On Savitri
THEME/S
The Call of Saraswati: Savitri
in Relation to Sanskrit Poetry.
Me from her lotus heaven Saraswati
Has called to regions of eternal snow
And Ganges pacing to the southern sea,
Ganges upon whose shores the flowers of Eden blow.1
Sri Aurobindo had already discovered poetry as the mainstream of his life when he returned to India at the age of 21 after having passed his early formative years in England. He claimed that he was first and foremost a poet. Indeed, at the heart of all his other activities-politics, philosophy, yoga, exegesis of ancient scriptures-there is the constant presence of poetry. And we can perhaps affirm, without exaggerating, that his most important poetical work, Savitri, gives the fullest expression to his versatile genius.
This poem has grown almost simultaneously with his life, expressing ever newer, wider and higher discoveries, both in form and content. If we have the right approach and the true insight we can find in it the imprints of his life and the evolution of his inspiration.
In this essay I would like to dwell on his poetic evolution, especially the aspect that took shape through his contact with the literature of ancient India culminating in the discovery of what he calls the Overmind aesthesis. I am fully aware that it is impossible to unravel the rich and complex structure of a great poetic mind, but we can nevertheless sort out some trends of its texture. The task becomes easier and the conclusions surer when we have the poet's own testimony about the influences he has undergone and the process of his own poetic creation. Fortunately for us we have access to many utterances of Sri Aurobindo, in his letters as well as his other writings, in particular The Future Poetry, which is not just an objective study of the poetry of the past and its possible2 evolution
1Collected Poem, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 28.
2 It is "impossible," says Sri Aurobindo," to predict what the poetry of the future will actually be." The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 199.
in the future, but is also his personal programme.3 He is the first poet of the "future".
Influence and Originality
As maintained by Kuntaka the creativity of a poet is marked by two faculties, the inborn (sahaja) and the acquired (āhārya). The two together create original (nūtana) poetry.4 It has generally been recognised that to be a poet one must possess an inborn genius (pratibhā), but at the same time it is also true that poetry cannot grow in a cultural, poetical and linguistic void. The poet learns his craft, gathers themes, develops an ideology, a style and a vision, and thus "acquires" the proficiency to give expression to his inborn genius. What, in the comparative study of literature, is called influence is at the root of this acquired faculty. This, however, does not diminish in any way the originality of a poet. Weisstein has rightly perceived that originality "applies to creative innovations in form or content as well as reinterpretations and combinations of ingredients borrowed from diverse models."5 In fact, even what we call innovation is not something that has no link with other works and other authors. As Kuntaka has clearly seen, innovation does not reject acquired knowledge. An original author is one "who succeeds in making all his own, in subordinating what he takes from others to the new complex of his own artistic work."6 Influence is not imitation, nor direct borrowing. All that is "received" is creatively transmuted. "Influence is not confined to individual details or images or borrowings or even sources—though it may include them—but is something pervasive, something organically involved in and presented through artistic works."7 It is a creative stimulus that comes from admiration for and a deep sense of kinship with another poet. It changes one's whole poetic personality.8 Many great authors have
3Poets— Horace, Rajasekhara, Du Belley, Boileau, Pope, Wordsworth, Eliot, etc.—who have developed an ars poetica, have themselves, in the first place, applied their precepts.
4Kuntaka, Vakroktijivita, UI.2.
5Ulrich Weisstein, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, Bloomington, London, 1973, p. 32.
6Joseph T. Shaw, "Literary Indebtedness and Comparative Literature", in, Newton P. Stallknecht and Horst Frenz, (eds.), Comparative Literature: Method and Perspective. University of South Illinois Press, 2nd ed. 1971.
7Ibid, p. 21.
8 See, T. S. Eliot, "Reflections on Contemporary Poetry", The Egoist, July 1919.
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openly admitted that they have been influenced by others. Sri Aurobindo too has acknowledged his debt to others.9 A poet must be original and non-derivative but it does not mean that he has not been influenced by others. Originality does not imply 'chemical' purity, but rather an 'alchemical' transmutation of matters received into the pure substance of the poet's creative genius. If we look carefully we can find traces, sometimes very faint, always transmuted, of influences that the poet has, consciously or unconsciously, undergone. Influences do not discredit a great poet; on the contrary, they reveal the wideness, complexity and power of his poetic mind.
