On Savitri
THEME/S
Part One
Introducing Savitri
tat savitur varam rūpam jyotiḥ parasya dhìmahi !
yannah satyena dipayet !
Let us meditate on the most auspicious form of Savitṛ, the Light of the Supreme which shall illumine us with the Truth.1
This is Sri Aurobindo's Gayatri Mantra. The meditation is on the auspicious form of the Sun, the Sun of Divine Light. The Mantra affirms that the Light shall illumine us with the Truth. It shall illumine all the parts of our being, even the very physical. In it shall be our true progress. The threefold reality of Sat-Chit-Ananda shall express itself in this creation. Even the physical shall express the dynamic Truth.
In it we shall be immune from contingencies of Time, from the workings of fate. We shall be uncircumscribed by ignorance. We shall be free from death.
Sri Aurobindo's Gayatri Mantra is different from the traditional Gayatri Mantra, the Mantra given by Vishwamitra. In Vishwamitra
'The original translation of the Gayatn Mantra in English as given by Sri Aurobindo is presently not available in his own handwriting. We do not know how he wrote in English the Sanskrit word savitṛ
the invocation to the Sun-God savitṛ is for the illumination of our intuition, of our perception, of our perfect understanding of the things. In that perfect understanding shall be our great spiritual achievements. In Sri Aurobindo's Gayatri Mantra the emphasis is on the auspicious form—varam rupam. The implication is that of physical transformation.
The Vedic-Upanishadic Rishis had knowledge of the supreme Reality. They knew that it is the support of the entire creation. But about the manifestation of the dynamic Truth in this mortal world, in mrityuloka, they did not have the working intuition. They did not know the way towards physical transformation. Perhaps it was too early to realise it collectively here in this death-bound world.
Now Sri Aurobindo by his yoga-tapasya has prepared the required ground. He has made it a reality in the evolutionary manifestation. He has invoked the supreme Grace to incarnate here. She must come here and take up the work in her own hand.
The coming down of that Grace is the birth of Savitri. She alone can bring about that transformative miracle. Savitri is the incarnate power who shall establish divinity in the terrestrial phenomenon.
That creative power should bring truth and light and force and bliss to the mortal world, to this creation presently governed by death. That will be her work for the fulfilment of the mortal world. Such is the significance of the esoteric birth of Savitri.
This mrityuloka is the great concern of Savitri. She must bring down the Truth in this world, must make that Truth dynamically operative in it. She must espouse the Truth howsoever difficult the circumstances, even in the presence of ubiquitous death.
It is to do this that Savitri comes here. She comes here as the Observer of the Vow of the Lord. She comes as pativratā. In the story of the Mahabharata Savitri is committed to the joyous husbanding of the Truth, that in the evolutionary way this mortal creation be an expression of multifold divinity. This is the significance of the legend of Savitri. In it is the revelation of the Sun-God's transformative power.
The significance is proclaimed to us by narrating it as a story. What otherwise proves to be beyond the reach of our understanding, what is too occult to grasp, that is made tangible through the medium of a household episode. The story thus turns out to be a fruitful device; by it the higher truth is made to us somewhat comprehendible.
The story belongs to the early Vedic times.
Aswapati, the king of Madra land, is issuless. He desires to have a son to perpetuate his ancestral line. In that way would the continuity of the Vedic Yajna be assured. Therefore it becomes an aspect of dharmic duty and Aswapati wishes not to fail in it. It is in the dharma alone that the order of the society can be maintained. And he is keen to uphold it.
Thereupon Aswapati retires to a forest and engages himself in the worship of Goddess Savitri. He is devout in nature and is firmly established in the truth. Everyday he offers one hundred-thousand oblations to the Goddess. Living a strict life and observing all the vows of the sacrifice, he does arduous tapasya for eighteen long years.
Goddess Savitri is pleased with Aswapati's great devotion, by his single-pointed dedication to the Truth. She grants him a boon. She tells him that soon a radiant daughter will be bom to him. The Goddess also tells him that the boon has the sanction of Creator-Father Brahma himself. The birth of the radiant daughter is therefore already marked by a high intention. It carries in it the Will of the Supreme himself.
Soon the princess grows into full maidenhood. But no hero-prince dares to approach her. None comes forward seeking her hand in marriage. She is an exceptional princess of fiery splendour and therefore none takes courage to court her.
But, according to the custom of the time, her father advises her to go out in search of a partner in life,—one who is endowed with qualities like her own.
She meets Satyavan in the Shalwa forest and they at once pledge to be together.
Savitri returns to the palace and tells to her parents about her meeting with Satyavan. But at that time sage Narad happens to be present in the palace. It seems that at this particular juncture he was making a purposeful visit to them. It seems that he was prompted to do so by some divine intention. The sage makes an announcement, of a foreboding prophecy. He makes known to them that destined death awaits Satyavan one year after the marriage.
But Savitri remains undeterred in her resolve.
The marriage is duly solemnised and the princess goes to the forest to live in her new home. She joyously accepts the rigour of harsh life.
But inwardly Savitri is actively engaged in yogic practices. She is getting fully prepared to meet the dire eventuality, that of Satyavan's death as foretold by Narad. Savitri has acquired inner strength to meet the God of Death.
Now it won't be too long for the fated day to arrive. On this day Satyavan must die.
Satyavan's death occurs in the forest. Yama himself comes to carry Satyavan's soul, he being an ocean of noble qualities.
Savitri follows Yama and discusses matters of Satya Dharma with him. Her understanding of the principles of righteous living pleases Yama. She maintains that the commerce of the world is actually borne by the spiritual practices of the saints and seers.
In a tremendous moment of revelation she discloses that it is by the Truth that the saints lead the sun, by askesis the saints uphold the earth, that in the saints all the three divisions of time find their refuge.2
Yama is immensely gladdened by her utterances and releases the soul of her husband.
Savitri wins a unique victory over death.
This is the tale of Savitri, a very familiar tale in India. It is the story of a beautiful young princess marrying a doomed youth. She was made aware of the short life of Satyavan, but she stayed steadfast in her decision. She even asserted that the choice of Satyavan was the choice of her soul and that there was no question of her reconsidering the decision. She had the conviction that she was driven from within.
That is the true Dharma, Satya Dharma, of being driven from within.
This spiritually eventful story shows Savitri not only firm-minded. She is shown as one having exceptional qualities, qualities which put her apart from everybody around.
In the narrative we have in the Mahabharata Savitri is presented as a radiant daughter, kanyd tejasvini; she is beautiful like a damsel of heaven, devarupini; she is dhyānayogaparāyaṇā, an adept in the Yoga of Meditation; she is one who is learned in the lore of the tradition, is fully conversant with the shastras, is an observer of difficult vows.
It is obvious that the Story of Savitri is not just a social episode designed to declare moral values. It actually enshrines the greatness of a woman's love for her husband even in the circumstance of death. It is even more than that,—the Triumph of Love over Death.
It is a story that depicts functionally the merit of the path of righteousness. Although it may seem to have the colouring of an ethical illustration, the story is spiritually charged. Even in the simple
2 R.Y. Deshpande, Vyasa's Savitri, p. 55.
narrative of the Mahabharata we see a purpose behind the story. In it we notice the seeds of a brighter world taking birth.
This birth of a bright world may not be in the immediate context, but it is bound to occur in the evolutionary future. It is a new world whose birth is helped and supported by Yama, true Yama as the possessor of gracious kindness. In it the authentic meaning, the high purport of mrityuloka, becomes clear. Yama shall thus prove to be the true Upholder of the Worlds. He shall then be pitrarājastām bhagavān, the beneficent King-Father and Lord of Creatures, as Vyasa says.
Sri Aurobindo utilises this legend to give mantric form to his yogic experiences and realisations, to his avataric work. His Savitri is therefore not only a legend and a symbol, a symbol describing the conquest of death. It is also a double autobiography.
In it the pregnant Gayatri Mantra of twenty-four syllables gets expanded to fill the earthly spaces by growing itself into twenty-four thousand lines.
It has wide and far-reaching dimensions of the expressive-revelatory Word. It is that Word which shall bring noble plenitudes of divinity to this evolutionary creation. It is on this foundation that we have Sri Aurobindo's epic.
In the epic Savitri came to live with grief, to share the mortal's lot, to stay the wheels of doom, to confront death. This was the great divine task she was engaged in. For that she made the sacrifice of her suffering to the presiding Deity, surrendered herself completely to the Will of the Supreme. Indeed in it she attempted all and achieved all. In it she received the most wondrous boon of divine life on earth.
The Divine Savitri had assured Aswapati that she shall take birth as his daughter and accept the burden of the world:
She shall bear Wisdom in her voiceless bosom,
Strength shall be with her like a conqueror's sword
And from her eyes the Eternal's bliss shall gaze.
A seed shall be sown in Death's tremendous hour,
A branch of heaven transplant to human soil;
Nature shall overleap her mortal step;
Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will.3
Incarnate Savitri accomplished what was promised. Now the Powers of the Spirit gaze upon destiny and there is its living presence
3 Savitri, p. 346.
even in the commonest things. Luminous crimson seeds of God's felicity have been sown in the earthly soil. These shall-sprout and
This earthly life become the life divine.4
Who is Savitri?
Who is this Savitri? What is her role, what is her business? Tradition makes her an unusual princess who wins back the soul of her dead husband from the God of Death. We already have in her story a supernatural element describing the most extraordinary event in the spiritual history of the earth. It therefore becomes obvious that it is a significant myth reciting the prophetic achievement of a woman in this death-dominated creation. If she is one who bears in her womb the secret birth of divinity, if she is janani, then surely she can't accept sorrowful infliction of the death of her own child. She must become death-victorious, mrityu-vijayini. Her one concern is indeed to establish immortal birth in this mortality. The root sense of the name Savitri itself makes it clear to us so.
The Sanskrit word savitr means the Sun-God, who is also the creator of the world. The descendent of savitṛ is therefore sāvitṛ, or as feminine savitri. The invocation to savitṛ in the Gayatri Mantra of Sri Aurobindo taken in the context of his magnum opus Savitri then assumes a revealing meaningfulness. In gracious answer to the invocation is the incarnation of savitri. She brings with her the dynamism of Truth and Light which no darkness can dim. There is thus the infallibility of success in her action, an action in the high Will itself. That shows how charged with spiritual connotations the word savitṛ is.
If the Sun-God or savitṛ is the creator of this entire universe, we have then to understand why this world is beset by the presence of Death. Which implies that the operative veil savitṛ has put on himself in the pregnant circumstance of this Inconscience has to be removed by his own power of illumination. After all, Death is also the descendent of savitṛ himself and therefore it becomes his concern to deal with him. For that to happen his expressive power who is the Sun-Word should come as savitri. But this happens only when the ground for her descent is well prepared here.
Such is the task cut out for Savitri. She makes a splendid sacrifice of the eminence of her heavenly abundances and accepts the travail
4Ibid., p. 711.
of evolutionary growth; she leaves her "vaster Nature" behind to work in the limits of our little terrestriality. This is an aspect of the process of manifestation itself, assuring in it the Supreme's direct involvement in the person of Savitri.
It was in a wondrous act of Love that the Supreme had plunged into the darkness of the Inconscience. In that way would appear out of it another creation for incessant progress in the growing possibilities of the Spirit. Savitri's incarnation is for joining this Love in conformity with and accomplishment of the Supreme's Will. That is how the story of Savitri also becomes the story of Love triumphing over Death through her action. If it is through the agency of Supermind that the world came into being, it is Supermind alone who will then bring authentic fulfilment to it in joyous glories of the Truth and Light and Force and Awareness. In it is the work of Surya-Savitri. It is that we celebrate in the Savitri-legend given to us as a great gift.
Such is the Savitri Mantra although we call it Gayatri Mantra. There is a certain difference between the two. One is the Mantra of Manifestation, the other of Transformation. In the Transcendent the executive Power of the Supreme is Gayatri; but bom here upon earth she takes the name of Savitri, the daughter of the supramental Sun. When we are invoking her on the earth, we are actually invoking that Supreme's creative executrix herself, asking her to make this a place for her habitation, for her to live in, a place where divinity in luminous magnificence of its aristocracy can find itself at home. The Creator can't be very happy with the conditions as they prevail now and, if there is an issue, it becomes his concern to deal with it. Therefore in response to a call from the praying soul of the earth he sends to this world his power as Savitri. "A world's desire [compels] her mortal birth." By condescending to be bom here Savitri accomplishes the heavenly task. She removes the dark Obstacle that lies across the path of the divine Event and makes the manifestation of a new world a reality.
If we choose the Pauranic language we can say that Brahma's conceptive-expressive power as the supreme Creatrix is present in two aspects,—in the modes of transcendental and terrestrial creation. That Creatrix in the nature of the Word is held by Brahma in his clasp5 and, when she comes out, she comes out as Gayatri in the Transcendent and Savitri in this world of ours. While as Gayatri she is the creative force in the Transcendent, in the mortal world she
5 Savitri, p. 525.
takes birth as Savitri for the transformative action. If from that Word world after splendid world wheels out in interminable glory and grandeur, "in metres that reflect the moving worlds,"6 there is also the evolutionary delight in a mysterious unfoldment of the eternal Time. We can meet the underlying identity of these two goddesses in the dynamism of the Truth-Being, in Brahma himself. In him Satyam and Ritam are one and inseparable. In fact their oneness belongs to the manifestive Truth in its twofold operation. If Savitri as the Truth-Word gives form and definiteness to the Truth-Idea in this world, Gayatri as the Truth-Rhythm sets that Truth-Idea into its spacious expanding movement,—one always supporting the other. If substantiality of form in its Truth-contents is bestowed on it by one, the other breathes majesties of a widening life into it.
