spirit of European nations is showing distinct signs of exhaustion and even some tendencies of decline, the resurgent spirit of India with all its rich spiritual heritage and possibilities is finding expression in the English language. The first sign of this remarkable achievement in poetic creation was given by the success of Tagore's Gitanjali. It showed that the expression of the Indian Spirit even in a remarkably Indian manner can find a high place in the cultural achievement of the human spirit. In fact, that which finds expression in Tagore is something of the fundamental spiritual elements and forms of Indian culture, not its widest sweep and utter depth. National resurgence after a
*Now called Indian Writings in English.
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period of political and social decline stirs the soul of the race to its very depths in the process of its re-awakening, throwing up all the elements of the culture with their characteristics into a ferment. Those elements that are found capable of survival, utility and vitality are retained, while those that have outlived their utility are rejected and dissolved. The basis of Indian culture goes back to the living spiritual experience embodied in the Vedas and Upanishads, the Gita, and Tantras and the Vedanta. Apart from the wide diffusion of spirituality in the consciousness of the masses, a traditional continuity of the practical process of self-realisation runs throughout the period of Indian history including the period of her decline. The names of Kabir, Nanak, Ramanand, Tulsi, Dadu, Chaitanya and others easily come to the mind while tracing the continuity to the very dawn of the Indian renaissance, which can be said to begin with the appearance of the colossal figure of Ramkrishna Paramhansa.
The fundamentally spirituo-religious character of the first forms which this movement of awakening took shows that it was not merely in isolated individuals that the Indian spiritual tradition persisted but that it had entered into the conscious life-forms, religious, social and even the sub-conscious of the whole race. The Brahmo Samaj, the Prarthana Samaj, the Arya Samaj are some of its well-known expressions. The national awakening and the struggle for political freedom gave inspiration to many writers and poets who boldly experimented with new forms of literary expression.
Poets are not lacking who tried to invent new forms suitable to the expression of the rising spirit of the nation and in almost every Indian regional language all the forms of European poetical expression have been accepted and experimented upon. Blank verse, prose poetry, — all have been tried, some of them with remarkable success. They all contributed to the awakening of the new spirit of literary expression, though it must be acknowledged that a conscious search for an epic form did not meet with success. Usually it ended with a discovery of a new metre, or of new combinations of old metres or a novel use of an old metre by introducing into it new laws of rhythm so as to yield some form very near to the blank verse of English language. But a search for a mere new poetic form for an epic was perhaps bound to fail because though form is important, and very important, in literary expression, yet it is the spirit which the form embodies that really gives life to the form.
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It argues well for the cultural unification of mankind that India has begun to pay back the great cultural debt it owes to Europe by her new creations in the English language. It was therefore a phenomenon of very great significance when Sri Aurobindo turned his remarkable poetical capacity to the creation of an epic in English to embody his grand vision of the Spirit. It is well-known that Sri Aurobindo had devoted himself to the pursuit of spirituality which is the foundation of the Indian culture. He is not merely a revivalist, his spirituality is not of the type of a traditional repetition; it is a resurgence, a reorientation, which carries the tradition many steps forward by his spiritual discovery of the Supermind. In him the Indian spirit finds its greatest exponent. The Divine, the sense of that living Reality, the need of bringing the influence and the presence of the Divine in all human activities and the consequent transformation of human nature and life into an expression of the Divine, — these are some of the fundamental concepts of his great vision of man's future. In the words of K.D. Sethna: "Philosophical statement lending logical plausibility to facts of the Spirit is necessary in a time like ours when the intellect is acutely in the forefront and Sri Aurobindo has answered the need by writing that expository masterpiece, The Life Divine.... To create a poetic mould equally massive and multiform as The Life Divine for transmitting the living Reality to the furthest bound of speech — such a task is incumbent on one who stands as a maker of a new spiritual epoch." Savitri fulfils that task.
Epic as a form of literary expression has not been static and conventional but has been continually developing, both with regard to the subject matter, manner and form. This can be seen from the remark of a critic who says: "Homer fixes the type and way and artistic purpose; Virgil perfects the type; Milton perfects the purpose." Whether one agrees with this opinion or not, it is clear that the epic has not been a stereotyped form of literary expression throughout history. It has not been a form constantly present; it has been recurrent. Looking at the whole field of epic poetry, one may divide it into two main classes: the authentic epic, generally intended for recitation, and the literary epic mainly intended for reading. The first type has a simple concrete subject and a sustained grandeur and splendour. Generally it concerns a great story which has been absorbed into the prevailing consciousness of the people.
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The story is supposed to have taken place in what has been termed the 'heroic age' in which hot racial elements and nascent cultural trends are brought out boldly and simply. While in the Iliad, Odyssey and in the Niebelungenlied, the subject matter concerns a great fight which has stamped itself indelibly on the memory of the race, in Dante's The Divine Comedy there is no story at all in that sense. With regard to this difference, a great critic says: "It is not necessary for the story to be a historical fact. Only it must have poetic reality." The authentic epic tells the story greatly, that is, in a high manner. This consists in endowing life with a significance. One of its purposes can be said to be to create values in life. Life by itself seems to have no significance, it is valueless. When there is this sense of utter want of significance of life, a sense of its ultimate uselessness, "a blankness of unperturbable darkness," then, says a critic, "the word 'hell' is not too strong to express it." In the authentic epic wherein courage in the face of danger, heroism in fighting for a cause is portrayed, the significance of life is brought out, its value found. This bringing out of the purpose in the epic may not be intellectually precise, but it is deeply felt. Let us observe in passing also, that courage or heroism are not the only values of life, and that love, sacrifice, attainment of perfection and other ideals can rank even higher.
Another critic of the epic says: "Epic-purpose will have to abandon the necessity of telling a story." We have already observed that The Divine Comedy has neither a mythological nor a historical story. It is in fact allegorical. Dante himself distinguishes between two senses in a poem, — a literal and an allegorical sense. "The literal sense of The Divine Comedy is the fortunes of a certain soul after death. Its allegorical sense is the destiny of man and the idea of perfect justice." Dante has made a reliable symbol out of his own experience. In Milton's Paradise Lost the pure story element is absent. "Milton from the knowledge of himself created Satan and Christ," — says Lascelles Abercrombie. His angels are not like Homer's Gods. To Homer the Gods are close and real, whereas Milton's angels are far and seem abstract. Milton's story deals with the mystery of the individual will in eternal opposition to the Divine Will. Satan, the creator of all evil on earth is conscious — very acutely conscious, of his limitations and also of the Divine Power that contains and drives him. It seems almost certain that after Milton an epic dealing entirely with an objective story is not possible, for, the rationalism with which the modern age began
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has been pushing man more and more towards a greater and greater subjective trend.
Sometimes it is said that "man and man's purpose in the world" is the theme for all epics. This may be accepted if a progressive evolution of man and of his purpose also is admitted. Man has been trying to discover, or "uncover" his Self— and in this great discovery he is bound to discover also this purpose as an individual and as a collectivity.
Efforts at writing an epic in European languages after Milton have, so far, not been successful. The feeling among the critics is that epic-manner and epic-content are trying for a divorce at present. The last effort, on a sufficiently large scale on the continent, was Goethe's Faust which, however, falls far short of the epic height and grandeur. Efforts in the English language were more or less of the nature of exercises and experiments lacking vitality and inspiration, and have therefore not attained success. Shelley's Revolt of Islam, Keats's incomplete Hyperion have something of the epic accent, but they do not go far enough. Hugo's La Légende des Siécles or Browning's The Ring and the Book, Hardy' s Dynasts — all seem to have some element which can be called epic in the sense of a developing significance of life which they see, but they fail to achieve the largeness, the grandeur and the sustained height and an integration which can give the sense of unity. We have already referred to a feeling among critics that the authentic epic as a literary form is doomed. Guesses have been hazarded as to the possible future of the epic content and of the epic form. The question has been debated whether it is possible to combine the epic and the dramatic forms with success. Some have thought of a connected sequence of separate poems like Hugo's as a possible and even an appropriate form. But the creative spirit has its own surprises for us. This was exemplified once in the past when the dictum that an epic should be a narrative on a large scale was falsified by Dante. For the modem lover of the muse another such pleasant surprise is offered by Savitri.