In the case of Sri Aurobindo the influence is conscious. Before his return to India he had already been writing poetry in English, influenced and inspired by English poets, and nourished by both the classical and modem literatures of Europe. In India he discovered the great Sanskrit literature which till then had remained virtually unknown to him.10 This discovery was a turning point in his poetic life. And he decided to create a poetry of his own which would incorporate, within the linguistic structure of English, formalistic, thematic, psychological and cultural matters of India. There is an important document that testifies to this fact: a letter written to his elder brother, Manmohan Ghose. He wrote this letter, says he, "only to justify, or at least define my standpoint; perhaps also a little to reassure myself in the line of poetical art I have chosen."11
The influence of Sanskrit poets i s most effective in Sri Aurobindo's narrative and epic poems based on Indian myths. His brother, it would seem, had misgivings about the poetic possibilities of Indian myths in contrast to the Hellenic which had more warmth of human passion and the savour of the earth.12 But Sri Aurobindo was fashioning a poetic art that would fuse the forces of the earth with those of the Spirit. He was certainly aware of the effort of Meredith whom he admired. In Meredith's vision, "Earth's ultimate goal is Spirit... the
9Sri Aurobindo on Himself, SABCL, Vol. 26, pp. 264-65.
10He certainly knew some of it in translation, but poetry cannot really be known except when it is read in the original language. "Supplement, SABCL, Vol. 27, p. 148.
12Perhaps Manmohan Ghose was thinking of the poems of Meredith, Swinburne and Stephen Phillips. Sri Aurobindo himself has recognised the influence of these poets on his early poetic formation. He even says that the after-effects of Meredith's Ascent to Earth of the Daughter of Hades "are not absent from Savitri." See, SABCL, VoL 26, pp. 264-65.
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spiritual is rooted in the natural."13 In Indian myths Sri Aurobindo discovers the power that can accomplish fully the union of the Earth and the Spirit. "Inferior in warmth and colour and quick life and the savour of the earth to the Greek," he writes to his brother, "they [Indian myths] had a superior spiritual loveliness and exaltation; not clothing the surface of the earth with imperishable beauty, they search deeper into the white-hot core of things and in their cyclic orbit of thought curve downward round the most hidden foundations of existence and upward over the highest, almost invisible arches of ideal possibility."14 In this statement we can discern, in the words "deeper", "downward" and "upward", Sri Aurobindo's lifelong search of integrality in poetry, philosophy and yoga. In Savitri the descriptions of the adventures of Aswapati and Savitri are the most poetic and visionary expressions of these three movements.
He distinguishes two different kinds of myths in Indian literature: 1) the religious-philosophical allegory and 2) the genuine secular legend.15 It is the second type that he chooses for his poetry. In spite of the presence of Yama, the god of death, as one of the protagonists in the story, the legend of Savitri is basically human and secular. The old legends are "very simple and beautiful" and have, adds he, "infinite possibilities of sweetness and feeling, and in the hands of great artists have blossomed into dramas and epics of the most delicate tenderness or the most noble sublimity."16 We can presume that he had in mind the tender and sublime works of Kali das a. This is justification enough to take for theme these legends and myths.
At the base of influence there is admiration and kinship. A spontaneous admiration not induced by teachers or traditions arises from the feeling of kinship with an author in whom we find in some way the fulfilment of our own aspirations and ideals. In the weak admiration can lead to a servile imitation; in the strong who have not only the promise but also the power of greatness, it supplies the necessary instruments, the acquired faculty (āhārya), "influence": "...one may conceive," says Weisstein, "of a series of steps which, beginning with literal translation, proceeds in an ascending order through adaptation, imitation, and influence to the original work of art."17 In every case of influence all these steps are not necessarily
13Herbert Grierson and J. C. Smith, A Critical History of English Poetry, Harmondsworth, 1960 (Repr.), p. 437.
14Supplement, SABCL, Vol. 27, pp. 150-51.
15Ibid., p. 149. 16 Ibid., p. 150. 17Ulrich Weisstein, op. Cit., p. 32.