In the context of the metres that move the worlds, Gayatri as chhanda-devatā appears in her triple measure. It consists of three parts each with eight syllables, indicating the triple occult formation with its enduring transcendental realities vis-à-vis this vast creation. These give rise to the triple world of Sat-Chit-Ananda. The Veda speaks of the three strides of Vishnu in the transcendent and we may as well conceive these to be the eight-syllabled three parts of this devatā. The virgin goddess of this supernal world is the one who, over there, luminously up-bears the lower triple world. "Determining all that shall be in this universe and in the terrestrial evolution by what she sees and feels and pours from her, she stands there above the Gods and all her Powers and Personalities are put out in front of her for the action and she sends down emanations of them into these lower worlds to intervene, to govern, to battle and conquer, to lead and turn their cycles, to direct the total and the individual lines of their forces."7 Such is Gayatri in the language of what we may call the Tantra in the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo.
The lower world, more specifically this mrityuloka, is the great concern of Savitri. She is the power of the ever-expanding divine creation in an evolutionary way in this death-dominated world, mrityuloka. She deals with death to give to it a deathblow, that by it the Supreme may emerge in another way. It also means that she has been here throughout the evolutionary history of the earth. Hers is an eternal birth. Since the beginning of the evolution whenever and wherever there was a possibility of the divine manifestation, she was present there. In fact it is she who works out that possibility. She
6 Ibid., p. 383. 7 The Mother, SABCL, Vol.25,p.23.
takes birth as a radiant daughter,—kanyd tejasvini as Vyasa puts it. She keeps on coming as the princess of Madra, the daughter of the timeless king Aswapati. For, hers is an eternal birth which is also the birth in eternal Time. Thus the fascinating Story of Savitri is actually an unfolding Story of the Eternal himself, being simultaneously told and retold on multiple levels. It is an exalted story of the evolutionary manifestation, which cannot be set into the domains of what we see as the past, present, and future.
Whereas Savitri comes as a radiant daughter, Gayatri always remains a virgin goddess. Gayatri who stands far above the mortal world, above this pain-fraught mrityuloka thus provides the needed transcendental foundation for the evolutionary Savitri. The essential oneness of the two assures the success even in the circumstance of mortality. We may as well say that it is this golden oneness which makes Savitri's coming here possible as well as meaningful. Because of their identity in the vastness of the Truth that is Brahman in every respect, it is Brahman himself who richly and rightfully greatens himself in another vast evolutionary dimension. This is an inalienable aspect of the supreme creative Will itself, of the divine samkalpa in the delight of existence.
But the advent of Savitri is to be preceded by preparing the needed occult-spiritual support to bear the weight and majesty of her Grace. A "world's desire" has to rise to bring her birth amongst us. This is done, again, by the Supreme himself, coming here as the Son of Force. He comes here as eternal Aswapati, as the king of Madra in the Land of Tapasya. He does intense Yoga-Sadhana in the Earth-consciousness. He discerns the "wide world-failure's cause" and offers his prayer to the supreme Goddess to mission down a living form of her. It is here that things have to happen and these can happen only through her. The purpose of the Yoga-Sadhana of Aswapati is therefore to prepare the necessary base, to provide a resplendent support, the firm needed ādhār for executive action of the omnipotent Goddess. He "keeping the traditions of those times goes," in the Savitri-story, "to the forest and performs penance for eighteen years, at the end of which the Divine Mother Gayatri appears to him and gives him a boon that she would be bom to him... He names her Savitri... Savitri and Gayatri are the same Deity."8
8Collected Works of M.P. Pandit, edited by Rand Hicks, Vol. 1, p. 337.
They are the same, yet they are different in their roles. Of course there is no exact algebraic equivalence between Gayatri and Savitri; but we can meet their underlying selfsameness in Brahma himself. The virgin goddess of this world, the World of Sachchidananda, is the one who, from that source, makes things in the lower triple world possible. The radiant daughter, accepting the conditions of the inconscient Ignominy, sets herself to work those things out in the rhythms of the Truth-conscient.
We may also state it differently: The Adya Shakti, the original Primaeval Might, always stays in the transcendent. That is her viewless home. Her office is there, up there, and it i$ from there that she supports all these thousand actions, actions even in the lower difficult hemisphere. But for the decisive change to take place she has to project herself as the supramental Force. Indeed, it is in that form that she will come down to doing the work. Thus while the supreme Adya Shakti will always remain in the Transcendent, it is Savitri with the transformative power who will come down and take charge of the evolutionary process upon earth. In fact that has been her responsibility all along.
It is in this way that the Supermind will belong to the evolutionary line. However, its descent will mean the descent of its powers and not the descent of the Transcendent itself. Gayatri will always remain there. More and more of her aspects will stream into this growing process, but that will not imply her own stepping into it. The Transcendent upholds evolution in its splendid evolutionary play, but it itself does not become a part of the evolution. But perhaps it is through this play that the Transcendent will grow further to make that growth richer in the terrestrial happiness.
To describe the entire sequence in a somewhat plain language we can put it as follows. The unmanifest Divine plunges as Love into the depths of Inconscience, into the Horror of Inconscience. That is the first Avatar, "the permanent Avatar" whose presence alone will make the Inconscience luminous, make it a means for his own widening manifestation. But in the meanwhile silently he suffers the great Affliction in a divine manner. To redeem that Love, the Divine incarnates here in mortality in an evolutionary way and does intense Tapas. This radiant ground of Tapas then becomes the foundation or adhar for his executive Power's action to assert his Will in this mortal creation. She prevails over almighty Death, the dire Antagonist, and wins a unique victory. Thus is established the unfolding sovereignty of Love in which transformed Death participates with his noble
benignities. Indeed that is how in a mysterious creative act of delight all is done by the Divine himself.
Such is the significance, the excellence of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri which is in fact the Word of Revelation adopting the fruitful form of a creative Myth, the myth that transcends the restrictive boundaries of space and time. It is a myth whose truth is being realised at every instance and at every place. It is the Mantra of Transformation which also implies Manifestation. It is built into the very origin of the creation, into the stuff of things by which they acquire their validity, in turn making that myth itself an eternal reality. Be it one single resplendent word Savitri holding the Sun-God's wide infinity, or twenty-four syllables reverberating from some deep-toned womb of the omniscient Hush, or, in "sessions of the triple Fire," twenty-four thousand lines spreading into the everlasting day, we have in them all present the Mantra Devata in her dynamic action to establish the supreme Truth on earth. We have in them all, and variously, the entrancing sweetness of her Love alone.
Autobiographical
It is well known that Savitri is the poetic record of spiritual experiences of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. In this connection we may recall what the Mother told Mona Sarkar:
All this is his own experience, and what is most surprising is that it is my own experience also. It is my sadhana which he has worked out. Each object, each event, each realisation, all the descriptions, even the colours are exactly what I saw and the words, phrases are also exactly what I heard. And all this before having read the book... earlier when he was writing he used to read it to me. Every morning I used to hear him read Savitri. During the night he would write and in the morning read it to me. And I observed something curious, that day after day the experiences he read out to me in the morning were those I had the previous night, word by word... Yes, they were exactly my experiences of the previous night which he read out to me the following morning.9
9 Mona Sarkar, Sweet Mother—Harmony of Light, pp. 26-27. See also Perspectives of Savitri /, 46-47.
We also have a few letters of Sri Aurobindo indicating the aspect of his yogic realisations forming a part of Savitri. In this sense the poem is a double autobiography, but an autobiography in a different sense. Certainly, it is not a chronological presentation of events as are narrated in works of the kind. Nor is the approach Newtonianly linear in the successive manner of a cause-and-effect series. In fact it transcends the dimensions of Time and at once becomes intuitively supple to extend into psycho-spiritual relationships. We may say that when Sri Aurobindo is describing the upward journey of Aswapati climbing the ascending hierarchy of these innumerable worlds,
Erect like a mountain-chariot of the Gods
Motionless under an inscrutable sky,10
it is not a curve of Time that he is tracing in sequence. Nor can we generally get from Savitri the dates of their various spiritual achievements, their Siddhis. More important is perhaps the fact that it is a work which graphically characterises the entire evolutionary march of the Soul of the Earth. That is why the autobiography is a legend, an intense and powerful Legend of the Future, a future that is being enacted all along. Yet there is also specificity pertaining to the present avataric enterprise.
During the most unremitting phase of his unique effort to bring down the Supermind in the physical and make it a part of the earth nature, Sri Aurobindo considered nothing insignificant or small, spared no labour to achieve the objective. Every minute detail had to be attended to, every nook and corner of the darkness searched with the light of the spirit. If the "supramental change is a thing decreed and inevitable in the evolution of the earth-consciousness... [if the change has to] arrive, take form and endure, there is needed the call from below... and there is needed the sanction of the Supreme from above."" To prepare earth nature to send this call and to obtain the sanction of the Supreme is the task of Sri Aurobindo. Towards this he absorbed into himself all the glories and all the travesties of the earth nature, that thus alone could he make it freely receptive, luminously pliable to shape it in the possibilities of the higher powers. The "aspiring Secrecy"12 has to reach the transcendental greatnesses that thus alone would pour into it flaming oceans of felicity. For that he attempted all and in the process achieved all.
10 Savitri, p. 98. 11 The Mother, SABCL, Vol.25,p.40.
12 Savitri,p.421.
But the power that graciously intercedes between the call and the sanction is the executive Power who can "alone rend the lid and tear the covering... and bring down into this world of... falsehood and death Truth... and the Immortal's Ananda."13 To accomplish this she has to "adventure through blind unforeseeing Time"14 and stand on a dangerous brink... alone with death and close to extinction's edge.15 The failure of her work would mean sure collapse of the creation itself; but the success would entail divine prosperity in the sunlit widenesses of the earth. Such are the happy or else grave dreadful consequences which we have to recognise in the avataric endeavour of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Savitri is the only yogic record through which we might glean the enormity of the difficulty and come to know what they did for us little mortals. But it is also the bright flame with which we can kindle our souls to grow more and more into its wonders.
If in Savitri we see such an extraordinary marvel we have to understand that it became particularly so, in the time-sequence, only during the last fifteen years of its composition. In one of his early letters in 1931, addressed to Amal Kiran, Sri Aurobindo writes as follows: 'There is a previous draft, the result of the many retouchings... but in that form it would not have been a magnum opus at all. Besides, it would have been a legend and not a symbol. I therefore started recasting the whole thing..."16 This makes it abundantly clear that the symbolic aspect of the magnum opus became more manifest than the legendary as an expressive necessity. In fact the entire thrust was to give a definite and dynamic shape to spiritual verities, in the process making them forever a part of the divinity in the earth. We see a quantum leap in the work of the incarnate God turning his gain into an enduring luminous evolutionary gain. The symbol thus becomes the Sun-Word itself. This is further corroborated by his letter to Amal Kiran in 1947: "Savitri is the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind..."17
How does it become the Sun-Word? "Savitri is represented in the poem as an incarnation of the Divine Mother. This incarnation is supposed to have taken place in far past time when the whole thing had to be opened out, so as to 'hew the ways of Immortality.' "18
13 The Mother, SABCL, Vol. 25, p. 41. 14 Savitri, p. 459.
15 Ibid., p. 461. 16 Ibid., p. 727.
17 Ibid., p. 794. 18Ibid ., p. 729.
About hewing "the ways of Immortality" we have what Amal Kiran calls,19 the Gayatri Mantra of the Mother. In a talk given to a women's association, dated 15 December 1911, the Mother expresses a very remarkable wish of hers. She proposes to the members of the association to make a resolution to raise themselves
... each day, in all sincerity and goodwill, in an ardent aspiration towards the Sun of Truth, towards the Supreme Light, the source and intellectual life of the universe, so that it may pervade us entirely and illumine with its great brilliance our minds and hearts, all our thoughts and our actions.20
The Mantra is striking in several respects when we also realise that the Mother received it indeed even before she met Sri Aurobindo in 1914. This was in Paris when she was just 33,—showing us that "the Mother had been spiritually conscious from her youth."21 The ardent invocation to the Supreme Light to "pervade us entirely and illumine us with its great brilliance" is certainly the imploration, as well as the defining assertion, with which both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother started their work even before they came together. Years later, thanks to Doraiswami,22 we see it embodied in the "auspicious form" of the Gayatri Mantra itself. The result is the transformative disclosure in the nature of a metrical formula in Sanskrit, made perhaps in the early '30s. In this case the coming of the Avatar—the twin Avatar—therefore also means the coming of the revealing Word of Manifestation. We should not be therefore surprised that it should have been formulated, though independently but in an identical manner, by both the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.
In 1914 itself the Mother had a very definite intuition of the "sublime mandate," of the "New Manifestation" which shall be an
19The Sun and the Rainbow, p. 123.
20Words of Long Ago, CWM, Vol. 2, p. 28.
21Prayers and Meditations, CWM, Vol. 1, p. 380.
22An Aiyar Brahmin from Chennai, Doraiswami was Sri Aurobindo's devotee. He maintained that he would perform the thread-ceremony of his son Mithran only if he received a Mantra from the Master. A nationalist and a leading advocate by profession, he was Sri Aurobindo's emissary who carried his message to the Congress Working Committee when, in 1942, Sir Stafford Cripps's proposal to create a new Indian Union with a Dominion Status was being discussed in New Delhi. Unfortunately Sri Aurobindo's recommendation to accept the proposal was rejected.
"integral manifestation." She was sure that
A new Light shall break upon the earth.