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of the Sanskrit language and Shahanama of the Persian besides literary epics like the Raghuvaṃśa of Kalidasa and Jānakiharanam of Kumardas. The Indian epics represent "the ancient historical or legendary traditional history turned to creative use as a significant mythus or tale expressive of some spiritual or religious or ethical or ideal meaning, and thus formative of the mind of the people... The work of these epics was to popularise high philosophic and ethical ideas and cultural practice."
Sri Aurobindo has given an estimate of the two Indian epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana in his Foundations of Indian Culture which is quoted here:
The Mahabharata especially is not only the story of the Bharatas, the epic of an early event which had become a national tradition but on a vast scale the epic of the soul and religious and ethical mind and social and political ideals and culture and life of India. It is said popularly of it and with a certain measure of truth that whatever is in India is in the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata is the creation and expression not of a single individual mind, but of the mind of a nation; it is the poem of itself written by a whole people. It would be vain to apply to it canons of a poetical art applicable to an epic poem with a smaller and a more restricted purpose, but still a great and quite conscious art has been expended both on its detail and its total structure. The whole poem has been built like a vast national temple unrolling slowly its immense and complex idea from chamber to chamber, crowded with significant groups and sculptures and inscriptions, the grouped figures carved in divine or semi-divine proportions, a humanity aggrandised and half-uplifted to superhumanity and yet always true to the human motive and idea and feeling, the strain of the real constantly raised by the tones of the ideal, the life of this world amply portrayed but subjected to the conscious influence and presence of the powers of the worlds behind it, and the whole unified by the long embodied procession of a consistent idea worked out in the wide steps of the poetic story. As is needed in an epic narrative, the conduct of the story is the main interest of the poem and it is carried through with an at once large and minute movement, wide and bold in the mass, striking and effective in detail, always simple, strong and epic in its style and pace. At the
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same time though supremely interesting in substance and vivid in the manner of the telling as a poetic story, it is something more, — a significant tale, Itihas, representative throughout of the central ideas and the ideals of Indian life and culture. The leading motive is the Indian idea of the Dharma. [Here the Vedic notion of the struggle between powers of Light and powers of Darkness, powers of truth and powers of falsehood is continued in these epics and takes the figure of a story. It is the old struggle of Deva and Asura, God and Titan, but represented in terms of human life.]
The Ramayana is a work of the same essential kind as the Mahabharata; it differs only by a greater simplicity of plan, a more delicate ideal temperament and a finer glow of poetic warmth and colour. The main bulk of the poem... is evidently by a single hand and has a less complex and more obvious unity of structure. There is less of the philosophic, more of the purely poetic mind, more of the artist, less of the builder. The whole story is from beginning to end of one piece and there is no deviation from the stream of the narrative. At the same time, there is a like vastness of vision, and even more wide-winged flight of epic sublimity in the conception and sustained richness of minute execution in the detail. The structural power, strong workmanship and method of disposition of the Mahabharata remind one of the art of the Indian builders, the grandeur and the boldness of outline and wealth of colour and minute decorative execution of the Ramayana suggest rather a transcript into literature of the spirit and style of Indian painting... On one side is portrayed an ideal manhood, a divine beauty of virtue and ethical order, a civilisation founded on the Dharma and realising an exaltation of the moral ideal which is presented with a singularly strong appeal of aesthetic grace and harmony and sweetness; on the other are wild and anarchic and almost amorphous forces of superhuman egoism and self-will and exultant violence, and the two ideas and powers of mental nature living ad embodied are brought into conflict and led to a decisive issue of the victory of the divine man over the Rakshasa....
The poetical manner of these epics is not inferior to the greatness of their substance. The style and the verse in which
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they are written have always a noble epic quality, a lucid classical simplicity and directness rich in expression but stripped of superfluous ornaments, a swift, vigorous flexible and fluid verse constantly sure of the epic cadence. There is a difference in the temperament of the language. The characteristic diction of the Mahabharata is almost austerely masculine, trusting to force of sense and inspired accuracy of term, almost ascetic in its simplicity and directness and a frequent fine and happy bareness; it is the speech of a strong and rapid poetical intelligence and a great and straightforward vital force, brief and telling in phrase but by virtue of a single-minded sincerity and, expect in some knotted passages or episodes, without any rhetorical labour of compactness, a style like the light and strong body of a runner nude and pure and healthily lustrous and clear without superfluity of flesh or exaggeration of muscle, agile and swift and untired in the race. There is inevitably much in this vast poem that is in an inferior manner, little or nothing that falls below a certain sustained level in which there is always something of this virtue. The diction of the Ramayana is shaped in a more attractive mould, a marvel of sweetness and strength, lucidity and warmth and grace; its phrase has not only poetic truth and epic force and diction but a constant intimate vibration of the feeling of the idea, emotion or object: there is an element of fine ideal delicacy in its sustained strength and breath of power. In both poems it is a high poetic soul and inspired intelligence that is at work; the directly intuitive mind of the Veda and Upanishads has retired behind the veil of the intellectual and outwardly psychological imagination.
We shall close this long citation of the estimate of the two great Indian epics by Sri Aurobindo with a comparison with the European epic which he himself has given:
These epics are therefore not a mere mass of untransmuted legend and folklore, as is ignorantly objected, but a highly artistic representation of intimate significances of life, the living presentment of a strong and noble thinking, a developed ethical and aesthetic mind and a high social and political ideal, the ensouled image of a great culture. As rich in
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freshness of life but immeasurably more profound and evolved in thought and substance than the Greek, as advanced in maturity of culture but more vigorous and vital and young in strength than the Latin epic poetry, the Indian epic poems were fashioned to serve a greater and completer national and cultural function and that they should have been received and absorbed by both the high and the low, the cultured and the masses and remained through twenty centuries an intimate and formative part of the life of a whole nation is of itself the strongest possible evidence of the greatness and fineness of this ancient Indian culture.1
Savitri possesses unity of structure in a remarkable degree. The legend on which it is founded affords an ample story element for such a unity. The opening canto with the Symbol Dawn brings us straight to the crisis of the story — the imminent death of Satyavan —and introduces the chief character Savitri in glowing and divine colours. It brings out at the same time the nature of the crisis, its cosmic significance and thereby raises the character of Savitri to that of the "saviour" of men. The attention of the reader is gripped, —if he can enter into the Seer's vision — and he is anxious to know how Savitri is going to meet Yama, the god of Death. To show how Savitri came to be constituted as a "half-divine" being even in her external being, the Seer rightly pursues the thread of her birth and explains to us how "a world's desire compelled her mortal birth." This brings us to the character of Aswapati, her father, who is no ordinary king but a "colonist from immortality." His attempts at self-perfection and his great spiritual attainments form a very natural background for the birth of so great a spiritual figure as Savitri. The "epic climb" of human soul really gains an epic grandeur in the vision of the Master and endows this earth with a tremendous significance. There are greater worlds than the earth, higher levels of consciousness than man's, but there is no more significant world than this our earth in the great divine destiny that it holds.