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present. In Sri Aurobindo's case, as the most evident step towards the influence he underwent, there are his translations from the Sanskrit, in particular those of Kalidasa's works and fragments of Valmiki's and Vyasa's. These translations are not literal; they are rather creative adaptations.18 In translating these he had an aim in view: "the ennobling influences spiritual, romantic and imaginative of the old tongues should be popularised in modem speech."19
Sri Aurobindo has clearly expressed his admiration for the great Sanskrit poets.20 He writes to his brother that he has read the tales of Rama, Sita and Savitri "in the swift and mighty language of Valmiki21 and Vyasa and thrilled with their joys and sorrows..."22 And admiration for Kalidasa is evident when he speaks of "his power of expressing by a single simple and direct and sufficient word ideas and pictures of the utmost grandeur of shaded complexity."23 He considered Meghaduta as "the most marvellously perfect descriptive and elegiac poem in the world's literature." What he further says about this poem seems to be what he himself aimed at: "...amidst all its wealth of colour, delicacy and sweetness, there is not a word too much or too little, no false note, no excessive or defective touch; the colouring is just and subdued in its richness, the verse movement regular in its variety, the diction simple in its suggestiveness, the emotion convincing and fervent behind a high restraint, the imagery precise, right and not overdone as in Raghuvaṃśa and yet quite as full of beauty and power."24
18The three versions of his translation of a fragment of Kalidasa's Kumārasaṃbhava is an evidence of this. One can see here how he moves gradually from a near-literal translation to a version which is almost an original work. (See, The Birth of the War-God. Three Renderings. The Translations, SABCL, Vol. 8. pp. 99-132.)
19Supplement, SABCL, Vol. 27, p. 85.
20A spontaneous admiration which comes from the intuitive recognition of kinship and not from studied critical appreciation, is the hallmark of youth when the mind of a creative genius receives influences. Keeping this in mind we shall use extensively, in the study of influences, the early writings of Sri Aurobindo on Sanskrit poetry.
21Sri Aurobindo has transcribed Sanskrit names differently at different periods. For the sake of uniformity I have adopted the generally accepted transcription and transliteration except in his poetical works where they are left unchanged.
22Supplement, SABCL, Vol. 27, p. 154.
23Ibid., p. 99. 24Ibid., p. 106.
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He found in Sanskrit literature a new world of form and content and submitted to its winning influence. But before him there was a tremendous problem: How could this influence be assimilated in English, a language so different from Sanskrit? Already in translating Kalidasa he had met with this problem. "The diffuseness of English," he writes, "will not thus lend itself to the brief suggestiveness of the Sanskrit without being so high-strung, nervous and bare in its strength as to falsify its flowing harmony and sweetness; nor to its easy harmony without losing close-knit precision and falsifying brevity, gravity and majesty."25 Besides the linguistic difficulty there was also the cultural difference. "The life and surroundings," says Sri Aurobindo, "in which Indian poetry moves cannot be rendered in the terms of English poetry."26 While translating Sanskrit poetry he had to tackle this problem thoroughly. In his notes he points out, as he says, "rather sketchily", how he thinks it best to meet the difficulty. His contention is that the business of poetical translation is to reproduce not the exact words but the exact image, associations and poetical beauty and flavour of the original.27 Influence, then, does not consist in reproducing with a literal faithfulness, mythological allusions and references to fauna and flora, nor in the use of themes. It is rather the appropriation of the spirit and mood, of thoughts and feelings, of the vision and tenor of the works of poets whom one admires. Sri Aurobindo, we may say, transmutes creatively the powers and presence of the poetry of Valmiki, Vyasa and Kalidasa and gives them a form in a foreign language. In his early narratives, Love and Death and Urvasie, the influence is still too apparent. But in Savitri, which he had begun more or less at the same time,28 the influence
25Ibid, pp. 106-7. 26Ibid., p. 96.
27See, Ibid., pp. 97 ff where Sri Aurobindo gives particular examples of the difficulties and also his solutions.
28The earliest draft extant is dated 1916. It is not possible to ascertain if it was the first draft. The writer of "On Editing Sri Aurobindo", (see, Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research, V. 2, p. 190, note) rejects the testimony of Dinendra Kumar Roy who lived with Sri Aurobindo in Baroda and has written that around 1900 Sri Aurobindo was composing a poem on Savitri and Satyavan. However there is a strong probability of its being true when we see in what glowing terms he writes about Savitri in his letter to Manmohan Ghose which was certainly written just after the composition of Love and Death (1899): "Surely Savitri that strong silent heart, with her powerful and subtly-indicated personality, has both life and charm..." Supplement, SABCL, Vol. 27, p. 154.
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gradually became subtler. A study of the different versions of the poem29 could enable us to grasp a little the process of this creative transmutation.
In Savitri there is another very important influences besides those of Valmiki, Vyasa and Kalidasa, namely that of the Veda and the Upanishads. These four influences form in their conjunction the basis of Sri Aurobindo's global Overmind aesthesis. We shall now consider how they have shaped some of the features of Savitri.