A new world shall be bom.23
If this is the nature of the work she envisaged for which she got the mantric knowledge, there is also the certainty of her joining the Master to carry it out and to give to it a dynamic form in his bright eminent Will. In her prayer dated 11 January 1914 addressed to the "sovereign Lord" she speaks of a new life dedicated entirely to the Divine:
I know that a day will come when Thou wilt transform all those who come to us; Thou wilt transform them so radically that, liberated completely from the bonds of the past, they will begin to live in Thee an entirely new life, a life made solely of Thee, with Thee as its sovereign Lord.24
This was in Paris about two and a half months before she actually met Sri Aurobindo. But even at that time she was speaking of the aspirant souls approaching them seeking transformation to lead a new life. We should pertinently mark the phrase "those who come to us" in her prayer to the sovereign Lord. She already 'knew' the one who would make them free from the dismal bonds of the past, by his yogic tapasya remove their dark encumbrances so that they may live a life dedicated to the Supreme to progress in the possibilities of the Spirit. The phrase "those who come to us" is already a wonderful prevision of what was to take place on the most eventful afternoon of 29 March 1914 in Pondicherry.
That by saying "us" in her prayer the Mother definitely meant herself and Sri Aurobindo becomes obvious from another prayer of hers addressed to the "marvellous Unknown One", dated 11 August 1914. They are the ones by going to whom a new life will begin:
O Thou marvellous Unknown One, Thou who hast not yet manifested Thyself, Thou who awaitest the propitious hour and hast sent us upon earth to prepare Thy ways, all the elements of this being cry to Thee, "May Thy will be done" and give
23Prayers and Meditations, CWM, Vol. 1, p. 249 (25 September 1914.)
24Ibid., p. 54.
themselves to Thee in a supreme, unconquerable urge...
The coming together of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo was thus divinely foreordained; they were sent—"Thou... who... hast sent us upon earth"—to prepare the ways to do things in the Will of the Marvellous, in His samkalpa. But for that to happen "the propitious hour" had to arrive. Because they were sent by Him it is no wonder that they, even without coming in contact with each other on the physical plane, should have given the same Mantra for the Transformation of Life. Indeed there cannot be any contingent spatiotemporal separation in the Mantra. The Mantra existed in the very samkalpa itself. That is why it is a part of that endless propitious hour awaited by the Unknown One. However, terrestrially that propitious hour, that providential moment, has also got to be fixed in the timeless birth of the Avatar himself. This hour in the yogic tapasya of the Avatar has also to acquire its Siddhis, become an accomplished realisation. Surely, then, that propitious hour in its executive potency itself becomes the Mantra. That is Savitri.
Sri Aurobindo explains the significance of the Mantra as follows:
Brahman in the Vedas signifies ordinarily the Vedic Word or Mantra in its profoundest aspect as the expression of the intuition arising out of the depths of the soul or being. It is a voice of the rhythm which has created the worlds and creates perpetually. All world is expression or manifestation, creation by the Word.... And the word of creative Power welling upward out of the soul is also brahman.26 The Vedic poets regarded their poetry as mantras; they were the vehicles of their own realisations and could become vehicles of realisations for others.... Anything that carries the Word, the Light in it, spoken or written can light this fire within, open a sky, as it were, bring the effective vision of which the Word is the body.27
The Word or Brahman the Creator of the Worlds can thus express itself in us, embody the auspicious powers of the spirit to make progress in its widening manifestation. Savitri achieves it. In terms of its reality-content we may as well say that the Mother had already
25Ibid., p. 218.
26The Secret of the Veda, SABCL, Vol. 10, pp. 303-13.
27The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, pp. 510-11.
written Savitri in 1911 itself, when she addressed her prayer to the Sun of Truth.
But we have to also see the entire sequence in terms of its modus operandi. The aspect of terrestrial chronology has certain pertinence in consolidating the mantric powers in it. If we connect the birth of Sri Aurobindo's Gayatri Mantra in the '30s with the work of physical transformation he was engaged in, we perhaps get some idea about the intensity with which it was being pursued during that period. In 1935 Sri Aurobindo had written to Nirodbaran that the Supramental Light was coming down but there was also the upsurge of the dark and dismal crudeness making things difficult. The Mother later told Amal Kiran, in 1954, that she used to see the Supermind descending in Sri Aurobindo in 1938; but at that time what he could not do was to fix it in the physical.28 That his yogic tapasya along with the revelation of the Gayatri Mantra in the '30s and the composition of Savitri during the period are interconnected is therefore extremely significant. In fact we might assert that the period between 1935 and 1950 is greatly consequential from the point of view of actualising the work of physical transformation.
That Savitri is a double autobiography is indisputable in its spiritual sense. The happy device used by the poet is to write or asseverate it in the form of a legend. But, though (he legend is an ancient legend, it is a time-transcending legend. Actually right from its creation it has been the Legend of the Future. It has the Vedic vision that sees the mortal world sans death. In it immortality shall be the basis as well as the means for endless progress in the aspects of the transcendental realities. It proclaims a divine Manifestation. Thus in the legend we have Aswapati as the Protagonist and Savitri as the resplendent incarnate Word in her occupation with the Soul of the Earth called Satyavan,—they timelessly engaged in the world-transforming action. They are, in the legend carrying the ancient symbolism, "emanations or incarnations 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."29 We have therefore powers and incarnations which have been eternally here; they are not simply the time-honoured characters belonging to Vyasa's
28For a fuller discussion of the theme, see R. Y. Deshpande, Sri Aurobindo and the New Millennium, pp. 235-61, (1999).
29On Himself, SABCL, Vol.26,p.265.
illustrative Upakhyana in the Mahabharata, where also they stand for eternal or sanātana values in life that must be cherished. That may be taken as the reason why we don't need an identification mark to recognise Sri Aurobindo as Aswapati and the Mother as Savitri of the story. It is the same Aswapati who evolutionarily marching through the ages comes to us as Sri Aurobindo. Aswapati is the eternal incarnation of the Supreme. In fact without identifying himself with this ageless Aswapati Sri Aurobindo would not have been able to bring himself out in Savitri.
Now he comes here, because the propitious hour has arrived. Presently this propitious hour has an intended connection with Death's tremendous hour.30 It is in this tremendous hour that the evolutionary march shall overleap its mortal step. This is the most felicitous blessing received by Aswapati from the supreme Goddess herself. In fact there is an unmistakable corroboration between the Gayatri Mantra of Sri Aurobindo and the Boon described by him in Savitri. In the Mantra the invocation is to the Sun-God to illumine all the parts of our being. However, before the benignities of the Sun-God are freely admitted into our lives, the physical presently prone to death must receive the solar illumination. Therefore Savitri must meet Death, Death as the incarnation of the Inconscience stubbornly standing across the path of the divine Event. She must encounter him and remove him from the scene. She must become mrityu-vijayini. Sri Aurobindo's epic of victory asserts that she shall do it with a victor's might and in the tremendous hour sow the seeds of grandeur. For this to happen of course Death's tremendous hour has to arrive. That also implies the occult necessity of Sri Aurobindo's 'death'. Thus the luminous affirmation of the Gayatri Mantra foreholds in its operative aspect the necessity for Death's transfiguring hour. It is this which assures the opening of the earthly life to its Light and Force. Then the Sun of Truth shall illumine with its splendour even the unregenerate physical to do things of its splendour.
The Descent into Night
If we wish to see the autobiographical—rather more appropriately the aurobiographical—account in the ancient tale of Savitri, then there should not be any difficulty in associating the Mother with Savitri
30 Savitri, p. 346.
and Sri Aurobindo with Aswapati himself. This is true not only in the sense of its legendary bearings but also in terms of its symbolic contents. The one-to-one correspondence that is likely to come in the first is enlarged in its spiritual context by the other aspect. It is the great visionary power of the legend that luminously supports the revealing possibilities of the symbol. In a certain sense they actually enrich each other.
This simply means that Savitri's is not a story of something which happened in the deep past. Indeed, we never ask a question as to who Savitri was; instead we always yearn to know as to who Savitri is. Vyasa's kanyā tejasvini Sri Aurobindo's Sun-Word is "the living goddess, the Word, and the Fire, that still works in us when we read the Mantra... It is effective word, which re-enacts her birth and tapasya in the hearer and the reader." That mantric force and vigour bring about an on-going rebirth in us. Such is precisely the purpose for which the goddess takes the "mortal birth", that thus alone she might take ever-recurring birth in our consciousness. As is the identity of Savitri and the Mother, so too is the oneness of Aswapati of the timeless past and ageless Sri Aurobindo. The two have all along been carrying the same soul of divinity in them. The external circumstances of life bring in them the least difference. This is particularly so when we also become aware of the fact that Aswapati that is Sri Aurobindo is not a frozen figure belonging to a given epoch. He is kālātit, beyond the circumscribing boundaries of time, yet growing in time to take time along with him.
The birth of Savitri means the birth of a new world. This she brings about by meeting the luminous Presence behind Death and obtaining the boon of a divine life upon earth. She always works in us towards that change, awaking us to the sense of our true innate spiritual entitlement. Sometimes it is feared that by laying too exclusive a stress on the aspect of the legend alone, we might somewhat overshadow this mantric power of hers. This will have the deleterious effect of distancing us away from what Sri Aurobindo intended it to be. If such is the danger then we should at once disassociate ourselves from the apprehensive outcome which the notion of a legend may carry in it. Our conjoining with its trenchant historicity could thus shut us off from the future it can unfold for us. But we should appreciate the fact that the ancient tale of Savitri in its charged symbolic contents is assuredly the auroral fore-history of the new age that is dawning on us. It is timeless in purpose and poignant in relevance.
The symbolic legend of Savitri describes a twofold journey. If one is a journey that climbs greater and greater spiritual heights into the Transcendent, the other journey is a deepening journey which plunges into the occult depths of this material existence. One is the Journey of the Lord of Life and the other the Journey of the Sun-bright Executrix. They have undertaken the journeys by assuming human forms in full acceptance of all the thousand limitations of ours, by embracing all the ordeals of our mortality. The exalted purpose is to open out ways of infinity for this creation to progress in its unbounded possibilities. Behind this purpose is of course the blazing happy samkalpa of the Supreme himself, his Will. But, in order to accomplish it, contingencies of the inconscient workings have to be also taken care of. Across the path of this arduous journey there stands presently an incorrigible power, the colossal shadow-figure of Death.
The Mother and Sri Aurobindo's age-old concern has been to decisively deal with this Death. Their incarnation—a double incarnation—is the sine qua non for the success. This aspect is well focused in the traditional story. To win back the evolving soul of Satyavan from Yama, the uncompromising Immortal, it is necessary that, from the fire-altar of Aswapati's tapasya emerge Savitri as a radiant daughter. The Vedic Rishis had this intuition when they presented to us the Myth of Savitri in the context of the issue involved in this Mrityuloka. That is the enduring truth behind it.
But the issue gets fully matured only in our own time, waiting as it were for the arrival of the twin Avatar; fate seems to have conspired towards this. The splendid imperative is now to resolve it. Therefore Sri Aurobindo has to go to the domain of darkness, which is the birthplace of the antagonist Death. Thus we see the Yogin of Savitri entering the ashen abysses of creation to discover this wide world-failure's cause. This also means that presently his yogic tapasya in terms of its consequences approaches certain finality to get things done. In terms of specific autobiographical details we may say that this started happening around 1935. If we have an early suggestive glimpse of it in Sri Aurobindo's experiential A God's Labour31 its fuller account in the nature of the journey of the Traveller of the Worlds is given in Cantos Seven and Eight of Book Two.
The poet of Savitri is sufficiently expressive to reveal to us what had transpired when he entered into this primordial darkness that prevails in the Non-being's Void. Much more might have happened
31Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, pp. 99-102.
than is indicated, but even that little only goes to show the enormity of the "terrible Inane" denying the Spirit's interminable Truth. We have in The Descent into Night a few action steps as follows:
He turned to find that wide world-failure's cause.
He sent his gaze into the formidable Infinity asleep.
He saw the fount of the world's lasting pain.
He saw the body and visage of the dark Unseen.
He followed the dim steps returning to the night.
He passed the no-man's-land without debate.
He came into an armoured fierce domain.
He witnessed the shadow depths of Life.
His vision discovered Hell's trade-mark.
He wrestled with powers that snatched from mind its light.
He entered a gaunt spiritual blank.
He strove to shield his spirit from despair.
His spirit became an empty listening gulf.
His being from its own vision disappeared.
His body was lapped by a tenebrous tongue.
He must bear all this with hope of heaven estranged.
He endured all, stilled the vain terror.
He mastered the tides of Nature with a look.
He met with his bare spirit naked Hell.32
It will be rewarding to know the chronology as to how exactly the corresponding passages through the various drafts of Savitri developed. But as these are spiritual experiences in the nature of a poetic record we will have to observe some caution also; their sequence cannot be taken strictly as that of an event-by-event account. Yet an archival approach in dating these can shed interesting light vis-à-vis the yogic accomplishments. It seems that the prime seeds of these consequential developments had just started appearing during the late '20s and early '30s. We may briefly trace these as follows.