The canvas of Savitri is as wide as the cosmos and it takes into its purview worlds of being that are connected with humanity which are not perceived by it because of its limitations of ignorance. Nevertheless, these levels do act upon human consciousness. They
1 The Foundations of Indian Culture, SABCL, Vol. 14, pp. 286-93.
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also include higher planes of consciousness which have not yet manifested here but which are pressing upon the earth-consciousness for manifestation. They contain beings, powers and presences that live on those planes of Light, Consciousness and Bliss, the worlds of Truth. The soul of aspiring humanity symbolised in Aswapati, the Lord of manifested Life, first descends from his human consciousness into nether regions of unconsciousness and materiality, the regions of the lower vital, its heaven and its hell, as a conscious witness. He then ascends to the regions of Heavens of the higher Vital and then crosses over to the Heavens of the Mind. After soaring into regions above Mind, into the Heavens of the Ideal and Illumined Mind he passes beyond the borders of manifested creation to the centre from which creation proceeds. Through a great shaft of Light across a tunnel that leads to the centre, he comes face to face with the World-Soul, the Two-in-One. It is there that he experiences the presence of the Divine Mother who supports the cosmos. It is She, the Power of the Supreme, supporting the cosmos, who bestows on him the boon that saves mankind from the stark imprisonment of Ignorance and subjection to Death. Being a power of the Truth-Consciousness, Savitri not only liberates man but creates conditions here for the embodiment of the Light Supreme. She shows how man's life here can be fulfilled in a life divine.
This complex and rich yet clear cosmogony revealed in Aswapati's voyage enriches the significance of the earth as a crucial centre of a divine experiment and enriches the life of man beyond his highest dreams. Incidentally, it indicates the nature of the task awaiting Savitri and the tremendous odds against which she would have to contend. Aswapati himself has advanced a great deal on the path to self-perfection. Throughout his vast journey through the various worlds.
He travelled in his mute and single strength
Bearing the burden of the world's desire.2
But he,— a "protagonist of the mysterious play", "a thinker and a toiler in the ideal's air", "one in the front of the immemorial quest", — felt baffled when he considered the destiny of the race. When the Divine Mother commands him to continue his labours for man's perfection he invokes her help. A boon is given to him in answer
2 Savitri, p. 101 .
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to his prayer. Savitri's mortal birth was thus in answer to "a world's desire". Even ordinary incidents in Savitri get endowed with cosmic significance. There is nothing that is not conscious — even the seasons are not a mere mechanical succession of external changes but conscious operations in the cosmic body.
Thus we see the problem and the difficult conditions for its solution. The problem is of man's imperfection and his unquenchable thirst for perfection, of his groping in the darkness of ignorance and his seeking for Light, of his mortality and his thirst for immortality. It can be solved by spiritual effort alone — no external change however well-meaning or seemingly successful would really solve his problem. And even the highest spiritual effort of man cannot attain the goal unaided, — the task is impossible. It can be solved only if the supreme Divine can be persuaded to descend on earth and take up the burden of man. Such higher and divine source of help are available to man. In fact, that is the claim and testimony of man's religion, mysticism, philosophy, and all his upward efforts. Savitri lays down the conditions of the problem in the clearest manner. The story attains its cosmic significance and the fate of Satyavan rings with the destiny of man. Man, the middle term between the Nescience and the Superconscience, sees the forces of the nether worlds and feels their impact upon his life. He sees also the possibilities of Higher Worlds and feels their action upon himself. He has to work out his destiny with the Divine help upon this terrestrial globe. This has been determined by a supreme Wisdom and Power. All this we see while we share the Master's cosmic gaze turned towards the earth. The vision of the elements that help and those that hinder, — and by their very hindrance make the final victory possible, — the imprisoning limitations even of those that help, gives us some idea of the tangled weft of human life with its baffling complexity and brings out the need of looking up beyond all mental and ethical idealism to something above all that man has attempted and attained up till now.
The Indian conception of the Avatar, the descent of the Divine in earth-consciousness, undergoes in the character of Savitri a profound change. Savitri, the Supreme Power of Grace descended into life, is the only feminine Avatar in the world. It is perhaps in the fitness of things that the Divine Mother in all her love, sympathy and deep understanding should descend to help her children on earth in the fight against the forces of Inconscience and bring to
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birth a new race of men embodying here the higher Supramental Consciousness. But in the current Indian conception, even though the Avatar is the Divine descended into the earth-consciousness, he is not supposed to participate in human imperfections. He comes down generally to do a divine work, — to save humanity in a crisis or help it forward in its evolution. But he remains all the time and always Divine and to the Divine nothing could be impossible. When he labours at his task it is only to conform to the human law that he does so. In reality, his divinity does everything. An Avatar, thus, is in humanity but not of it; his experiences are not like those of other men. Sri Aurobindo for the first time has brought out clearly the necessity of complete identification by the Avatar in his nature-part with the nature of man in order to save humanity. This identification, be it noted, is not an ignorant subjection on his part to Nature or even an outcome of sympathy as ordinarily understood by man. It proceeds on the basis of knowledge, — it is an act of divine compassion, an act of grace.
The greatest saviours of men do not have to deal directly with outwardly great or critical events in the life of humanity. For, when properly understood, man's problems are all inner, psychological and spiritual. The roots of man's conflicts are within him and it is his inner conflict that projects itself into his outer life. Some of the great spiritual battles that are fought within man's soul stamp themselves on human history, as in the case of Christ and Buddha. The epic Savitri accomplishes two difficult tasks: it creates a personality, Savitri, a human-divine character and, secondly, it succeeds in making all the inner spiritual experiences of man real, concrete and direct. It is well known that the highest spiritual experiences defy expression in language. But Savitri for the first time succeeds in such a thorough objectification of them in terms of images and symbols that the sensitive reader feels their concreteness. Out of many examples we shall just give one here as an illustration; it describes the work of the Goddess of inspiration:
In darkness' core she dug out wells of light,
On the undiscovered depths imposed a form,
Lent a vibrant cry to the unuttered vasts,
And through great shoreless, vioceless, starless breadths
Bore earthward fragments of revealing thought
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Hewn from the silence of the Ineffable.3
One feels the concreteness of the silence of the Ineffable and the "hewn fragments of revealing thought" being borne slowly earthwards.
This was no result of a happy accident but a result of the conscious art of the great Master. That he was conscious of it becomes clear from the following quotation taken from a letter in reply to certain criticism of Savitri. He speaks about the plan of Savitri:
It has been planned not on the scale of Lycidas or Comus or some brief narrative poem, but of the larger epical narrative, almost a minor, though a very minor Ramayana; it aims not at the minimum but at an exhaustive exposition of its world-vision or world-interpretation. One artistic method is to select a limited subject and even on that to say what is indispensable, what is centrally suggestive and leave the rest to the imagination or understanding of the reader. Another method which I hold to be equally artistic or, if you like, architectural is to give a large and even a vast, a complete interpretation, omitting nothing that is necessary, fundamental to the completeness: that is the method I have chosen in Savitri.4
Savitri deals with a realm of experience that is not known to the common man and it is therefore likely that it may not meet with general appreciation or understanding at first. The creator of Savitri knew this very well and so he wrote: "Savitri is a record of a seeing, of an experience, which is not of the common kind, and it is often very far from what the general human mind sees or experiences." But even the modernist poet cannot lay claim to a universal understanding and appreciation of his work. Savitri demands a certain minimum of capacity of vision in addition to a broad cosmopolitan enlightened outlook familiar with the latest advances in several branches of human knowledge. But that cannot be a bar to its high epic qualities. On the contrary, it opens out an altogether new and rich realm of experience to the reader and if he has to make an effort to enter into the spirit of it, he will find that his labours are more than amply rewarded.