The Influence of Sanskrit Poetry on Sri Aurobindo's Savitri.
In order to understand the influence of the ancient poets in the creation of Savitri we should first consider Sri Aurobindo's views about them; this will indicate to us what we have to look for. There are some obvious echoes of Sanskrit verses in Savitri. I shall only give two examples. Let us take Vyasa's line from the story of Nala and Damayanti:
vanaṃ pratibhayaṃ śunyam jhillikā-gaṇa-nināditam30
which Sri Aurobindo translates as:
A void tremendous forest thundering
With crickets.31
In Savitri we find:
Or wandered in some lone tremendous wood
Ringing for ever with the crickets' cry.32
It is not difficult to see its relation with Vyasa's line. And this from Kalidasa:
alpālpabhāsam
khadyotālī-vilasita-nibhāṃ vidyud-unmeṣa-dṛstim33
29The epic Savitri, with its dozen and more versions amounting to thousands of manuscript pages..." "On Editing Sri Aurobindo", Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research, TV.2, p. 201.
30The Mahabharata, 3.61.1.
31"Notes on the Mahabharata", SABCL, Vol. 3, p. 157. See also Savitri, p. 815. 32Savitri, p. 385. 33Meghaduta, 86.
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which Sri Aurobindo renders as:
A flickering line of fireflies seen in sleep.34
The echo of this line is evident in the following:
A thin dance of fireflies speeding through the night.35
But the more subtle influences are those of the manner, of a certain way of seeing and expressing, of a mood and of the vision of life and world. According to Sri Aurobindo Valmiki, Vyasa and Kalidasa give the supreme poetic expression to "three periods in the development of the human soul" governed by three powers, the moral, the intellectual and the material. But, says he, "the fourth power of the soul, the spiritual, which can alone govern and harmonise the others by fusion with them, had not, though it powerfully influenced each successive development, any separate age of predominance."36 Sri Aurobindo envisages a coming age which will be essentially spiritual with a spirituality that will not reject but transform and embrace the other three powers.37 He envisages also the nature of the poetry of that future age. "This poetry will be," he writes, "a voice of eternal things raising to a new significance and to a great satisfied joy in experience the events and emotions and transiences of life which will then be seen and sung as the succession of signs, the changing of the steps of an eternal manifestation; it will be an expression of the very self of man and the self of things and the self of Nature; it will be a creative and interpretative revelation of the infinite truth of existence and of the universal delight and beauty and of greater spiritualised vision and power of life."38
To create the poetry of the future the expressions of the four powers have to be harmonised in a new expression. Sri Aurobindo himself says that Savitri belongs "to the future".39 In fact this poem is the realisation and illustration of the future poetic as he conceives it. It is a poetic synthesis realised in the framework of a new poetics.
34The Harmony of Virtue, SABCL, Vol. 3, p. 239.
35Savitri, p. 592.
36The Harmony of Virtue, SABCL, Vol. 3, p. 217.
37See, The Human Cycle, SABCL, Vol. 15, pp. 312-13.
38The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 249.
39Sri Aurobindo on Himself, SABCL, Vol. 26, p. 255.
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The powers of which Sri Aurobindo speaks are not in themselves poetic, for poetry is not the contents only; it is the togetherness (sāhitya) of contents and form. When the vision (darśana) becomes expression (varṇana) then there is poetry. Valmiki, Vyasa and Kalidasa are supreme poets of their respective ages because they have found, each in his own way, the perfect expression for those powers. When Sri Aurobindo speaks of the three powers supremely expressed by the three poets his remark should not be taken to mean that each power is exclusive to one poet only. Valmiki's world contains "vast material development and immense intellectual power, both moralised."40 Likewise Vyasa's contains the material world, but almost always subordinated to the idea. Ideas in a poetical world, cannot thrive in pure abstraction, as they do in a philosophical one. The poet has therefore to depict the material background. This Vyasa does effectively "taking little trouble with similes, metaphors, rhetorical turns, the usual paraphernalia of poetry."41 And the moral world too is harmonised in his work "as a basis for conduct but purified and transfigured by the illuminating idea of niṣkāma karma."42 And finally Kalidasa the poet who lived and worked in a world of high material prosperity that built great luxurious capitals in which all the arts flourished, who gave the most magnificent expression to the beauty and grandeur of the physical world, shows also "a keen appreciation of high ideal and lofty thought."43
i) Valmiki and Sri Aurobindo
The moral world of Valmiki is the world of passions and emotions, world of the vital forces. Morality implies the governance of the natural impulses in man and a transformation of that which is destructive and dark in them into creative sentiments. There is "an enthusiasm of morality" and "an enthusiasm of immorality"44 which are expressios of the life-forces and of the heart's passions. Indian poetics call these forces bhāva. They are natural and belong to all humanity. Poetry transmutes them into an aesthetic experience of
40The Harmony of Virtue, Vol. 3, p. 219.