32 Savitri, pp. 202-19.
The present version of The Descent into Night consisting of 609 lines essentially belongs to the 1942 draft which was revised and enlarged in the double column copy-text of 1944. But of the total number of lines of Canto Seven and Canto Eight put together there were hardly 60-70 lines present in the earlier draft of 1935-3633 and of these scarcely a couple of lines existed prior to this. But then around this time the symbolic as against the legendary character of the epic had just started emerging more and more prominently. It became more experiential and pinpointed towards the transformative objective during the '40s. Previous to this 'first draft' there was practically nothing in Savitri to indicate the grimness of the Night's sway over the creation. This first draft—and A God's Labour— therefore forms the first recorded statement of the Yogin's stifling Assignation with the Night. In 1938 he had a rendezvous with her and, carrying God's deathless light in his breast, he had gone there to woo her dark and dangerous heart; but he had no definite idea of how he would win her over. He, however, had the conviction that his celestial Friend is there always with him to help him and that his determined engagement with the Night would pave the path towards Immortality.34
When the Avatar puts his foot on the soil of the Night it indeed marks the beginning of the Everlasting Day. In Sri Aurobindo's Yoga-tapasya it means the first decisive step towards integral transformation. In its sequel great things happen,—including the upsurge of terrible forces. That this business with the jeopardous Night should have coincided with the Second World War when the Regiments of Darkness had heavily precipitated therefore does not come as a surprise. The fate of the evolutionary creation was hanging in the balance. But he came out victorious. Savitri informs us about that aspect of occult history. Here the symbol has certainly gone far ahead of the traditional legend.
Yet if we go into the deep past we have certain clues about the attempts which were made earlier. In this respect we have a very perceptive comment from David Frawley alias Vamadeva Shastri: "It seems that the urge to transform the Earth consciousness was stronger in the earlier ages of light. It fell away during the worst of Kali Yuga, when it was enough for a few individuals to gain liberation and the collectivity was too caught in tamas. As we move back towards
33This early version has been published in Mother India, 1983.
34Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 132.
the ages of light it is arising again. The Rig Vedic Rishis were at the dawn of this cycle of civilisation and were mainly concerned with setting forth the seeds of the upcoming culture, particularly on a spiritual level, but also as the social order. It is hard to say whether physical transformation as Sri Aurobindo envisioned it was part of their yoga but we do have the tradition that many Rishis lived for long periods of time (which could have been done by various methods occult, tantric, yogic, ayurvedic). They seem to have included the idea of transforming physical matter as part of their long-term aspiration for humanity, but they were also aware of Asuric forces in the material world that are very difficult to overcome."
Vamadeva further adds: "The Rishis' pursuit of physical and spiritual rejuvenation is reflected in the Vedic knowledge of Soma. There were many types of Somas both external (prepared with herbs) and internal (produced through yogic practices like pranayama) for rejuvenating body and mind and for gaining immorality on various levels. The Bhrigus were particularly known for their knowledge of rejuvenation. Even Brihaspati of the Angirasas sent his son Kacha to gain this knowledge from Shukra of the Bhrigus. Yet it is hard to tell whether the Rishis ever tried to, or were in a position to, create a naturally divine body such as Sri Aurobindo envisioned. This would require the most powerful form of Soma. It would be, as it were, a body naturally made of pure Soma, matter with the capacity of perpetually rejuvenating itself. Yet there is no reason to think that they were not aware of the possibility, given their pursuit of Soma on all levels. We could also describe this as bringing the Soma of Mahar Loka into the genetic matrix of physical matter. Of course the Asuras would try to prevent this as much as possible as this would mean the end of them."35 But with the descent of Mahar itself in the earth-consciousness this cannot happen. Asuras are helpless against it. That was the truth seen by Sri Aurobindo and he worked towards it and firmly established it in the earth's subtle-physical. Things now will happen in the dynamism of the Truth-consciousness itself.
In one of the Vedic Riks we have the description of Agastya digging into the darkness of the Night, khanan as it says. But the Rishi found it difficult to deal with the physical nature. He could not bring light to it. His body was afflicted with a triple poison and could not bear the sunlight. It was like an unbaked clay-pot, atapta tanu. Similarly, Vamadeva could live here in a divine body, divya tanu, only for sixteen
35 Private communication.
years.36 These ancient Rishis certainly knew what could bring about the physical transformation, the Mahar or Supermind, but they did not know its full modus operandi. The attainment of immortality in the luminous worlds or divyaloka is one thing and its knowledge in mrityuloka is another. The aspect of dynamic immortality in the physical is the work of the executive Force and unless her incarnation takes place it cannot be accomplished. Though the intuition of her descent to bring about materially the transformation was there,—and that is what the significant legend of Savitri narrates,—the field, the necessary resplendent spiritual support, ādhār, for its universal action was not yet ready then. The eighteen-year arduous tapasya of Aswapati, that is to stay Sri Aurobindo, was exactly for preparing the ground for her transformative action. In that respect we see the importance of the radical step that was taken by him. In fact what he achieved he achieved precisely because Savitri that is the Mother in her full energetic splendour also accompanied him. This was not so earlier. Cycles of evolution had to be silently worked out to arrive at this point.
In this context we may also recall the great Vedic revelation in which we see Yama and our illustrious forefathers having together an ambrosial drink under Supalash Vriksha.37 The mention of supalāsha in the Rik is extraordinarily striking, particularly in association with Yama whom we take as the God of Death. The reference to a cluster of palāsha trees by Vyasa in his Savitri-narrative lifts up that narrative itself to another level of symbolism embodying in its richness a whole world of bright future possibilities. The botanical name of this tree is Butea Frondosa, which is popularly known as the Flame of the Forest. But the spiritual significance of it is far deeper than we can discern even from its poetic nomenclature. The Mother sees palāsha as the Beginning of the Supramental Realisation. That Yama should be linked up with it, enjoying the drink of immortality under its rich branches in the happy company of our forefathers and other gods, only indicates the centrality of his role in the entire process of supramentalisation of the physical. Here is the kind and gracious God who bestows on this creation the desirable boons of a glorious life in the splendours of the spirit. Yama shall thus fulfil himself terrestrially also.
36 For a detailed discussion of some of these aspects, see R.Y. Deshpande, Sri Aurobindo and the New Millennium, pp.201-27.
37 Rig Veda, X.135.1.
That lends another meaning to the Savitri-legend itself. Savitri's winning back the soul of Satyavan from Yama therefore acquires another sense that points towards this marvellous realisation. But in order that this should happen the dark sombre veil which has been worn by Yama must be removed. Radiant Savitri, the daughter of the Sun-God, alone can do that. In fact Yama has put on a double veil, the veil of the incorrigible Antagonist and the veil of the luminous Inveigler. Behind him is indeed present the loving Supreme himself. It was the removal of this double veil, this double transformation which was accomplished by Savitri. Thus behind the darkness of this creation she meets her bright father to receive authentic boons of divine life upon earth. The Yoga-tapasya of Aswapati has thus borne the fruits of godly felicity.
Some Imponderables
There is no doubt that the ancient tale of Savitri is charged with the contents of physical transformation; but then we also see that in its swift narrative it has left many details unsaid. Thus Savitri's winning of the very unusual boon of Satyavan's life from Yama,—the Vedic immortal drinking ambrosia under the Supalāsh tree,—undoubtedly acquires its significance in the marvellous intent of this world's creation. But the story, although it is sufficiently careful to drop the necessary hints, does not go into the multiple processes that operate in time's dynamism. The yogic vision behind it is the Vision of the Future though it may not spell out the means and the details to make it a reality upon earth.
Many questions in the story will therefore trouble the modem mind, but suggestive answers are also to be found in it. Take as an example the tapasya of Aswapati. He retires to the forest and worships goddess Savitri with the intention of getting a boon from her to have a son. For upholding and perpetuating the truth-values in the society, in the collective life, he considers this to be necessary. The continuance of the race of the meritorious engaged in sacrifices is an aspect of Satya Yuga, the Age of the Right, and the responsible should not fail in it. Instead Brahma sanctions him, through Savitri, a daughter. The immediate cause of it is not made known to us and we remain greatly puzzled. This evidently goes to show that the reason behind Aswapati's tapasya lay far beyond the present social concerns; his was more a concern in the direction of the future of the race itself. If
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so, naturally then, Aswapati would invoke that executive Shakti who alone could grant him the propitious boon which would lead him towards the fulfilment of his singular desire. Therefore we can well understand why he worships Savitri and not, say, Shiva or Vishnu,— or the Sun-God himself if the tale belongs to the Vedic times.
The deeper imponderable of the story is perhaps the premature death of Satyavan. Why was he preordained to die in his "beauty's bloom,"—as Torn Dutt says? If it is generally taken for granted that people in the Vedic age lived for a full span of a hundred years then this death took place too early. This is particularly disturbing when we are also told that he was a noble prince, a lustrous youth of exceptional spiritual attainments. He was, as Vyasa says, an ocean of virtuous qualities and therefore it was Yama himself who had come to carry away his soul. But why in the prime of his youth? Was not the Ordainer of the Worlds upsetting the Order of the Worlds by this action of his? In the story we have no clue anywhere as to why Yama should have come so soon, why Satyavan's death was premature. Was it providence, was it fate, was it divine dispensation that worked here? What stands as reality behind this death?
The Vedic life is divided in four stages or ashramas. But the noble prince had hardly completed the first stage. He therefore remained Vedically unfulfilled in the integrality of life that was his native right. This in many respects seems to be incongruous. All that we can say is that in the story Satyavan had to die, that thus alone would Savitri meet Yama and fulfill the purpose of her incarnate birth. But that will not make any sense if she is going to get back the same Satyavan from the God of Death. Yet in the legend there are also sufficient indications of a symbolic nature to tie all these aspects together. It does not go into the rapturous lyricism of love between the two, but Savitri's firm determination to remain fixed in her resolve even in the worst circumstance of life has tacit connotations that go beyond all verbal descriptions. Hers is love that triumphs.
Why should Satyavan die one year after meeting Savitri? But this cannot but happen. That is the power of her love. Its alchemy has to transmute him into absolute gold, lustrous in the tight of the sun. "A curse [was] laid on the pure joy of life"38 and that curse had to be removed. She was there to do that. Their togetherness through a cycle of earthly seasons moved inexorably towards the miracle to set themselves into seasons of the spirit. The moment she chose him as
38 Savitri, p. 629.
her life's partner, all that he had in him as the buried past had to disappear. His deep buried past included the presence of the dark almighty Death himself and it had to get consumed in the fire of her victorious will. That is why the story of Savitri is the story of love conquering death. The moment she saw him and recognised who he was the wondrous deed was done. Savitri's love hastened Satyavan's death. How dangerous! Yet how desirable! If only we die like him in the love of the eternal Savitri who is ever seated within our heart! But his was a ready soul to woo the fiery beloved:
Noble and clear as the broad peaceful heavens
A tablet of young wisdom was his brow,
Freedom's imperious beauty curved his limbs,
The joy of life was on his open face.
His look was a wide daybreak of the gods,
His head was a youthful Rishi's touched with light,
His body was a lover's and a king's.39
The moment Savitri met Satyavan her inner vision knew who he was.
A marvel of the meeting earth and heavens
Is he whom Savitri has chosen mid men,
His figure is the front of Nature's march,
His single being excels the works of Time.
A sapphire cutting from the sleep of heaven,
Delightful is the soul of Satyavan,
A ray out of the rapturous infinite,
A silence waking to a hymn of joy.
A divinity and kingliness gird his brow;
His eyes keep a memory from a world of bliss.40
But what was the intention behind the love of Satyavan and Savitri,— if we have, so to say, to ascribe an intention to the spontaneity of love? The higher imperative was
To mould humanity into God's own shape
And lead this great blind struggling world to light
Or a new world discover or create.
39 Ibid., p. 393. 40Ibid., pp429-30
Ultimately if this creation is to make progress in the ways of the spirit
Earth must transform herself and equal Heaven
Or Heaven descend into earth's mortal state.41
To be Savitri's life partner in the magnificence of her divinity Satyavan had to shed the unregenerate burden of the evolutionary antiquity. He was in his deeper nature now ready to do it. Therefore Narad proclaims loudly that Satyavan, his life here expended, will one year from that day abandon his body, samvatsarena kshinayurdehanyasam karishyati. He is going to abandon his body and not die helplessly. Such was the power of love that moulded his inner will, perhaps he being unaware of it. "Twelve swift-winged months [were] given to him and her,"42 but that was enough for Savitri to do whatever was to be done. Her one-year association with him in love's oneness was occultly essential when whatever had to be worked out was worked out in the enduring greatness of efficacious love. Time prepared the destiny that goes beyond time's cycles. The sanction of one-year period was a necessary and sufficient condition for the intense yogic preparation.
If we have to understand this love's alchemic work in the Dantesque language, we may say that it was the Power of Love that really conquered Death, Love that moves the sun and all the stars. Thus "Love in the wilderness met Savitri"43 to fulfill himself. She enshrined him in her inner soul to make him dynamically triumphant. Now perhaps we know why "Love came to her hiding the shadow, Death,"—that
Well might he find in her his perfect shrine.44
But here is a shrine which is not a frozen lifeless structure, but is the House of Truth itself which imparts its own rhythm of joyous movement to what it enshrines. Fulfilment happens when the lovers pass together through one cycle of divinely operative time. In this way grace, consciousness, truth, redemption and bliss can all be seen on one single thread, the diamond thread of the wonderful Savitri-legend.
41Ibid., p. 486. 42 Ibid., p. 431. 43 Ibid., p. 391. 44 lbid., p. 14.
When Narad sees that Savitri has chosen Satyavan for a husband, he at once bursts into an optimistic rapturous song. He sings of the glory of the name of Vishnu and makes sudden haste to reach king Aswapati's palace in Madra. He is extremely happy that the things that were promised long ago shall now be fulfilled. He is gladdened that in the fire of Savitri's love Satyavan will die, die to his afflicted deathful life. He therefore, as if to precipitate the issue further, designedly makes known to Savitri the impending death of Satyavan. His death was inevitable in the very nature of things and it could not have been avoided. Nay, it was already fixed in the glorious moment of the eternal lovers' meeting. But then why had it to be made known? Why had Narad to carry the Word of Fate? What imperative compelled him to utter in Aswapati's palace the calamitous sentence? This is an imponderable which again moves in an altogether different dimension that should also take care of love's unfailing triumph over death.