3 Savitri, p. 41. 4 Ibid,, p. 792. (Perspectives of Savitri, pp. 10-11.)
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We have brought to the notice of the reader that there is spiritual affinity between the poetical expression of the Veda and that of Savitri. In a general sense it can even be asserted that the subject matter of Savitri has an affinity with the subject matter of the Veda. That is to say, not only in some parts does the manner of expression resemble the Vedic style; but the vision of Savitri is surcharged with a constant play of the light of inspiration and revelation from which the Vedic seers received their hymns. The Veda deals with the struggle between the powers of the Light and the powers of the Darkness in terms of symbols. Of course, there is a basic difference between the symbolism of Savitri and that of the Veda. The occult system of symbolism which the Vedic seers used as a sort of spiritual algebra fell into disuse and was forgotten because of the conscious veil of secrecy used by them. In Savitri it is replaced by an open psychological and spiritual symbolism which interprets the legend using it as a transparent veil for conveying its world of spiritual experience. In fact the legend lends itself easily to such an interpretation. It is itself full of incidents and characters into which the poet's inspiration has woven the whole question of the supreme silent Eternal and its manifestation in Time beginning with the dark Night of the Nescience and mounting step by step by evolution towards some superconscient expression of the Eternal in earth consciousness. In that unfolding manifestation of the cosmic effort man appears as a transitional being between the Nescience and the Superconscient Divine. This vision alters entirely the value of man and his life and places before him the high destiny he is here to fulfil as an instrument. Throughout the poem this grand purpose dominates the atmosphere and wherever poetically necessary the Seer brings it to our view by apt repetition. Another important point of difference between symbolic Vedic poetry and Savitri is that the Vedic hymns are a creation of various seers with their natural temperamental characteristics of expression, while Savitri is the creation of a single genius.
This vast subject, compared with those of other epics that are extant turns out to be greater than any that has been sung by any epic poet. Dante speaks of inferno, — hell, — through which the human spirit has to pass to arrive at purgatory to be purified of all its dross in order to reach the vision beatific. But the Beatitude is far in the heaven of the Divine and this earth is condemned to remain a vale of tears, — it is a place where the soul of man is tested in order to prove its worthiness to reach the kingdom of
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God away from the earth. Milton wanted "to justify the ways of God to man"; but he does not succeed in his task because perhaps the inspiration of puritanic Christianity was not sufficient to fulfil that task. Savitri is a poem of hope and fulfilment on earth. It is a poem of knowledge in the sense that it weaves the conditions of man's highest fulfilment in its epic pattern.
Sri Aurobindo has said that his Savitri is planned like a Ramayana on a small scale, but it is full-bodied so far as the subject-matter is concerned, therefore it is to be taken as a full-fledged epic. Though from the point of length Savitri already overpasses that of all European epics, yet all earnest critics would agree with Abercrombie that length by itself is not enough to gain the stature of epic greatness for a poem. It is the sustained breath of inspiration, the high tone of poetical expression that are important.
Between the Ramayana and the Mahabharata on the one hand and Savitri on the other there can be no real and direct comparison for obvious reasons. The spirit of the two languages Sanskrit and English would itself bring in so many incommensurate elements. And yet it is possible to consider them as expressions of the Indian spirit in poetry separated by a period of at least two thousand years. "Ramayana," says Sri Aurobindo, "has epic sublimity in the conception and sustained richness of minute execution in detail." The Ramayana has more feeling of ideas and emotions of things. It has "ideal delicacy and sustained strength of power." It portrays ideal manhood, and a "divine beauty of virtue and ethical order, a civilisation founded on dharma, the ideal law of conduct." It gives us on the one hand the picture of "an exaltation of moral ideal which is presented with a singularly strong appeal of aesthetic grace and harmony and sweetness; on the other hand are wild and anarchic and almost amorphous forces of superhuman egoism and self-will and exultant violence." These two ideals and powers of the mental nature are brought into conflict in the embodiments of Rama and Ravana, and led to a decisive issue of victory of the ideal man over Rakshasa.
The Mahabharata proceeds from a "strong and quick intelligence and a great and straight vital force and single-minded sincerity." Both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are "products of inspired intelligence with a high poetic tone." Both are "ensouled images of a great culture." These epics give us the spiritual significance of individual and collective life from a strong and noble thought-power of a mind that has high social, political and ethical ideals
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and is artistically delicate and refined. Savitri too offers a whole world of experience but it is altogether a new world in which the life of man, — in fact the whole view of the cosmos, — undergoes a great and radical change. In Ramayana, for instance, the ideal law of conduct, dharma, is seen triumphing over the forces of Titanic egoism that were trying to establish their reign. Savitri is not a rendering, or a vision of the world in terms of the current laws of human evolution as seen by the ideal mind. In enunciates a new law, a new world of consciousness transcending — and yet fulfilling at the same time — the evolution attained by man up till now. And it renders it with such a rare power of inspiration and vision that it succeeds in making the rare experience concrete to our minds. The Ramayana hints at the suprarational and openly speaks of the Divine as against the Asura and the Rakshasa — the Titanic force. But there it remains something mystical and therefore unknown. Savitri deals with the suprarational but makes it a natural part of its vision of man and deals with it as one of the legitimate fields of consciousness to be attained by man. In spite of these differences one can say that there is similarity in the poignant pathos pervading the life of Rama, the Sattwic hero, and of Savitri, — the embodiment of Divine Grace descended to save mankind from the bondage of Ignorance and Inconscience. In Ramayana, Dharma, the ideal law of life as formulated by the religious seeking in man, and Rama, the man who embodies that law, seem to reign supreme, or rather, to pervade the whole atmosphere of the poem, while in Savitri not merely an ideal law of life, but the Divine and his Purpose reign and pervade the atmosphere. In Ramayana the Divine is brought face to face with a great crisis through his own formed Sattwic nature, — the highest human mould attained by Nature in her evolution up till then. The conflict there is with the exaggerated forces of egoism and ambition trying to dominate the world. In Savitri evolution reaches a higher rung than the mind and Savitri, the Divine Grace incarnate, has to fight not merely with the hostile demonic ego merely but with the original force of cosmic Ignorance, the Inconscient represented by its extreme form of death. In raising this basic problem of elimination of the Inconscient, the cause of man's subjection to his imperfection, suffering and evil, Savitri is unique, and goes deeper than other epics towards its solution. It calls out the Divine that is hidden at present in the human mould to deal direct with the problem of man's emancipation and of establishment of the divine kingdom on earth. To
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the vision of Savitri, to the vision of Truth seen by the Seer, the whole of life is the legitimate field for the Divine to manifest himself in. It also sees with equal clearness the great and formidable obstacles in the path of the divine victory.
The Mahabharata as Sri Aurobindo has said "embodies not only the whole national tradition of India but is an expression of the religious and the ethical mind and social and political ideals of India. It is a vast store of story within story, a whole string of mythology built like a vast national temple," "a humanity aggrandised and half uplifted to superhumanity yet always true to the human motive, idea and feeling." Life of this world in Mahabharata is amply portrayed but is subjected to constant conscious influences and divine powers of worlds behind it and a consistent idea brings about a sort of complex unity in the epic. Savitri lifts the veil for man from over the worlds that are behind. In fact it is a world upon world full of beings and powers heaped upon one another laying bare the interaction of these complex worlds and man's life upon earth. Here in Savitri it is not the ethical and the religious soul of India embodying a national tradition only; it is the soul of man in the mould of the Indian spirit widening out into the vast Soul of Humanity under the stress of an intense spiritual aspiration — ascending to the highest and turning its gaze upon the whole complex field of cosmogony illuminating with its power of rare knowledge all the worlds that are the legitimate field for the spiritual adventure of man. It is said: "Whatever is in India, is in the Mahabharata." It can be said that all that man is and holds within himself, all that he is likely to be, is in Savitri. The poet of the Mahabharata perhaps saw with his prophetic vision the Age of Kali, the Iron Age, approaching and sang his song celestial of the triumph of righteousness against the apparently overwhelming array of the forces of unrighteousness by the play of the secret Divine managing the whole plot of the human drama from behind the veil. Savitri turns its grand vision to the Age of Gold that is coming, the reign of Truth that is in prospect and envisages the supreme fulfilment of man by his ascent to the Divine and the open reign of the Divinity over life to the most external aspect. It is a creative vision that calls upon the soul of man to rise to its highest. It synthesises all the spiritual gains of humanity in a living and organic unity. It is like a vast cosmic temple built for humanity. It unrolls, unfolds its structure of immense complex worlds through which the Master's vision shows us the voyaging soul of man
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traversing and ascending till it reaches at last its own Reality in the Divine and brings down the Divine Presence here on earth to transform the life of man. In Mahabharata with its different purpose, the outer story engulfs our attention. We get lost in the human and emerge after long intervals for a short while so see the spiritual significance of things or feel the play of hidden divine forces behind the surface. At times, character dominates. The Mahabharata enchants us by the play of the changing colours of life, the play of hazard, its high mental ideals, the deep pathos of human life and fate. Kings and royal dynasties and their fate claim our willing attention and interest. In Savitri the basic issue of subjection of man to the Darkness of Ignorance — earth, and love and doom — and the inevitability of death grips us from the first. The problem stands out clear and is never out of sight. Events and characters come but have significance in so far as they are conscious agents in the working out of the problem of man's destiny. Savitri lifts us out of the mundane and the ordinary rut of human life to a point of view from where we see the whole play of life, in fact, the whole cosmos, with a cosmic vision of a divine Purpose trying to work itself out through the life of man. The ultimate significance of life as emanating from the Mahabharata is often ambiguous, depending upon individual interpretation of events, of motives of characters and of the ideals pursued. We often meet people drawing diametrically opposite conclusions about the significance of the Mahabharata. So far as Savitri is concerned it is free from such possible ambiguity. In the Mahabharata man suffers, struggles, tries to win, sometimes succeeds or fails, fate intervenes in human life, and the relation between man and God is in a very great degree indirect. In Savitri man, even as a struggling and a suffering being, is raised to a higher status because man knows himself to be an episode between the Inconscient and the unattained Superconscient. In this view, the whole life of man becomes a part in the working out of a higher purpose, a supreme will. In Savitri the relation between man and God is direct.