41Ibid, p. 148.
42Ibid., p. 220. This idea of "disinterested work" finds its sublimest expression in the Bhagavad-gitā.
43Ibid, p. 223.
44Ibid p. 219.
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delight (rasa).45 Speaking of the Ramayana Sri Aurobindo writes, "The ethical and the aesthetic mind of India have here fused themselves into a harmonious unity and reached an unexampled pure wideness and beauty of self-expression."46
Valmiki makes the opposition of the good and the evil palpable and visible in powerful evocative passages. When Sita hears of Rama's banishment she says that she will go with him to the forests, and evokes a picture of the forest that is good and beautiful. Rama who wants to dissuade her paints a different picture which is evil and ugly. Both are true, both are expressions of the universal life-force, but whereas one is the vision of the "greater life" the other is that of the "little life".47 We find in Savitri too the opposition between the two visions. Sri Aurobindo does not imitate Valmiki. Yet we can discern the same spirit, transformed, and appropriate to the new spirit and aesthesis. I shall quote first the Sanskrit passages, next a translation as literal as possible and finally the rendering of Sri Aurobindo. The rendering in English is an important link in the transmission of the Valmikian vision into the vision and manner of Sri Aurobindo.
The first passage: Sita says,
icchāmi parataḥ śailān palvalāni sarāṃsi ca//
draṣṭum sarvatra nirbhitā tvayā nathena dhimata/
haṃsa-kāraṇḍavakirṃaḥ padminiḥ sādhu-puṣpitāh//
iccheyaṃ sukhini draṣṭum tvayā vireṇa saṃgatā/
abhiṣekaṃ kariṣyāmi tāsu nityam anuvratā//
saha tvayā viśālakṣa raṃsye parama-nandini/48
The literal translation:
I desire to see far-off mountains, tarns and lakes, everywhere unafraid with you, my wise lord.
45The tale of Valmiki's awakening to poetry tells us how the natural bhāva of grief (śoka) is transmuted into the karuṇa rasa, the aesthetic experience of compassionate sympathy, giving rise to the poetic utterance (śloka)
46The Foundations of Indian Culture, SABCL, Vol. 14, p. 290.
47Valmiki sings, says Sri Aurobindo, "of the ideal man embodying God and goistic giant Rakshasa embodying only fierce self-will approaching each other from their different centres of life..." The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 206.
48Ayodhyā-kāṇnda, 27.17b-20a.
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I desire to see, happily walking beside your heroic self, well-bloomed lotus-ponds full of swans and kāraṇda-ducks.
And I, for ever devoted to you, will bathe in them. In your company, supremely glad, O you with large eyes, I shall live happily.
Sri Aurobindo's rendering:
O I desire
That life, desire to see the large wide lakes,
The cliffs of the great mountains, the dim tarns,
Not frighted since thou art beside me, and visit
Fair waters swan-beset in lovely bloom.
In thy heroic guard my life shall be
A happy wandering among beautiful things,
For I shall bathe in those delightful pools,
And to thy bosom fast-devoted, wooed
By thy great beautiful eyes, yield and experience
On mountains and by rivers large delight.49
In the second passage from Ayodhyā-kāṇda, 28.19-22. Rama replies:
sarisṛpās ca bahavo bahu-rūpāś ca bhāmini/
caranti pathi te darpāt tato duḥkhataraṃ vanam//
nadi-nilayanāḥ sarpā nadi-kuṭila-gāminaḥ/
tiṣṭhanty āvṛtya panthānam ato duḥkhataraṃ vanam//
pataṇgā vṛścikāḥ kiṭā daṃśāś ca maśakaiḥ saha/
bādhante nityam abale sarvaṃ duḥkhamato vanam//
drumāḥ kaṇṭakinaś caiva kuśāḥ kāśaś ca bhāmini/
vane vyākula-śādkhagraś tena duḥkhamato vanam//
Ayodhya-kanda, 28.19-22.
And many diversely shaped reptiles, O passionate, insolently wander on your path making the forest more distressing.