But love can conquer death only when it acquires power in the measure that can weigh up to the demands of the task. Narad clearly foresees the magnitude of the problem and, divinely inspired, rushes in righteous urgency to do something marvellous. He must, in the ironfisted circumstance of life prevailing here presently, "steel the will of Savitri."45 She must do Yoga and in her soul harbour the might of the supreme Goddess whose incarnation she was. In that context Narad shows a certain sense of responsibility towards it and actively participates in Savitri's task of moulding the future. He thus proves to be the heavenly preceptor who initiated Savitri on the path of Shakti Yoga. Savitri would not have succeeded in her mission had this not happened.
The fulfilment of Savitri's Shakti Yoga is complete, its Siddhi being the life divine upon earth. She did it entirely in the Will of the Supreme as a sun-bright truth of existence. It is at times said that "the supreme epic of Savitri presents one great conquest of Death and not the last." If it is so then we will have to say that Savitri left her task half-done. This is such a major commentary on the avataric work that it sounds almost suspect and hence unacceptable. But, though Savitri has already vanquished Death, she also tells him to be still there, to be the instrument of her will and her work: functionally she still needs Death,—as if nothing is superfluous in this creation. Should this continued presence of Death be then interpreted in the sense that further conquests are yet to be achieved? But this is not true,—because
45 Ibid., p. 429.
hence onward in whatever form he might continue to exist at the bidding of Savitri, he is always going to be her instrument in universal affairs, in the universal commerce. What greater conquest or greater mastery over Death is then needed than making use of him for her own purposes in the scheme and details of the evolutionary process? The meaning of the mortal world, mrityuloka, indeed becomes clearer to us only when we see the positive dynamism of veilless Death in it. In fact the moment the double covering that Yama had put on himself was removed Savitri's task was done.
Another puzzling feature of the Savitri-epic is the passive role of Satyavan in the great events that were happening in it. If we do get some idea about the role of Aswapati, Savitri and Narad from what is described in it, we should also understand from it the kind of part that was being played by him in the drama of the earth. If Satyavan and Savitri are a dual power of God, then how does he complement her in the work of God? How does he support the play through his wise passivity, through his calm and tranquil submission? Sri Aurobindo has broadly hinted about it especially in the eleventh Book of Savitri.
If the climbing of the earth's soul, the soul that is now ready to receive Supernature's transformative gifts with her powers and potentialities poised to emerge in their great crystalline manifestive glory, then we can understand how through silent ages he had taken upon himself this mortality-bound birth. The question that rather needs to be answered is why at all did Satyavan take this mortality-bound human birth. Why did he come here, to all immediate appearances without any power, as "the Eternal's delegate soul in man"?46 And what is it that took him closer to the fiery Princess of Madra, Savitri, to whom none would dare approach claiming her hand in marriage? Or was the silent helpless preparation under the yoke of fate and circumstance the contributive factor towards this? Is to suffer, so unredeemably, accepting the dicta of the evolutionary nature, also a means to acquire transcendental awareness? Or is there some smouldering fire by which the fuel itself gets somehow kindled in its quiescent transformative blaze?
The incarnate dual Power shall open God's door,
Eternal supermind touch earthly Time.47
46Ibid, p. 633.
47Ibid., p. 705
This is what the passage says. What so far was a revelation has now materialised and taken actual shape. Supermind has touched the earthly time, has entered into the terrestrial process. "Touched"—yes, that was set as the present goal. Sri Aurobindo's task got fulfilled in achieving it. Because the supermind has entered into time, time itself shall unfold the dynamism of its growing ages.
We therefore recognise the 'dual power' as the double divinity incarnate in the context of the terrestrial work. Yet the question remains: Who is Satyavan with all his passive wisdom as the collaborator of his Savitri? Perhaps we may attribute the nature of this power as belonging to a different category. The Mother speaks of Satyavan as an Avatar48 evolutionarily climbing from mortality to divine felicity in life, a permanent incarnation of the Supreme in the inconscient creation. And in it lies his passive wisdom waiting upon the establisher of the truth to manifest himself in the earthly play. He comes here and puts himself in the hands of Nature, Purusha shaped by Prakriti. Satyavan of his own accord cannot climb to divinity without the arrival of Savitri whose birth needs the occult-yogic support, the tapasya, the Divya Yoga of her father Aswapati. To this dual term we have therefore to add the most important aspect of the divine Will now directly entering the matured evolution. In it we can understand the story of Satyavan and Savitri:
Two fires that bum towards that parent Sun
Two rays that travel to the original Light.49
The quiet flame and the roaring flame merge into a superfire, that it be kindled in the heart of the earth. Has this not happened? If Savitri has been doing the Shakti Yoga, Satyavan has all along been engaged / in the Yoga of the Earth, the Prithvi Yoga. The dual power of God has been set on the march by God. Therefore in saluting that power we indeed salute God himself.
48 Questions and Answers, CWM, Vol. 5, p. 391. For discussion of several related aspects, see also R.Y. Deshpande, Satyavan Must Die.1996.
49 Savitri , p. 720.
Part Two
A Brief Resume
In this section we shall quickly run through the several articles that have been included in the present volume. The one single common thread, the diamond thread that ties them together is the spirit of Savitri itself. There are spiritual aspects, occult and mystical aspects, religious aspects, philosophical, literary, aesthetic aspects and each one can be a lifetime engrossment for us to grow into the multi-dimensionality of the creative Word. When the Mother says that Savitri is the supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo, we see at once that its power can take us to the splendours of the future. It is inexhaustible and no amount of treatises or metaphysical discussions or interpretative rationalisations can come anywhere closer to its resplendent form. Vyasa speaks of Aswapati's daughter Savitri as kanyā tejasvini, a radiant daughter. Such indeed is also the poem Savitri. She has the form of such beauty that she looks like a damsel of heaven, devarūpini. No wonder none takes courage to court her, exceptional as she is in her fiery brilliance. Our approaches to her are too human. Yet it is only through them that we can enter into her realms of gold. She makes our mortality bear the touch of the immortal. Each study here may be a first-rate study, but when put together everything seems too insignificant, too little that our eyes can see in her. But hers is also the role of uplifting us to her own grandeur in the delight of endless spiritual progress. To our intimacy with her she shall bring luminous richnesses of the manifesting divinity. We should therefore see the studies entirely from that point of view.
1: Sri Aurobindo spoke of future poetry as the voice of the spirit. It does not automatically follow that there shall be future painting or future music or future science expressing one aspect or another of that creative truth. These have to happen, but not as corollaries. The aesthetic urge has to find the needed means, appropriate instruments and manners of elegant and beautiful expression. One example of the opening of this possibility is the Mother's work in bringing out the Savitri-paintings through Huta. The Mother had told her that she wanted to do something new. This has been done. If we can enter into the true meaning of these paintings then the gain is entirely ours. It becomes a sadhana for our growth, showing the way of spiritual progress. "The Mother," tells Huta, "took my consciousness to other spheres and let me see many extraordinary things in detail, she also
made me feel their vibrations and meet numerous strange beings of different types. Without her direct instructions, guidance and constant help nothing could have been achieved." No wonder there is the atmosphere of light, golden yellow or golden red, or else that of a lake filled with diamond-like lotuses having emerald leaves. There shines the Sun in its tranquil majesty, tranquil glory. It is that glory which shall be present in future painting.
Such is also the wondrous harmony we find in Sunil Bhattacharya's music, music that moves in the rhythms of Savitri.
2: When in the context of the line "All things shall change in God's transfiguring hour" from Savitri the Mother was asked if man can delay or hasten this hour, she replied:
Neither one nor the other in their apparent contradiction created by the separate consciousness, but something else which our words cannot express. In the present state of human consciousness, it is good for it to think that aspiration and human effort can hasten the advent of the divine transformation, because aspiration and effort are needed for the transformation to occur.
Can Matrimandir at Auroville, for instance, mean that transformative aspiration and effort of which the Mother spoke? Yes, it is so; it is a symbol and a possibility. About the body's cells holding the Immortal's flame she says that it is a poetic way of expressing the transformation which will take place. To make that poetic way real, to effect it in the physical, she spared no effort. In that effort in the Will of the Lord she brought the proclaimed future at our doorsteps.
3: After the siddhis of the Individual Yoga and the Universal Yoga Aswapati has to move forward. He has yet to discover the solution to the problem of imperfection of this suffering world. In the Transcendental Yoga of Aswapati a moment comes when he has to make a choice: he must either leave behind all that he had achieved or else he must transform all that into powers of the spirit. But that is possible only by living in pure existence. Then only could he approach the Divine Mother and invoke her to step into the mortal creation in order to transform it. In the Yoga of Savitri,—through which she embodies higher and higher powers of the Divine Shakti in herself,— there arrives also a somewhat similar stage, that she must discover the cosmic spirit and cosmic consciousness. This is in the context that Savitri has a task to do and she cannot disappear into the
Unmanifest. The gulf between that Ultimate Reality and this Manifestation has to be filled. Only after that the Divine Shakti would work in her in order to deal with Death.
Savitri has attained the supreme Nirvan of divine emptiness. "She is passing through the great experience of the Buddha, Sakyamuni, and the Seer of the Taittiriya Upanishad who spoke of the Asat, the Non-Existent." She has offered her gnostic individuality to the Supreme by passing through the experience of Nirvan. She would have vanished into it and gone out of existence. This immergence or laya into her origin would have marked eternal failure of her role in this creation. But the ancient guardian Shakti clutches her and holds her back. Savitri cannot disappear so. On the other hand, the imperative is the integral readiness to embody and manifest the whole in her person. Such is the only decisive or essential factor. Savitri must presently open herself out to hold in her the Divine Shakti for the work of the Divine. Towards this "all finitising movement of the instrumental members of the personality" must be overcome.
Savitri has done this. Now tranquil or receptive identification with all manifested forms is an accomplished fact with her, an inevitable consequence of surrender to the pure Truth that sustains everything. That puts the seal of success on the Yoga of Savitri.
4: Savitri's occult disputation with Death is becoming ineffectual. She therefore decides to resort to a yogic action by entering into her meditation's house. In it her "silent will" joins the Will of the Divine. In that house she witnesses the Vedic Yajna going on with the house-lord and his mate offering oblations. But who are they performing the eternal sacrifice? We may say that on the individual level they are the soul of Satyavan and the soul of Savitri. But the great sacrifice has to also grow on other levels. On the cosmic dimension in her house of meditation Agni is the Lord of the House with Aditi as Swaha seated to his left offering oblations. In its transcendental aspect the Supreme himself is the house-lord with the executrix Shakti as his mate engaged in this sacrifice for the sake of the creation. Out of this Tapas-Yajna or the force of concentration were the worlds bom and in that sacrifice shall they ever grow. The human Savitri on entering her house of meditation sees the divine reality of her own self and makes her will one with the transcendent Will. It is in that divine reality of her self that she gets the power which is vaster and mightier than the power of Death the Terrible. Now she becomes the indisputable leader of the evolutionary march and is sure of her victory. Although a small Yajna is constantly being performed in the heart of
each one of us, this Yajna of Savitri is unique in its triple dimension of the Supreme. If her Yajna is to dissolve ignorance and death, that in the ever-progressive manifestation divinity may inhabit this house of Matter, ours is to grow in that sun-bright splendour of divinity itself. That is the House of Meditation.
5: Our journey starts in the morning, the hour of the symbol dawn. Around us the star-field stretches to infinity, but now let us look down far below where a dark planet is moving ponderously in its orbit around the sun. We are about to begin our journey, the fascinating journey towards new life in a new world. Sri Aurobindo himself, as Aswapati, is our guide. Savitri, with its luminous images and powerful music that speak directly to our innermost being, is the supreme travel-guide. Everywhere in that pilgrim-chant are invoked by the magnificence and majesty of Sri Aurobindo's language and vision luminous powers who, unseen companions, accompany us at every step of journey: "Varuna active within is a remover of limits, Saraswati a bringer of revelation, Sarama the power of intuitive mind to search out Truth. In the mind's silence they interpret for us the images that rise and change before our eyes, as if by some magical process, conjures them line by line. These are images charged with a profound truth and significance beyond the capacity of language to express." Eventually the journey arrives at the yoga of integral surrender to the Divine. When we are conscious in every part of our being, then perfect offering becomes possible. The path then becomes a path of action and will.
6: Savitri has to meet Death. Therefore Death comes to her in the form of the death of her husband Satyavan. It is through the death of Satyavan that she has to work out the victory for which she had incarnated herself in this mortal world. In that sense Satyavan's body becomes her alter-body. If we actually see this episode in the deep biographical context of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother we recognise that the identity of their consciousness has a decisive role in the work of transformation. When in 1949 it became occult-yogically necessary for one of them to leave the body for the fulfilment of their work, it was Sri Aurobindo who took the strategic decision to 'die'. It was a kind of prophetic destiny, just as Satyavan's destined death. It was dying to Death itself. In the sequel, in 1961 the Mother had to battle with the Lord of Death and she came out victorious.
In the epic Savitri represents the Mother in totality, and there are no two views about it. But regarding Satyavan or Aswapati there are opinions. "Sri Aurobindo has always been the Earth's Jiva, Satyavan, the Original Avatar and in this incarnation a combination of Aswapati
and Satyavan." In any case the coming together of Satyavan and Savitri is absolutely necessary if there has to be the birth of the New Race. They are the bright parents of the sons and daughters who will be bom to live a divine life upon the earth. For the purposes of the manifestation their mystic union is essential. The answering Grace from above that is Savitri and the aspiring Soul from below who is Satyavan meet only because of Aswapati's intense Yoga-Tapasya.