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with it the unrolling of the cosmos. "The Eternal's quiet holds the cosmic act," (p. 120) says the Master. There are two ends of Eternity visible in Savitri, — an Eternal below facing man with its unfathomable depth of darkness of the Nescience which may be called the Dark Eternity described in the Veda as "darkness covered thickly by darkness" in which there was neither "being nor non-being". The other is the Eternity of the Divine Absolute, beyond the realms of the three supemals — Sat, Cit and Ananda. Many have felt an irreconcilable opposition between Timeless Eternity of the Absolute and Time-eternity which is constantly flowing. Time is posited as something contradictory to the Timeless, the Eternal. It is maintained that the Eternal beyond Time alone is the Real and that time-movement is unreal and even non-existent. Savitri throughout gives the vision of the true reconciliation of this opposition. It shows us the Nescience, the dark Night, as a mask of the Divine, the Eternal and wherever an opportunity occurs it also shows that Timeless Eternity (of the Absolute) is the fount and origin of Time and that behind the veil the Divine is Himself the creator and dynamic support of the cosmos. The conception of a Time-Eternity as a dynamic Reality depending organically upon Timeless Eternity is one enunciated clearly for the first time by Sri Aurobindo in the world of thought. He constantly speaks of the two ladders, one of descent of the Absolute into the Nescience and the other of ascent from Nescience to the Supreme. Far from Eternity being in opposition to Time-movement, the grand vision of Savitri constantly brings Eternity in moments of Time. This opposition between Time and Eternity is, in fact, a result of our mind's divided consciousness and its inability to reconcile what seems to it the opposites. Mind commits the error of applying its own logic which is that of the finite to the Infinite whose logic is different. The result is that mind can give us only a partial view of the Infinite. In any supreme vision of the Reality the two — Eternity and Time — are not only reconciled but become organic and indivisible. Viewed as an expression of the supreme Divine — on some date in the "calander of the Unknown"* — the moments of Time become replete with the presence of the Eternal and then the whole cosmos, from the infinitesimal material particle to the highest Infinite Being, is seen pulsating with such a multiple and vast play of Eternity that the word "eternity" itself seems to gain an ineffable
*lbid., p. 59.
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significance in that great vision. It is about such a moment of realisation that Savitri says "a marriage with eternity divinised Time." It is possible that the mind may continue to ask: "Why at all this movement, this cosmic manifestation from the Supreme and Silent Eternity?" The answer — one among the many poetical answers — is:
That the eyes of the Timeless might look out from Time And world manifest the unveiled Divine.5
To another question "How did this miracle happen?" the Seer says that it is Life that "has lured the Eternal into the arms of Time."6 It is true that man does not feel this eternity in his present state of consciousness because there it is hidden by the movement of Time which exclusively occupies him. But even there it is present behind the veil. The Master expresses it so poetically! "Lulled by Time's beats eternity sleeps in us."7 We then feel the justification of the line which says, spiritual beauty "squanders eternity on a beat of Time,"8 and also of the description of Savitri as "a prodigal of her rich divinity'"' who gave herself and all she was to men. He speaks of Aswapati, the human king, as "a colonist from immortality" because in his inner being he was conscious of his origin in the Eternal. He sees the relation between Eternity and Time-movement:
Ascending and descending twixt life's poles
The seried kingdoms of the graded Law
Plunged from the Everlasting into Time,
Then glad of a glory of multitudinous mind
And rich with life's adventure and delight
And packed with the beauty of Matter's shapes and hues
Climbed back from Time into undying Self,
Up a golden ladder carrying the Soul,
Tying with diamond threads the Spirit's extremes.10
Let us for a moment suppose that Eternity is realised here in Time and man succeeds in manifesting the Divine in life. What then would happen? The Master envisages an endless divine unfoldment in time. Says he:
5 Ibid., p. 72. 6 Ibid., p. 178. 7 Ibid., p. 170. 8 Ibid., p. 5.
9Ibid., p. 7. 10Ibid., pp. 88-89.
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The Spirit's greatness is our timeless source
And it shall be our crown in endless Time.11
The opposition between Eternity and Time seems to be resolved in human life by the intervention of a power of the Divine. It is She who acts as an "ambassadress" between Eternity and Time. She embodies herself forth in the form of Divine Love, or rather, of a being carrying the saving power of the Divine Love within herself. All true human love has this divine element in it, however, perverted it may be in its actual expression. The highest ideal of love conceived by man is, really speaking, a manifestation of this "infinity's centre". Love is that embodiment of the Eternal in Time which carries with it the stamp of immortality.
Eternity drew close disguised as Love
And laid its hands upon the body of Time.12
In the language of the Master: "Death is a shadow of love."
This love "wider than the universe" is really the Divine Love. Love and Death seem to embody two contradictory principles, one affirming the divine eternity and immortality, the other, insisting on the eternity of the Nescience, of mortality. Through three of his poems this subject of love has been treated by the Master and it is in Savitri that it reaches its highest height. In Urvasie Pururavas struck by the shaft of immortal love, denied fulfilment by the power of the gods, at last gains his immortal love on the heights of Heaven. In Love and Death Ruru recovers Priyamvada from the dark nether regions of Death by the power of the charm of the supreme Mother and that of the God of Love. In both of these poems the immortality and eternity of Love are affirmed. It is in Savitri that Love divine comes as the embodiment of the Supreme Grace to deliver the soul of man out of the clutches of Death. Savitri raises the whole problem to its cosmic proportions and brings in the necessary divine elements whose intervention alone can lead to the successful solution of the opposition. The colloquy between Savitri, Love Divine incarnate, and Death is among the most inspired utterances of world's poetry. Conquest over death, attainment of immortality has been the dream of man from the dawn of his awakening. It finds expression in the Vedic hymns, in the famous aspiration of the seer of the Upanishad who
13Ibid., p. 110. 12 Ibid., p. 237.
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chanted "from death lead me to immortality," and who affirmed in a mortal world the immortality of man's soul by addressing men as "children of immortality". Savitri takes up the same subject, brings out all the necessary conditions for the realisation of this dream of man. It affirms the necessity of the birth of a new Power, the Power of Divine Grace, or Love, which alone can save man from the reign of Ignorance which is Death.