7: It is well known and also well recognised that the mind of man is a not an adequate instrument for the discovery of the gnostic Truth from which all the faculties originate. But when mind fails what can come to our help is sight. It is by acquiring the sight of the Spirit that we may get some idea of the vast reality that is there behind this creation which otherwise looks to be a dim and shadowy world of ignorance. In fact ascending through the grades of spiritual consciousness, our sight also climbs to higher and higher worlds and in the process it acquires a certain universality; it can leap even into the transcendent. What was so far incomprehensible now comes into its all-encompassing view. In that sight an identity between the subject and the object is at once experienced. Then the "spirit is no more hid from its own view." The gaze of eternity itself spreads across this cosmic manifestation. In it sight can penetrate into the form to see the formless, as much as it can be the other way around also. When one has this sight one sees that the form itself is inherent even in the formless, that it already exists in its mystic latency everywhere. It is only the divine sight which is truly capable of seizing the supreme form. This mystic latency finally progresses into a recognised full-grown potency in the play of manifestation. Indeed, there is no end to sight when it becomes one with the Eternal' s gaze. A vision that is omniscient sees and sustains all that is.
8: If we put Savitri in the class of religious texts, such as Saptashati and Devi Bhagavata, then it has to be recited aloud daily. It has the power of profound vibrations that can create in us states that have sound forms of reality. Although such an approach of looking at it as a scripture may not be the right one to live in the world of Savitri, it has yet the merit of exploring the occult aspects that are present in the depths of our nature, our inner existence that should open to higher working. It tells a story, it makes us think, meditate, struggle; "it takes us to the spaces of a divine calm where all is one seamless Ananda." Aswapati's invocation to the Divine Shakti and her response, that she shall descend carrying all mights and greatnesses in her, are sufficiently indicative of the role of the Tantra in the efficacy of the
Integral Yoga. To effect transformation in all the details, including even our obdurate physical constitution, she incarnates herself here. She is bom as a daughter to the Tapasvin. "Again and again we are drawn to the Mother idea in Savitri, for Sri Aurobindo found this to be the most potent instrument to lead man to the life divine." A fixed and unfailing aspiration is answered by the supreme Grace from above. This boon which Aswapati received has therefore behind it the sanction of the supreme Creator himself. However, it must be immediately noted that the Tantrik elements in Savitri are not ritualistic, as are generally associated with this discipline.
It is interesting to see the growth of Aswapati's daughter Savitri with the scriptural ideas. The Tantra texts deal extensively with the different ages of the Mother. "Sri Aurobindo follows this idea and we have a whole canto that had been inspired by a single term in Vyasa: kanya tejasvini." From this point of view we may see that Savitri is actually set as a devt kāvyam. "Hence we have also to grow along with the idea of the Devi; and so we are granted a double vision through the magic of poetry to watch the human and the divine as an indivisible whole. We see Savitri as one among her kind and yet, somehow, different." Can it then be said that the epic's "Book of Yoga draws a major portion of its material from the Tantra"? But this may be considered more as a part of integral Tantrism entering into operation of the occult-spiritual. Just as we recognise the deities of the Tantra to embody their powers in us, to experience their living presence in us, to grow in them, the world of Savitri also needs to be seen as an experiential truth. If physical nature, with the character of ignorance housing death, has to be tackled then surely the powers of this New Tantra Shastra are available to the desirous soul.
9: If Savitri abounds in the ancient Indian spiritual lore, there is also a good deal of Bible in it. We have references such as God's covenant with the Night, the Son of God, the Father, the Holy Ghost, God's martyred body, Gethsemane and Calvary, or Christian Madonna's or images of cathedral and tabernacle. About the Great who come to save this suffering world we have in Narad's speech a picture of Christ. If Savitri was bom in the greatness of the Saviour then she must accept the lot of mortality in order to change it. The elaborate biblical picture of Christ is taken as an illustration. The Son of God comes as the Son of Man to drink the bitter cup. This is a direct echo of Christ's words in the Bible with the symbolism that is at once obvious. Jesus undergoes intense agony not long before the great sacrifice. The cause of this agony is Man's callousness, denial,
betrayal. The phrase "It is finished" is famous and Sri Aurobindo has used it in the most appropriate manner in the context.
Christians do not think in terms of God the Mother. But if there is an identity between Jesus and Lady Wisdom as the Word of God, then there seems to be a close link between the Lady Wisdom and the Supreme Mother and her incarnation as Savitri. It is she who is "the Incarnate Word of God" in the poem. She is the Saviour. While speaking of her Narad brings before us the magnificent vignette of the Crucifixion. "There are hints of the association of Savitri with Christ from the very beginning of the poem. Though association does not imply identification, it nevertheless does imply a close link between the two." Regarding Savitri's suffering we have the symbolism of passion-flower which "suggests the instruments of Christ's passion or his suffering on the Cross. The corona of the creeper suggests the crown of thorns." The Christ-figure is seen in Savitri in relation to the world's evolution and as a step in the direction.
A study of Savitri seems to make the Old Testament's Book of Job most spiritual. Pain as the hand of nature sculpturing Man is the Aurobindonian interpretation of Job's suffering. "In Job it is the Lord himself who causes pain and suffering on the protagonist in order to raise him from the Sattwic state of perfection to the state of a Gunatita who can have the direct vision of the Lord." Finally, the Lord reveals his Infinity to Job. "Once Job sees the Lord with his own eyes, there is neither pain nor grief. It is possible that a study of Savitri could throw at least some light on other portions of the Bible as it can on other Scriptures." This is so because Savitri is a Scripture that includes, and transcends, the essence of all other Scriptures.
10: The epic Savitri is a wonderful piece of architectural engineering. It is also vibrant in the sculpted forms that can embody the breathing souls of formless Infinity. The rock-hewn temple in the mystic cave of Savitri's heart is a beautiful example of this Art. She enters into the deep recess and finds herself amidst great figures of the gods conscious in stone and living without breath. In fact, this Art itself can then become a great yogic Art. We may therefore say that in it is the world of "true matter" where the supramental physicality will first manifest. Accordingly, it can be viewed as the sculptor's stone or clay through which is expressed the divine idea behind the form. It is an idea that is inaccessible to the ordinary human mind. Here then a creative artist becomes a Shilpa Yogin, with his art as heaven's art. He passes beyond sensible Nature and as an artist enters the Age of Subjectivism. He develops a highly specialised
technique of vision. The form is held in view in "an act of non-differentiation" to execute in stone, pigment or other material that which is invisibly seen.
Yet this inner visualisation could become a constraint as a subjection to external reality. There has to be an art with eyes wide open. The modern Shilpa Yogin's has to be sajāg-sādhanā. Such contemplation and representation is the invitation for the future art. "The Gods must be shaped within to live in us and an inspired dynamic union with the Transcendent's sphere lead us into a Divine Life on earth." That shall be the future Art.
11: Is the Yoga of Aswapati a series of negations? There may be a certain atmosphere of grief and gloom spread over Savitri, but nowhere do we have pessimistic or negative feeling about things to come. What is displayed is the pragmatism in handling the issue of pain and suffering in the mortal world. It is the deep-rooted problem of death that is being tackled by the three protagonists, affirming the evolutionary future in the splendour of divinity. Aswapati invoking the divine grace, Savitri carrying out successfully the occult battle, and the soul of the earth called Satyavan stepping into the world of knowledge mark the unfoldment of the epic's theme. It may also be considered as a multiple biography extending over space and time far beyond the parameters of the legend.
But from the point of view of a biography there are a number of questions that demand proper elucidation. Why does, for instance, Sri Aurobindo write the name Aswapati for the first time on page 341 in the epic? This may be partly seen in terms of the legend on which the epic is built. Although this part of the poem is directly experiential-autobiographical in nature, the poet has retained the pregnant elements of the legend to serve his purpose of narrating those yogic realisations. The author resorts to the plain comprehensible technique of story telling. The legendary figure of Aswapati thus turns out to be the most apt. It would have been therefore unaesthetic and incongruous to keep on harping all the while the name of Aswapati the protagonist as the Avatar. The problem of identifying Aswapati of the legendary past with Sri Aurobindo of the divine future thus reduces to the understanding of the nature of the device of a story used by Sri Aurobindo. It is in this way that he gives expression to his avataric work. There is the least doubt that half of Savitri is Sri Aurobindo's occult-spiritual biography. It is therefore well said that if "one reads the first half of Savitri without Sri Aurobindo himself in mind (and in the heart),
one not only misses its true significance: one also erects a screen between the spiritual vibration conducive to his Yoga and one's own receptivity."
12: The traveller Aswapati is moving through several worlds in the pursuit of that which shall unravel the enigma of this creation and give a clue to the solution of its difficulties. As long as death is present in this world there cannot be true progress and happiness. Aswapati climbs these hierarchies, these worlds rising one above another in an endless series; he experiences their limitations and their possibilities, finds their meaning and purpose in the scheme of things, their realities. Even in the heart of the Night, Aswapati finds a place where all conflict is resolved. In that hostile emptiness he suddenly comes across the spring of divinity. It is that divinity which must emerge from the darkness and step into the light of the everlasting day. Soon Aswapati enters the domain of the World-Soul. Here are lovely landscapes and lakes and streams. A fragrance fills the ambience. Here is the meaningful rest for souls to assimilate the bygone experiences in order to sketch the map of a new life. It is in this world that Aswapati meets the twofold being in one who is seated in a trance of creative joy. The Divine Mother, sole and omnipotent, stands there supporting all. Aswapati falls prostrate at her feet. Then, in the Kingdom of the Greater Knowledge, he could see all the creative powers in their plenitude, powers quiet and fulfilled, powers that can take care of our mortality.
Aswapati is now free from the bondage of death and ignorance. But his aim is not only to realise the Divine; it is to manifest the perfection of the Divine in the world. He was looking for the one who would enable him to accomplish this unique task. That was the purpose of his long extraordinary odyssey described in 210 pages of the epic. These are the incredible experiences of Aswapati which become the foundation for the Divine to descend, to come as the power of grace to transform mortality. Aswapati realises that such a power, the supramental consciousness, is not yet manifest in the cosmic formula and unless that comes here, there cannot be the genuine fulfilment of this creation. He is now ready for the Yoga of the Transcendental to establish the supramental upon earth.
13: "Once Jesus of Nazareth, we are told in the New Testament, narrated to the people a parable. He said the kingdom of God is like a pearl that is most sought after. And when one has found it, one goes out and sells that entire one has and buys the pearl. Savitri is such a pearl for which one could give up what one has in order to get it."
What is that so pearl-like in Savitri? It depends upon one's approach towards it: there is philosophy in it, there is rich metaphysics, mysticism, occult knowledge, religion, science, literature, cosmogony, history of civilisation, history of evolution, everything that one wishes to have. But indeed it is the supreme revelation which brings divinity to our mortality in order to transform it into its own nature that draws us closer to it. What is it that which one will not or should not sacrifice for its sake?
One of the most appealing aspects of Savitri is of life that passes from time into eternity, as much as the other way around. It is a quest for the Divine even in this mortality-bound world. Jacob's ladder was built long ago, the ladder on which the angels of God move up and down. It is available to us also,—if we wish to use it. But today we are trapped in a time warp. Our helplessness is the inability to get out of the constraints of time.
The problem ultimately gets quintessenced in the death of Satyavan. Sage Narad says that Satyavan must die after a year of the marriage; but that also means that Satyavan will live for one year. This is the year during which we can get ready to meet death. We are in the angst of death, of facing nothingness. In it is the annihilation of our own being. But the very consciousness of this dread can catapult us to realise our own being to go beyond whatever death entails in its negatively creative aspect.
That is what we get from Savitri, which is "not a book of sweet poems and blissful spirituality. It is not like the musings of a poet, of an imaginary spiritual heaven. It comes to grips with the nitty-gritty of life in sharper contrast than the existentialists claim." Zen-like Savitri tells us to be aware of the world. But that is awareness in the truth of existence. In it we have to grow as conscious individuals. It is this awareness that has to be a means for the Divine to express itself in this world. We move in time to make progress in awareness. Time is given to us precisely for that purpose. The cycle of time, symbolised by one year after which Satyavan is to die, thus becomes triumphantly meaningful. In it indeed is the significance of Savitri's great victory over Death. Our search for the pearl is to always live in that glory.
14: When we talk of true poetry that goes beyond the mental level or else our quick ordinary vitalistic satisfaction, we await the revelatory word that can make the sublime a part of our humdrum life. That is what Savitri does to us. It is the noblest experiential poetry, the veritable Veda of the Modern Age. It communicates mantric
vibrations that defy analysis. "Savitri may remain on hands, lap or desk, but we find ourselves soaring, in repeated flashes of extraordinary illumination, intonormally inaccessible heights; or plunging into hitherto unsuspected and otherwise mortally dangerous depths." In the process when life only becomes an attempt to love, without integrating it with death, what we get is just a far glimmer of victory over death. Both life and death have to be offered as fuel to make the stars bum in the sky in their true and all-comprehensive brightness. Savitri had God-given strength and, for the creation of the new world, she put that God-given strength entirely at the disposal of that God himself. Thus she became entirely, including even her physical body, a luminous instrument that could express the Will of the Lord in the freest possible way. In that supreme identification her task was accomplished and now whatever has to happen that will happen in the certainty of that wonderful achievement of hers. Is that not devotional or Bhakti poetry par excellence? That is Savitri.
15: It is at times said that a poet should be a philosopher, a prophet and a seer. His vision should stretch to the stars. His philosophy should unravel the mystery of the creation. As a prophet he should bring nobility of the spirit to our life. Can we say all that about Lucretius, the Latin poet? He promises to reveal the ultimate realities of heaven and of the gods. But the promise is a materialist's promise. In contrast to that Sri Aurobindo's Savitri has "the twin task of knowing the causes of things and laying all fears of Fate and roar of Death under his feet."
Lucretius waxes lyrically about the universe when he lays Aristotelian geocentricity aside. There is no outside to the universe and hence is not bound. Space is infinite and so matter too should be infinite. For him there is no necessity of a god to arrange the universe. On the contrary, he argues that the notion or supposition of the presence of divine nature in cosmic order will be full of flaw. There is neither past nor future to life and therefore we should remain unconcerned to life. Indeed all our dreams are made by Matter's mind. Here is Death himself, the dark and terrible entrepreneur, upholding the nihilist ideal of existence that has no issue to enter into any enterprise, whom we meet in Savitri speaking eloquently. The poet's extraordinarily bleak attitude to love makes him suggest promiscuity as a natural condition. This is Epicureanism at its extremest.
Contrast this with Savitri: In her love is not a hunger of the heart but that which has its origin in god's delight. Savitri asserts that Love is the Transcendental's angel here, man's lien on the Absolute. No
wonder, Lucretuis's epic should end with a gruesome account of the great plague in Athens at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. This is so, argues he, because man must be courageous to face even death. In Savitri, on the other hand, we have the promise of immortality upon earth, bringing multifold divinity into life. In it is the well-bom and virtuous fructification of our deepest aspiration and that is why it becomes to our excellent sense admirable and acceptable. The theory of negativism can be put pretty forcefully but, ultimately, it fails to satisfy the warm intimate urges of our inner soul and our spirit. Savitri is at once that promise and that fulfilment.
16: It is well known that the composition of Savitri went through several stages. There are bafflingly a large number of manuscript and typescript sheets of the drafts that preceded the final emergence of the text as we have presently with us. "The opening pages of the earliest known manuscript of Savitri are dated August 8th-9th 1916. In November 1950, the month before his passing, Sri Aurobindo dictated the last passages to be added to the work. Between 1916 and 1950, Savitri grew from a medium-length narrative poem, consisting of about eight hundred lines in the first draft, to an epic of thirty times that length, all-embracing in its scope and inexhaustible in its significance." Before the 'final' printed version of Savitri came out it went through some eight thousand pages of drafting with revisions and additions taking place at every stage. There are some parts that evolved through as many as fifty versions.
Thus the story of the composition of Savitri itself turns out to be an absorbing story. It may very well run into several fat volumes which, we hope, will one day be available to the researchers of the epic. In the entire process of composition the Savitri-legend itself acquired new dimensions and new significances. What began as a simple narrative became a symbol characterising the predicament of the evolutionary world. Through the untiring work over long years Sri Aurobindo approached the problems of death, fate and pain in the context of his spiritual engagement. The revolutionary of yesteryears rose in him to battle and conquer the dark forces that beset this unfortunate ignorant creation. To win authentic freedom for the unhampered growth of the spirit was now his single concern. If for this purpose the stubborn, rather anachronistic, Law of decay-disintegration-death had to be trampled over, there were no compunctions about it. In fact in order to achieve it there was nothing left undone and full price was paid towards it. We thus understand Sri Aurobindo's Aswapati as an autobiographical symbol of "the
concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes." In it is the success of Savitri's divine mission which also forms an inalienable part of that double autobiography. In it Savitri accomplished that for which at his invocation she had taken the mortal birth.
17: There are very respectable critics who do not see Sri Aurobindo as a poet at all. There are even advices recommending that yogis as a matter of rule should be debarred from expressing themselves in verse since, it is maintained, they do it so badly. If we should accept such a criticism to be well meant, then we may see that the problem actually lies in the inability to go beyond the immediate ideas of aesthetic enjoyment. It is unfortunate that the modem mind, though we quite appreciate its caution against emptiness and imprecision, due to its ineptitude fails to go to the worlds of deeper rhythm or image or thought. That undoubtedly would make the poetry of the spirit abhorrent or anathematical to its psychology.
But what is needed is a special intuitive faculty if we are to enter into the poetry of Savitri which is a revelatory Word that can make that revelation itself a reality here. Its poetic achievement must be seen in terms of the divine riches it brings to us in their happy abundance. "And nowhere in Savitri is his use of language more powerful, complex and original than in the first half of the first canto of Book One. Here Sri Aurobindo achieves something that... has never been attempted elsewhere in world-literature... certainly nowhere else in the history of the English language. The only parallel might be found in the composition of the Rig Veda where an inner psychological sense is, as Sri Aurobindo has shown, carried by an outer one that is physical and ritual. For in this overture to the mighty symphony of his epic, Sri Aurobindo fuses multiple layers of meaning—literal, psychological, occult and spiritual—in a single flow of incomparable music." Here we have inspired 'ambiguity' in poetic language which allows several meanings to be present simultaneously. If we are alert to their simultaneous significances, world after wondrous world opens out to our perception in luminous spontaneity. We live in their glad and gracious benignances to grow more and more in the aspect of the manifesting divinity. That is the power of mantric speech brought to us by Sri Aurobindo in his Savitri. That indeed is the nature of the Mantra of the Real, Satya Mantra.
18: The fascination that the Symbol Dawn of Savitri holds for us is indubitably beyond any description. It is a unique creation in the entire world literature. It is not only spiritually profound; even on the
literary-aesthetic level we are "touched by its splendid imagery, its subtle rhythms, and its majestic movement." From the point of view of its architect what we most admire is its internal structure and its integral relationship with the imagery. "It has been observed that Savitri is written in lines of iambic pentameter with approximately four to six lines per sentence (indicated by a full stop). It has also been observed that within a four- to six-line sentence, a main clause in the first line or a main clause or phrase in the final line summarises the idea presented in that sentence. In addition to the sentence, there are structural divisions within the cantos which the poet indicates with visual devices such as blank lines and paragraph indentation. A close reading of the first canto, however, reveals that between the sentence and these larger sectional divisions, there is another level of logico-thematic structure... and that these thematic units are marked by single-line sentences (or, in some cases, independent clauses). These units are integral to our understanding of the first canto."
Looking at it in an essayistic manner it is noticed that the development of a particular theme is generally preceded and followed by single-line sentences. Not only has this technique a structural relevance; it also makes poetry evocative. Time vs. Timelessness, World and Nature vs. Spirit and God, Darkness and Sleep vs. Light and Awakening are the three lines of imagery that are used to work out the idea-substance in several degrees of significance of the coming Dawn. This aspect of supreme artistry in Savitri as a poem perhaps reinforces its mantric quality in a mutually advantageous way. "The three lines of imagery which run throughout this canto reverberate in our minds and hearts like a repeated mantra," carrying us to the richer worlds of the Spirit. The builder and deviser of form scales calm blue heights in the yogic sky of wonder and beauty. To appreciate its sublimity and grandeur we too should have that faculty which alone can reveal the poetry.
19: Lotika Ghose's brief but perceptive study of her uncle Sri Aurobindo's poetry was one of the earliest works that has the mark of an enduring literary evaluation. She was the daughter of Sri Aurobindo's poet-brother Manmohan. Once she was taken aback when Spiegelberg, the admirer of The Life Divine, told her that the poetry of the author of the philosophical opus was "entirely Greek". This was before 1949, when only two volumes of Sri Aurobindo's earlier poetry and dramas had come out as Collected Poems and Plays in 1942. Undoubtedly, one sees in them the chiselled perfection of images drawing inspiration from the master sculptors of Greece, giving
ample justification to what Spieglberg had observed. "The formal purity, the restraint even in richness, the freedom from rhetorical device and verbal excess mark his poetry away from Sanskrit poetry."
Even when it comes to the spiritual themes Sri Aurobindo does not veil his mystic realisations. His insights in allegory, his use of myth or symbol, all have the language of living experience in poetry. No wonder that in his hand the legend of Savitri should win for us its deepest symbolic truth. "Through āropa or superposition he has made the legend the purveyor of his spiritual realisations." That is precisely what makes Savitri as the great fulfilment of Sri Aurobindo's poetic genius. Indeed, that should immediately dispel the doubt that a Yogi's experiences can at all form the subject-matter of poetry. Had not Dante taken the Christian mystical experience and made an attempt to grasp the inner unity through a traditional myth? The result is a wondrous pictorial beauty. Much more than that is Savitri. In Sri Aurobindo the myth is made to yield up its truth-element and to embody his accomplishments in which we can, and should, live gainfully. One of the powers of great poetry lies in the illumination it renders to the subject. Obviously, and paradoxically, it needs a fine eye to see such a brilliance. He would be a bold critic indeed who would deny to Savitri the high estimate of such poetry. But if there are such brave critics their's would be the voices of the past, the past that is trying to survive in the inevitable death. In this tachyonic age of information technology, one may rightfully ask if there are books of poetry at all that get sold in thousands? The professional critic has remained rather unfortunately shut to its marvels; but a large perceptive readership, though perhaps less adept at its multifold wonder, has also grown around it. The wizardry, the enchantment of Savitri is felt only by a receptive soul and therefore what is necessary for us is to open ourselves to it.
20: Sri Aurobindo is categorical in his statement that he never wrote anything in Savitri merely for the sake of "picutresqueness or rhetorical turn". But that does not mean that there are no images or other poetic features that we commonly take as attributes of good poetry. If we yet want to go by these canons of judgement, we do at times see in Savitri what may be called "detachable ornaments". But even these detachable ornaments always organically form an integral part of its composition. Sri Aurobindo accepts them and uses them to create great poetry. The magic of inspiration has the power to make all these as its breathing reality. Symbolism in Savitri can be
understood and appreciated only by going into the nature of the poem and the power of its evocative Word.
Usage of symbols forms the most important element of Savitri's poetic technique. Indeed, it brings nearer to us the presence of the Divine. Through symbolic language the poet gives rapturous expression to things inaccessible to our immediate experience. Symbols in Savitri come with their truth-revealing power. There are several categories of images in the epic: groups of words as images, single line expressions, paintings in words, idioms carving figures of truth and beauty, long and sustained metaphors as we have in the symbol dawn or the world-stair or the sailor of the cosmic sea; then we also have an entire canto as a symbol of the poet's yogic vision. But nowhere is to be seen a deliberate indulgence in image making. Spiritual truth and its expression are the main concerns in Savitri. Symbolism in Sri Aurobindo's poetry thus becomes not a pale decorative ornament to satisfy merely certain aesthetic tastes; what is intended is to bring out through them the soul of a radiant creation in the felicity of the spirit. It adds another quality to the overall expression inspired by the Goddess of Poetry.
21: We must recognise that historical-literary influences, howsoever great or appealing these be, can hardly form the basis for appreciating Sri Aurobindo's Savitri. Yet it does not mean that in noble and lofty poetry we look for originality in the sense of "chemical purity". Contact with literature of the past has its own alchemic role to play,—even in what is called the Overmind aesthesis. The deeper sources of inspiration that have been explored by the past can be the part of a larger experience of the future when explored and assimilated in its creative enterprise. In that sense "influences do not discredit a great poet; on the contrary, they reveal the wideness, complexity and power of his poetic mind." Savitri has all these in rich abundance. Take the use of the old legend itself. It belongs to those legends which are "very simple and beautiful" and have "infinite possibilities of sweetness and feeling, and in the hand of great artists have blossomed into dramas and epics of the most delicate tenderness or the most noble sublimity." This is justification enough to take for themes these legends and myths. But there are other aspects of 'influence' also. From the Indian tradition Valmiki, Vyasa and Kalidasa are present in Savitri as far as possible in the genius of the English language. Both inspiration and vision of the early Vedic poets have left their mark on Savitri; but it is the Upanishads that have directly contributed to the formulation of the new poetics.
If an essential relation between the linguistic form and the content goes to make a great creation, then it can be gainfully asserted that "the blank verse of Savitri has evolved from Kalidasian influence and culminated to what it is through that of the metrical Upanishads." Perhaps some of these elements have themselves recreated the Vedic experience of the Mantra of the Real in Savitri. But it goes beyond even these glorious achievements. It is, as Sri Aurobindo says, "a new poetry with a new law of expression and technique." It is the poetry of the future built on the great poetic realisations of the past. In it the human and secular legend of Savitri becomes the Legend of the Future. Surely, that opens out another window to view the many-hued perspectives of its aesthetic possibilities.
22: If for a moment we go only by the stylistic considerations, we at once see that Savitri makes a marked departure from the traditional invocation having the story's beginning with the end-stopped line. In Milton's Paradise Lost we have just 26 lines to get going; but in Savitri Sri Aurobindo takes time to state the gist of the theme. The theme itself looks into the fundamental issue as to why Paradise should have been lost at all. Paradise needs no Death who, after all, is an inevitable spoiler; but, then, neither is there freedom from the frozen happiness of that typal world howsoever grand it be. To justify the larger ways of God wisdom seems to see the desirability of an antagonist foe in the efficacy of the initial working. Then shall come the flaming warrior and redeem the creation. That is how through Aswapati's eyes the poet of Savitri presents his visions.