We have said in the beginning that Sri Aurobindo's Savitri in its origin and in the realm of experience with which it deals — and even in some of its expressions — is comparable to the highest spiritual poetry of the world, the Veda and the Upanishads. Some passages have already been cited showing the deep spiritual affinity between Savitri and the Veda. We shall pursue the subject a little further to show that the epic height and manner of expression which is native to the Veda and the Upanishads is in Savitri the most sustained element giving to the whole poem the most sublime throb of an organic divine creation. This is because Sri Aurobindo's life-work comes naturally in a line with that of the Rishis of the Veda and the Upanishads. His work in fact adds to the rich spiritual treasures of the past by giving to mankind his great vision of the Supermind, — the divine gnosis, — and by his insistence that life must be related to the Divine if man wants to arrive at the true solution of his problems. Besides, his mode of poetical creation is akin to that of the ancient seers. It is not to say that he takes them as models for imitation, but in him the Goddess of Speech seems to act—consciously on his part — from above the plane of human mind and is constantly bringing in currents, — and torrents even — of Light from higher planes which have been touched or tapped occasionally but are far from being the normal possession of even the highest genius of poetical expression. When Sri Aurobindo speaks of "a torrent of rapid lightnings" which represents the irresistible current of illuminating inspiration, he is not using merely a figure of speech but is expressing his own personal experience. It is by such an onrush from above the mental level that, as K.D. Sethna says, "knowledge of the Deathless Divine leaps on the human consciousness and by whose thronged and glittering invasion the revelatory speech of the Overhead spiritual is bom."
Again when he says
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Missioned voices drive to me from God's doorway
Words that live not save upon Nature's summits,
Ecstasy's chariots,13
he is stating his own experience.
It is because he derives his poetical inspiration from this higher world known to the ancient Rishis that his poems bear a kinship to the creation of the ancient sages. In the Gita perhaps the eleventh chapter giving the vision of the Vishwarupa, the Cosmic Divine, bears a resemblance to some portion of Savitri. The student may compare the utterance of Arjuna in his exaltation of the vision, and of Vishwarupa, as the Destroyer of the World, with the colloquy of Aswapati and the Divine Mother in the third Book.
Savitri has got the intense directness, vastness and comprehensiveness of the Vedas and the Upanishads. The Vedas and the Upanishads speak of the One, the Divine, the Supreme Ineffable. It is that which finds expression in myriad forms in the cosmic dance. In the Seer's vision, the shadows of the lower planes of cosmic existence are shot through with the Light of this Eternal Reality and to him, therefore, the whole Nature seems to be bathed in an ether of Delight. This experience seems so far from the ordinary experience of man that one would have thought that its expression in poetry would lack the sense of a convincing Reality. But the most miraculous power of the Goddess of Poetry is that the expression of this experience by the ancient sages carried with it a very intense sense of concreteness, what Sethna calls "a burning throb of realisation." This power of expression comes to them, not from the realms of mere mind but from Overhead regions of intuition, inspiration, revelation and even beyond it from the Overmind. It is the spiritual alchemy of this overhead poetical expression that renders this immeasurably remote realm of experiences intimately near to us, and carries a sense of their reality to our most outward mind. While reading those inspired utterances one feels opening before him altogether a new world of experiences, a world of beings "more real than living man"; for, in it breathe and move "nurslings of immortality". Like Veda and the Upanishads, Savitri also opens us to this realm of the Eternal. It is not merely a reproduction of the experience of the past; for, Sri Aurobindo has discovered new realms of the spirit. Savitri,
13 Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 563.
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therefore, is charged with a similar inspirational afflatus but is also at the same time, "a spiringing forward". We are not here concerned with the difference of spiritual content, which could take us far, but with the similarities in their content and mode of expression.
In the Kathopanishad there is a situation which is apparently similar to the one we find in Savitri. There, the boy Nachiketa like Savitri confronts Yama, the God of Death. But the similarity is only apparent because Death does not meet its challenge, neither is Nachiketa faced with the inevitability of death. The precocious boy seeks the acquaintance of Death and turns Death into his instructor and learns from him the way to reach the immortal Self. The question of the world-existence does not arise there. The question of man struggling on earth, subject to ignorance and his possible emancipation from seemingly eternal bonds during his earth-existence, is not there in the picture. But apart from the dissimilarity of content, one can see that there are passages where the expression of the Upanishad rises to a plane of impersonality of Illumined Mind which sees life in large and compact masses and is at the same time itself suffused with a wide and intense emotion of the tragedy of life subject to human ignorance. It is a very effective and direct poetical utterance. When he reaches the house of Death, Nachiketa thinks within himself:
Like grain a mortal ripens!
Like grain he is bom hither again,
and when the God of Death dissuades him from seeking Knowledge of the Self and offers him temptations instead, he replies:
O Ender of all things; transient, ephemeral are all these. Moreover, they wear out the brightness of such sense-powers as a mortal has. Even aeonic life is short.
Not with wealth is a man to be satisfied and if we should desire it, having once seen thee we shall surely obtain it.
There are many passages in Savitri that convey a similar inspiration. We choose one in which the insignificance of man, inconsequential nature of all his works, and the ephemeral nature of all his enjoyments is brought out effectively:
An inconsequence dogs every effort made,
And chaos waits on every cosmos formed:
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In each success a seed of failure lurks.14
Man is
A thinking being in an unthinking world,
An island in the sea of the Unknown,
He is a smallness trying to be great,
An animal with some instincts of a god,
His life a story too common to be told,
His deeds a number summing up to nought...
His hope a star above a cradle and a grave.15
The tragedy of human life subject to ignorance is intensely brought home to us. And yet there is much more than that in these lines. And about the nature of man's enjoyments, he says:
Here even the highest rapture time can give
Is a mimicry of ungrasped beatitudes,
A mutilated statue of ecstasy,
A wounded happiness that cannot live,
A brief felicity of mind or sense,
Thrown by the World-Power to her body-slave,
Or a simulacrum of enforced delight
In the seraglios of Ignorance.16
These lines indicate to our minds that there exists an unchanging delight, an unwounded happiness and ecstasy somewhere towards which are directed all the pathetic strivings of the ignorant human soul. "A statue mutilated", a "happiness" mortally "wounded" or the "enforced delights" of the harems "of Ignorance" — are marvellously vivid images.
Throughout Savitri one feels the pulsating presence of the One, the Perfect, the Divine, and there are moments when the inspired utterance expresses this presence:
Then by a touch, a presence or a voice
The world is turned into a temple ground
And all discloses the unknown Beloved.17
Or
The Immanent lives in man as in his house.18
14 Ibid., p. 78. 15 Ibid., 16 Ibid. 17Ibid., p. 278. 18 Ibid., p. 66.
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The opening verse of the Ishopanishad runs:
All this visible universe is for habitation by the Lord.
The world becomes a holy place when we enter into this vision.
It is the same truth we find in the expression of the Gita:
All is Vasudeva, — the Divine Being: Vāsudevah Sarvam.
Take another passage from the Isha reconciling the Static and the Dynamic aspects of the ultimate Reality in a powerful image:
That moves, and That moves not; That is far and the same is near; That is within all this and That also is outside all this.
It is similar to a passage of Katha which says:
Sitting, He proceeds far;
Lying, He goes everywhere.
The Seer of Savitri gives us a similar vision in his own inspired utterance:
Near, it retreated; far, it called him still.19
Hidden by its own works it seemed far off.20
The Rishi in the Isha speaks symbolically of the necessity of breaking beyond the limitations of the mind in order to reach the highest Truth which is beyond. It says:
The face of Truth is covered with a brilliant golden lid; that do thou remove, O fosterer, for the law of the Truth, for sight.
The Master in Savitri speaks in the language of living symbolism. Describing Aswapati's spiritual achievement he says:
And broken the intellect's hard and lustrous lid.21
In another context recounting the limitations of the mental being which remains satisfied and self-complaisant, he says:
There comes no breaking of the walls of mind.22
The basic idea both in Isha and Savitri in these expression is that
19 Ibid., p. 305. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., p. 25. 22 Ibid., p.251.
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the highest Truth is above the plane of the mind which acts as a barrier to the Truth above, and it is attained by breaking the obstruction of the mind and ascending beyond.