Let us take some examples. Wisdom, beauty, gladness of life all contribute to the image of Satyavan, with joy on his open face. Hisv look a wide daybreak of the gods, his head a youthful Rishi's touched by light, his body a lover's and a king's,—that is Satyavan. But then this splendid youth had to be short-lived, he doomed to die too prematurely. When Savitri met him in the forest she wanted him to speak until the light would enter her heart. In her words there was a "passionate urgency", in her imploration the wish to feel through his words the significance of her own deathless inner being. Yet Savitri had to meet the existential crisis, epitomised in the death of her husband. The waging of last battle thus becomes inevitable. In it Death's recourse is, to put it from the point of view of a literary critic, to "anaphoral devices to mesmirise the flaming lady." But she uses prophetic idiom to meet the challenge. "The debate is a curious interplay of pessimistic irony and inspired optimism." While this may be taken as a literary mode of expression, the opposing figures hurl
occult powers against each other. Finally, the deeper and undisclosed issue in the clashing of forces is resolved in the expressive Word itself. In it a new Paradise on this mortal Earth is bom to grow in the Ways of the Infinite.
23: Fine jewellers and gem-setters often remain themselves unrecognised and what is generally adored is their artistic creation. In their hand even the commonest metal can acquire a godly quality of amazement which we may profitably worship. In India where a roadside stone can be turned into an idol, it is little wonder that precious metals and gemstones as repositories of occult powers should find place in mystic-spiritual poetry. Precious stones are structurally more perfect than ordinary stones. These can be charged with consciousness. Such can also be their use in literary creations. This use can go far beyond the ideas of ornamentation or embellishment to create certain effects in writing. In fact they become embodiments of secret deities to breathe majesties in our life.
Keats travelled much in the realms of gold and was led to the discovery of oneness of truth and beauty. Savitri abounds in the unity of many other powers of conscious existence. Its sunlight can be golden red or gold and green or simply golden yellow. Each one carries an unerring psychological shade bringing out one aspect or another of our association with the spirit. As an example, take the "moon-gold feet" of Savitri when we see her meeting Satyavan for the first time. She is still in her chariot and looks at him with wondering eyes. Already a sea-change has taken place in her. But her coming down would imply the descending Spirit touching and transforming Matter. She combines in herself both divinity and feminine earthly grace and the description is poetically as well as romantically very apt. Indeed, throughout we are made conscious of the fact that "she is the Sun-Word, the ultimate perfection that poetry aspires to achieve, the magnificent Mantra that puts us in contact with the worlds of Truth and Beauty and Joy."
Similarly, on several occasions we witness that, "what is exquisite about Sri Aurobindo's imagination is the gentle yoking of usually irreconcilable elements like sky and forest into one metaphor: emerald." He transfers the fabulous quality of centaurs to Nature with the colour of emerald mane. Or else when Satyavan is described as a "sapphire cutting" from heaven, it is suggested that he is also the possessor of that immensity of luminous heaven in his soul. Towards the end of the epic we see Savitri bearing the burden of Infinity and coming back to earth with the soul of Satyavan. Yet someone with
peacock plumes of gorgeous hue, framing a sapphire, pursues her with a heart-disturbing smile. "In this context 'sapphire' at the metronymic level is a gem worn by the youth; at the metaphoric level sapphire is the insignia of his royalty. Savitri is assured the fulfilment of her mission." There are other precious stones also in Savitri and where they occur they have significant roles in the development of specific themes of the poem. Thus diamond threads signify the invincible strength that binds the lovers together. Time and Eternity, which remained apart in Satyavan's earlier life, have now got joined with each other. Similarly, what seemed to be abstract about the higher planes of consciousness at once becomes concrete in the image of the crystal. The crystal mood of air conveys a sense of mystery that condenses and expands into purity of air.
The effective use of jewels and gold with poetic and spiritual connotations provides insights into the depths of Savitri. Jewels become a medium for depicting abstruse and subtle shades of the spiritual experience. This medium not only conveys the power of the word, its concretising mantric effect; it also gives to it a gleaming solidity. Objects are matched together and metamorphosed through strikingly new images. That makes Savitri the poem a jewelled hilt in the hands of a daring Warrior to win new kingdoms of aesthetic joy and wonder. But the Poet as a Master-creator uses all these devices with absolute precision to bring those marvellous worlds of joy and wonder into our being. A new sense of beauty is seized to seize truth and delight in this life of ours. That is the creative power of spiritual poetry which comes here in measures of rich felicities.
24: The Mahabharata legend of Savitri given as Pativrata Mahatmya is rarely narrated in simple Sanskrit prose. In fact the very contents of the original text have unfortunately undergone several unacceptable changes in the course of time as it got transmitted through different vernaculars. These narratives not unoften present a naive picture of the radiant princess who fought the battle with Yama to win immortality for man's soul in the earthly existence. The dilution of the Mahabharata story has also led to the unhappy loss of the real significance of a spiritual possibility depicted in the form of a household occurrence. It is necessary that we should adhere to the text that has an exceptional nobility which can convey the true spiritual purport that is there behind it. Precisely because the ancient tale of Savitri is so powerful that, Sri Aurobindo made it a basis for giving us his magnum opus which is capable of rising to the stature of an autobiography.
25: Ancient Ballads of Hindustan is a remarkable work of young Tom Dutt (8 March 1856-30 August 1877) falling in the genre of early creative Indian writings in English. This "daughter of Bengal, so admirably and strangely gifted, Hindu by race and tradition, an English woman by education, a French woman at heart, [she] blended in herself three souls and three traditions." The character of Savitri fighting with Death himself, fighting with the power of love and getting "better of him", becomes more appealing in her when she also recognises that he, as Yama, is both the Destroyer and the Upholder of the Worlds. The Ballads was published posthumously in 1882. Speaking about Toru Dutt, Sri Aurobindo tells us as follows: "Toru Dutt was an accomplished verse-builder with a delicate talent and some outbreak of genius and she wrote things that were attractive and sometimes something that had strong energy of language and a rhythmic force."so While commenting on the 19th century literary contributions of Bengal, he mentions that Toru Dutt "could write English with perfect grace and correctness and French with energy and power."51
It was a remarkable insight of Toru Dutt to have seen in the Savitri-ballad the sublime character of Yama. In the discourse with Yama we can discern what Savitri felt in the depth of her soul. Toru Dutt reveals that the God behind the traditional Yama is Love indeed. That imparts to the legend a genuine quality charged with high spiritual contents. Transformed Death in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is this noble Yama bestowing the boon of divine life on earth. Toru Dutt's poetry is not only enchantingly lyrical; it is also luminous. Let us take an example. When Savitri upholds the Law of Righteousness even in the face of Death, in Vyasa we have:
By the Truth the saints lead the sun;
by askesis the saints uphold the earth;
the past, present and future find their refuge in the saints.
Noble persons in the midst of the saints have never any grief.
Toru Dutt re-creates it as follows:
50The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9,p.453
51Harmony of Virtue, SABCL, Vol. 3,p.79.
Of all the pleasure given on earth
The company of the good is best,
For weariness has never birth
In such a commerce sweet and blest;
The sun runs in its wonted course,
The earth its plenteous treasure yields,
All for their sake, and by the force
Their prayer united ever wields.
Oh let me, let me ever dwell
Amidst the good, where'er it be.
Whether in lowly hermit-cell
Or in some spot beyond the sea.
We may not have Vyasian austerity in it, but surely it has the substantiality that is trans-traditional. Another soul of mystical secularism breathes happily in it
.
26: The Legend of Savitri actually belongs to the Vedic cycle, but the form in which it is familiar to us appears in the Book of the Forest of the Mahabharata. It has been narrated in 300 shlokas in praise of the greatness of a woman who is unswerving in her conviction even in the face of the worst possibility that life can extend to her. She remains firm in her resolve, even in the knowledge of the death of her chosen lover who is prophesied to die one year after the marriage.
But the story is built in the values that simultaneously operate at several levels in the pursuit of life's aims. It has a religio-ethical purport for the maintenance of the social order, it has literary-artistic bearings, it has the truth-driven dharmic connotations to uphold the sublimity of righteous conduct, it has far-reaching spiritual implications as if it foresees the sound resonant prospects that are awaiting human race in the evolutionary future. The most important aspect in the Aurobindonian context is the mythic-symbolic substance it carries in the dignity of a language that expresses the verities of the Spirit. Were it not so, the poet of the great epic would not have made it a basis for the revelation of the Idea-Truth realities that can manifest in the terrestrial scheme.
If presently we are living in a world where the Law of Life is as proclaimed by Death, then the assertion is that there shall be the Freedom of Life in the joyous dynamism of the Truth. Indeed, eventually, the real meaning and purpose behind even this creation, that is at the moment full of strangling mortality, shall turn out to be none other than the expression of the Will of the gracious Supreme.
The one who stood as frightful Death, demanding submission of the incarnate Shakti, shall stand through her triumphant accomplishment as the Creator spreading his everlasting Day for the growth of the Soul of the Earth. That is the epic magnificence, mahātmya, of the Savitri-tale.
27: Out of thousands of sheets of Savitri drafts in Sri Aurobindo's own hand even a few should help us to get some faint idea about the enormous effort that has gone behind its literary composition over several years. But the yogic aspects of it will always remain beyond our immediate ken. Yet by living in the worlds of Savitri we shall progressively have the Truth and the things of the Truth. The Revelation carries in it that power of Realisation.
Part Three
Concluding Note
In the previous section we have given a kind of quick précis of the various articles that are present in this volume. The numbers indicate the serial order in which they occur in it. It may be mentioned here that, except for a few, most of these writings are appearing in print for the first time. When the authors were approached for the contributions it was suggested that these should be generally around ten thousand words in length. This was a hard stipulation but then there were restrictions of space also. In addition to this there was a time constraint, if the book had to come out by the end of this year. We are glad that, in spite of these boundary conditions, the response from the writers was very positive for which we extend our sincere thanks to them. In this connection we may mention here another point. According to the modem practices of bringing out edited anthologies, we should have provided a brief introductory bio-data of the authors present in it. But we desisted from this, simply for the reason that the focus should remain not on contextual but, essentially, on the thematic aspect. But then each one of them stands out distinctly in his article and that itself can become the best introduction of him.
While inviting the authors to contribute articles for the anthology an attempt was made to define certain areas in order to cover, as far as possible, the infinity that Savitri is. These could be the spiritual aspects, occult, yogic, scriptural aspects, mystical, religious, philosophical, literary, poetic, social, historical, comparative or lexico-
graphic aspects; there could also be a biographical angle shedding light on the avataric work of the divine incarnate. But we do not know if this has been achieved with any degree of success, particularly when we recognise that here is God's own account of his evolutionary engagement in the manifestation of a divine life upon earth. Furthermore, it is to be well understood that, not only in terms of its extraordinary esoteric but also exoteric-secular contents, Savitri's knowledge is oceanic and of that ocean what we can hold in our palms is insignificantly human. To adapt a simile of Jnaneshwar, we are like a bird that can hardly hold in its beak any quantity of the water of a vast sunlit lake by which side it builds its tiny nest. Yet whatever is there in that little bird's bill is that lake's own wonderment. Such only could be the glad merit of a collection of works being presented in two volumes with some fifty and odd articles in it.
It is always true that the study of Savitri has to be for the improvement of our faculties, our spiritual faculties, for the growth and enrichment of our soul and our spirit. It is a book of revelation, as the Mother says, and what we have to do is to live in it, allowing it to work in us whatever has to be worked out for our true betterment. Which means that our approach should be supple-intuitive rather than mental-discursive. Therefore we have to guard ourselves against a possible danger as well, the danger of excessive rational thinking. Thought had to be there, but thought that has its birth in the silence of the mind. The purpose of this anthology in two volumes is hence specifically to provide a certain mental support leaping into intuition while approaching Savitri.
Take the example of orchids that are so dear to Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of beauty. They have mythical associations also; the Chinese name for these flowers is pretty significant, which means perfume and gracefulness. Any number of stories have grown around the orchids and it is said that they are special plants if for no other reason than the mystique that surrounds them. But as the Renaissance in Europe began to fade and the Age of Reason started making its appearance things took another turn. Nature became an object of investigation instead of an object of joyous amazement and admiration. The unfortunate result was that the "strange beauty of orchid flowers worked their magic on those who would one day be called scientists." Instead of living in the happy glorious ambience of Nature, we took up scalpels in our hand and started dissecting to learn. Let that not happen to Savitri.
But that cannot happen to Savitri, and no crudity of instruments can despoil its beauty and charm. If we are to use the language of the Gita, we may say that "weapons cannot cleave it, nor the fire bum, nor do the waters drench it, nor the wind dry." Such is the soul as much as the shining body of Savitri. Therefore when we look at Savitri as a means to grow, then every help is available and we need not have any complex that we are mentalising it. In fact the power of its unfissionable Word is such that it can lift up all our understanding to the integrity of the spirit in its moods of rapturous self-expression.
It is believed that these two volumes of Perspectives of Savitri will form a foundation to launch on specialised themes in future. There have been too many repetitive discussions and the hope is that a sense of direction may now come to the Savitri-studies. We are perhaps moving from general to specific and distinguishing aspects in our approach towards the Masterwork that Savitri is. Such deeper studies will conceivably give some access to the inner realities and in that respect the gain will be entirely ours. Possibly that will be one way of entering into its sublimities and profundities that also spread outward to establish Sachchidanadaic realities in the world.
We may well remember here Shankaracharya's prayer to the Ineffable who is beyond all description. The Acharya is genuinely conscious of his inability to find speech that would be acceptable for singing his glories. But then he also pleads to him that whatever he would utter let that become a stotra or a chant of praise to him. It is in that spirit that our studies can become a hymn to Savitri. Let us live in Savitri who shall give us the Truth and the things of the Truth.
R.Y. DESHPANDE
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