How the spirit and the vision of the Master in Savitri moves on the regions of the Superconscient and how some of the symbols and modes of expression come out of the creative power as organic parts of a living process can be seen from a line like the following which describes Aswapati's wanderings in the dark world of Falsehood, the world where the Mother of Evil gives birth to her sons of Darkness, where he
...roamed through desolate ways
Where the red Wolf waits by the fordless stream.23
This reminds one of the Vedic hymn:
Once the red Wolf saw me walking on the path.24
The Red Wolf is the symbol of the powers that tear the 'being', that suddenly fall upon it to destroy it. They are persistent, destructive, cruel, unscrupulous powers of the lower Darkness. Sri Aurobindo in his expression has made the symbol more effective, improving spontaneously upon the original in the alchemy of his poetical process by the image of "fordless stream". In the original hymn there is only 'path'. The "fordless stream" brings in the needed element of danger and difficulty of the path of the aspirant when he has to cross this dangerous region.
He does the same with several Vedic symbols which he employs. For instance, consider the line:
Its gold-homed herds trooped into earth's cave-heart.25
It indicates the descent of the "gold-homed" Cows — symbolising the richly-laden Rays of Knowledge — into the Inconscient of the earth, its "cave-heart". Generally, in the Veda the action is that of breaking open the Cave of the inconscient and releasing the pen of Cows, the imprisoned Rays of Light for the conscious possessions by the seeker. Here is how a Vedic hymn speaks about it:
23 Ibid., p. 230. 24 Rig Veda: aruno ma sakrit yantam dadarsha hi. See also SABCL, Vol. 10. pp. 565-66. In this context it may be noted how amusing Ralph T. H. Goriffith's footnote to VII: 68:8 is! —Editor.
25 Savitri, p. 243.
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They drove upwards, the luminous ones, — the good milch-cows, in their stone-pen within the hiding cave.26
Or, take another, similar one:
By a mind seeking the Ray-cows, they rent the firm massed-hill which encircled and repressed shining herds, man desiring, laid open the strong pen, full of Ray-Cows by the Divine Word.27
One sees in Savitri the processes reversed and the Master's vision lays open the original act of involution of the Light into the darkness of the Inconscient.
The growth of the divine potentialities in man is spoken of in Veda as the growth of a Child. The Master takes the symbol straight and employs it thus:
Where the God-child lies on the lap of Night and Dawn.28
The idea is that through the state of ignorance that is Night and through the state of awakening that is Dawn, — through the alterations of the two —, the God-child in man attains its growth. Ignorance is not thus something anti-divine. It contributes to the growth of the Divine in man. This certainly reminds one of the hymn in the Veda which runs as follows:
Two are joined together, powers of truth, powers of Maya. They have built the Child and given him birth and they nourish his growth.29
In Savitri the symbol has been made more clear and effective by the word "God-child".
Speaking about the rise of the Many from the One, the Master says,
The Sole in its solitude yearned towards the All.30 Or, in another context he speaks of
The seed of the Spirit's blind and huge desire31
26 Rig Veda IV: 1:13; SABCL, Vol. 11, p. 164. 27 Ibid., IV: 1:15; Ibid.
28 Savitri, p. 36. 29 Rig Veda X:5:3; SABCL, Vol. 11, p. 385.
30 Savitri, p. 326. 31Ibid., p. 40.
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to explain the rise of the many which reminds us of "He desired 'May I be many'." (Taittiriya Upanishad 2:6)
The omnipresence of the Divine, not merely as an abstract principle but as a living Reality finds expression in a concrete and convincing image as in the following lines:
And garbed in beggar's robes there walks the One.32
It is similar to a passage in the Swetashwatara Upanishad:
Old and worn, Thou walkest bent over a staff.
The same basic idea of the Self perceived in all and all perceived in the Self finds similar expression both in Savitri and the Isha.
Where all is in ourselves, ourselves in all.33
The Self in all existence, and all existences in the Self.
There is also a similar passage in the Gita (6:29) which speaks of the same truth.
The mystic Self that is present-in all but is hidden is spoken of by the Master as:
...a large self
That lives within us, by ourselves unseen.34
There are many passages in the Upanishad that speak of the presence of this mystic Self, sometimes in the cave of the heart, sometimes as merely hidden. The Katha for instance, says:
This secret self, present in all beings, does not shed its light, that is not apparent.
The Gita describes the condition of the sage:
That which is Night to all the beings, in it wakes the man who controls the self; that in which the creatures awake, is to the awakened sage, the dark Night.
The change that comes over the consciousness of Aswapati as a result of his awakening to the inner Light is compactly described in Savitri as a "grand reversal of Night and Day," which conveys the same idea as the verse of the Gita quoted above.
When the secret Presence of the divine in the heart begins to
32 Ibid., p. 169. 33 Ibid., p. 112. 34 Ibid., p. 48.
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manifest itself it becomes, in the words of the poet, "a living image seated in the heart" no longer hidden and working indirectly but overt and working directly. There is a similarity in the tone of expression with the verse of the Gita:
The Lord abides in the heart of all beings.
So also, the two lines referring to the original Transcendent One:
He was here before the elements could emerge,
Before there was light of mind or life could breathe.35
These are similar to a Vedic hymn
That One lived without breath.
We may also see the line
There was nothing else, nor aught beyond it.36
The identity of the Two who are One is expressed in the following:
He is the Maker, and the world he made,
He is the vision, and he is the seer;
He is himself the actor and the act,
He is himself the knower and the known.37
At first it looks rather a philosophical statement to our intellect; but really speaking, in the context of the poem where the poet speaks of the whole cosmos as the figure of the Transcendent One and sees the process of the creation of duality from the original Identity, each of these lines adds an aspect and a colour to the apparent self-division of the One. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad expresses it thus:
It is not a second or other than, and separate from himself that he sees, speaks to, hears, knows.
While describing the spirit of man struggling in this world, apparently without success, the Seer penetrates behind the appearance and sees the deeper significance of the struggle and says, in spite of all appearances to the country,
His is a search of darkness for the Light,
Of mortal life for immortality.38
35 Ibid., p. 60. 36 Rig Veda X: 129:1; SABCL, Vol. 10, p. 306.
37Savitri, p. 61. 38Ibid.,p.71.
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This vision echoes the well-known aspiration of the Brihadaranyaka:
Lead me from darkness to Light
From death to immortality.
The One as the basis of the multiple expression is beautifully figured in Canto I of Book II where the silence of the Eternal sees its own Universal Power building up the whole cosmos with all its innumberable elements including all subjective experiences which fall into "a single plan" and become "the thousandfold expression of the One", (p. 96) Swetashwatara speaks of this as "the One fashions one seed in many ways." That Savitri touches the same suprarational and supernal regions of the infinite can be seen from many passages. We shall only here touch upon one or two, which in their similarity to the Upanishadic utterances are striking:
For not by Reason was creation made
And not by Reason can the Truth be seen.39
Where judgment ceases and the word is mute.40
But mind too falls back from a nameless peak.41
And not by thinking can its knowledge come.42
But thought nor word can seize eternal Truth.43
This is similar to Katha:
This wisdom which thou hast attained is not to be gained by any Process of logical thought.
This Atman is not to be attained by exposition, nor by intellectual thinking nor by much hearing.
Some passages in Savitri bear a very close resemblance to, — in fact are identical in content with, — some of the passages of the book The Mother which reach the height of epic expression in prose, for example:
Our life is a holocaust of the Supreme.
The great World-Mother by her sacrifice
39Ibid., p. 256. 40Ibid., p. 33. 41 Ibid., p. 260. 42Ibid. 45Ibid., p. 276.
Has made her soul the body of our state;
Accepting sorrow and unconsciousness
Divinity's lapse from its own splendours wove
The many-patterned ground of all we are.44
These lines are from The Mother.
... moved by the mysterious fiat of the Supreme to work out something that was there in the possibilities of the Infinite, she has consented to the great sacrifice and has put on like a mask the soul and forms of the Ignorance. But personally too she has stooped to descend here into the Darkness that she may lead it to Light, into the Falsehood and Error that she may convert it to the Truth, into this Death that she may turn it to godlike Life, into this world-pain and its obstinate sorrow and suffering that she may end it in the transforming ecstasy of her sublime Ananda. In her deep and great love for her children she has consented to put on herself the cloak of this obscurity, condescended to bear the attacks and torturing influences of the powers of the Darkness and the Falsehood, borne to pass through the portals of the birth that is a death, taken upon herself the pangs and sorrows and sufferings of the creation, since it seemed that thus alone could it be lifted to the Light and Joy and Truth and eternal Life. This is the great sacrifice called sometimes the sacrifice of the Purusha, but much more deeply the holocaust of Prakriti, the sacrifice of the Divine Mother.45
Or, take from another context:
She guards the austere approach to the Alone.
At the beginning of each far-spread plane
Pervading with her power the cosmic suns
She reigns, inspirer of its multiple works.46
And all creation is her endless act.47
The one original transcendent Shakti, the Mother stands above all the worlds and bears in her eternal consciousness the Supreme Divine. Alone, she harbours the absolute Power and
44 Ibid., p. 99. 45 The Mother, SABCL, Vol. 25, pp. 24- 25.
46 Savitri. p. 295. 47 Ibid.
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the ineffable Presence.... The Mahashakti, the universal Mother, works out whatever is transmitted by her transcendent consciousness from the Supreme and enters into the worlds that she has made; her presence fills and supports them with the divine spirit and the divine all-sustaining force and delight without which they could not exist.... Each of the worlds is nothing but one play of the Mahashakti of that system of worlds or universe, who is there as the cosmic Soul and Personality of the transcendent Mother.48
The spiritual truth conveying the logic of the Infinite is contained in the following lines:
Each soleness inexpressibly held the whole.49
It made all persons fractions of the Unique,
Yet all were being's secret integers.50
Shtntiptt°a of the Isha opens with a similar Mantra:
This is perfect, so is 'that' perfect; from the perfect what arises is Perfect; deducting Perfect from the Perfect the Perfect alone remains.
"Each soleness" holds the "whole", and all persons though fractions of the Unique are "integers" in the logic of the Infinite.
The passages cited here are by no means exhaustive but they serve to show the affinity of content and the revelatory and inspired character of the expression. In the Vedas and the Upanishads the same Overhead lightnings break forth revealing the universe in so different a light from that of the intellect that it has remained for mankind a new world of spiritual experience to which it has aspired from the dawn of its history. The lightning has revealed sometimes the higher regions of Solar Light, the regions of golden light or Truth, at times, the moonlit worlds of infinite Delight, at times, deep chasms of the Darkness of the Inconscient and the whole whole world of teeming cosmic life. Savitri is like a vast band of lightning steadied into the poetic empyrean, illuminating the cosmos from end to end, from the deepest and the darkest Night of the Nescience to the highest heights of the Transcendent Divine,
48 The Mother, SABCL, Vol. 25, pp. 20-22.
49 Savitri, p. 324. 50 Ibid.
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revealing the double ladder of divine dynamics, the ladder of Descent of the Divine and the ladder of ascent of the Divine into the earth-consciousness and the consequent transformation of the earth-nature into the divine nature. K. D. Sethna in his book says: "Only the ancient Vedas and Upanishads embody with anything like a royal freedom these ranges of mystical and spiritual being, hidden beyond the deepest plunge and highest leap of intuition known to the great masters. Over and above opening up such movements, Sri Aurobindo stands as a creator of new Vedic and Upanishadic age of poetry." It is not only the content but the poetic manner, the height of the tone, the inevitability of the word, in fact all the elements that go to make up the highest manner and technique of poetic creation are also present in Savitri. In the words of Sethna: "The expression is organic to the sight and consequently carries an authentic and convincing power." We will close this section with an apt quotation from Sethna:51
To create a poetic mould equally massive and multiform as The Life Divine for transmitting the living Reality to the furthest bounds of speech — such a task is incumbent on one who stands as the maker of a new spiritual epoch. Without it he would not establish on earth in a fully effective shape the influence brought by him. All evolutionary influences, in order to become dynamic in toto, must assume poetic shape as a correlate to the actual living out of them in personal consciousness and conduct. In that shape they can reach man's inner being persistently and ubiquitously over and above doing so with a luminous and vibrant suggestiveness unrivalled by any other mode of literature or art. But scattered and short pieces of poetry cannot build the sustained and organised Weltanschaung required for putting a permanent stamp upon the times. Nothing except an epic or a drama can, moving as they do across a wide field and coming charged with inventive vitality, with interplay of characters and events. Nor can an epic which teems with ultra-mental realisations by wholly adequate to its aim if it does not embody these realisations in ultra-mental word and rhythm. Hence Savitri is from every angle the right correlate to the practical drive towards earth-transformation by India's mightiest Master of spirituality in
51 The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, pp. 140 - 41 (1947).
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his Ashram at Pondicherry. Next to his own personal working as Guru on disciples offering themselves for a global remoulding of their lives, this poem that is at once legend and symbol will be the chif formateur of the Aurobindonian age. Out of its projected fifty-thousand lines, about twelve-thousand only are said to be ready yet in final version, but even that number is enough to give it a central place, for the whole length of Paradise Lost is exceeded and in no other art-creation so continually and cumulatively has inspiration, the lightning-footed goddess, "a sudden messenger from the all-seeing tops," disclosed the Divine's truth and beauty:
Even was seen as through a cunning veil
The smile of love that sanctions the long game,
The calm indulgence and maternal breasts
of wisdom suckling the child laughter of Chance,
Silence, the nurse of the Almighty's power,
The omniscient hush, womb of the immortal Word,
And of the Timeless the still brooding face,
And the creative eye of Eternity....
From darkness' heart she dug out wells of light,
And through great shoreless, voiceless, starless breadths
Hewn from the silence of the Ineffable.52
Sri Aurobindo wrote the following lines about the epic as a poetical form and its possibilities in modem times:
The epic is only the narrative presentation on its largest canvas and, at its highest elevation, greatness and amplitude of spirit and speech and movement. It is sometimes asserted that the epic is solely proper to primitive ages when the freshness of life made a story of large and simple action of supreme interest to the youthful mind of humanity, the literary epic an artificial prolongation by an intellectual age and a genuine epic poetry no longer possible now or in the future. This is to mistake form and circumstance for the central reality. The
52 Savitri, p. 41. (N.B.: The quotation here is as the text stood in 1947.)
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epic, a great poetic story of man or world or gods, need not necessarily be a vigorous presentation of external action: the divinely appointed creation of Rome, the struggles of the principles of good and evil as presented in the great Indian poems, the pageant of the centuries or the journey of the seer through the three worlds beyond us are as fit themes as primitive war and adventure for the imagination of the epic creator. The epics of the soul most inwardly seen as they will be by an intuitive poetry, are his greatest possible subject, and it is this supreme kind that we shall expect from some profound and mighty voice of the future. His indeed may be the song of greatest flight that will reveal from the highest pinnacle and with the largest field of vision the destiny of the human spirit and the presence and ways and purpose of the Divinity in man and the universe.53
Now in the light of Savitri that is before us it is clear he was anticipating his own work in the forecast. And who can say that he has not amply fulfilled those anticipations? For, he has given us "the song of the greatest flight" that has revealed "from the highest pinncale and with the largest field of vision the destiny of the human spirit and the presence and the ways and purpose of the Divinity in man and the universe."
A. B. PURANI
53The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 267.
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