River-dwelling snakes that go winding like the rivers beset the paths making the forest more distressing.
Insects, scorpions, worms, gadflies and gnats continually torment,
49 The Translations, SABCL, Vol. 8, p. 13.
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O delicate, making the whole forest a place of distress. Thorny trees, kusa-grass, reeds, O spirited, have their boughs and tops entangled, thereby making the forest a place of distress.
Reptiles of all shapes
Coil numerous where thou walkest, spirited,
Insurgent, and the river-dwelling snakes
That with the river's winding motion go,
Beset thy path, waiting. Fierce scorpions, worms,
Gadflies and gnats continually distress,
And sharp grasses pierce and thorny trees
With an entangled anarchy of boughs
Oppose.50
Let us now read two passages from Savitri, the first from "The Paradise of the Life-Gods" and the second from "The Kingdom of the Little Life". Aswapati
... traversed scenes of an immortal joy
And gazed into abysms of beauty and bliss.
Around him was a light of conscious suns
And a brooding gladness of great symbol things;
To meet him crowded plains of brilliant calm,
Mountains and violet valleys of the Blest,
Deep glens of joy and crooning waterfalls
And woods of quivering purple solitude.51
And
An insect hedonism fluttered and crawled
And basked in a sunlit Nature's surface thrills.
And dragon raptures, python agonies
Crawled in the marsh and mire and licked the sun.52
When we compare the passages of Valmiki with those of Sri Aurobindo we at once notice the difference of the poetic approaches
50Ibid, p. 15. 51 Savitri, p. 234. 52Ibid, p. 142.
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of the two poets. Valmiki's description is physically concrete whereas Sri Aurobindo's is a concretisation of abstract experiences of the subtle psycho-spiritual world—abstract to the thinking mind only, for they are concrete realities to the experiencing soul.
ii) Vyasa and Sri Aurobindo
The Mahabharata and the Ramayana, says Sri Aurobindo, "are built on an almost cosmic vastness of plan and take all human life (the Mahabharata all human thought as well) in their scope."53 Vyasa's epic is "representative throughout of the central ideas and ideals of Indian life and culture."54 We can say that Sri Aurobindo's epic is representative of the ideas and ideals of all mankind, as well as its future realisations, seen not in the context of any history but sub specie aetemitatis. In that vision thought and philosophies have also their legitimate place. But ideas and ideals as such do not make poetry. There are many ways in which ideas can be tramsmuted into poetic expression.55 Like Vyasa, Sri Aurobindo too does not shut thought out of poetry. About the place of thought in poetry, in general as well as in his own poetry, he writes: "Some romanticists seem to believe that the poet has no right to think at all, only to see and feel. This accusation has been brought against me by many that I think too much and that when I try to write in verse, thought comes in and keeps out poetry. I hold, to the contrary, that philosophy has its place and can even take a leading place along with psychological experience as it does in the Gita."56 He conceived Savitri as "a sort of poetic philosophy of Spirit and Life...covering most subjects of philosophical thought and vision and many aspects of spiritual experience."57
It is not that Vyasa is constantly busy with ideas. His poetry is philosophical because, even when he is narrating or describing, his attitude is philosophical. He sees everything, even the most terrible happenings, dispassionately in the light of pure intelligence. "The poetry of an age of many-sided intellectualism," says Sri Aurobindo, "can live only by its many-sidedness and by making everything as it
53The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 523.
54The Foundations of Indian Culture, SABCL, Vol. 14, p. 287.
55For a discussion of this problem, see, Ranajit Sarkar, In Search of Kalidasa's Thought-World, Lucknow 1985, Chap. 1, "Poetical Transmutation of Philosophical Ideas."
56Savitri, p. 737. 57Ibid, pp. 731-32.
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comes a new material for the aesthetic creations of serving, thinking and the constructing intelligence."58 This remark would fit perfectly to Vyasa's poetry.
The Gita is the quintessence of the Mahabharata.59 There the intellect of the great poet, "the original thinker who has enlarged the boundaries of ethical and religious outlook,"69 is most completely realised. As morality in order to be poetry must be infused with aesthetic delight (rasa), so also intellect. And the Rasa that transmutes Vyasa's thought into poetry is the śānta, the peaceful, a calmness in which all passions and sentiments find a luminous repose and equanimity (samatva). Here life's fury and fever are alleyed. Sri Aurobindo expresses this idea metaphorically: "To those who have bathed even a little in the fountain-head of poetry , and can bear the keenness and purity of these mountain sources, the naked and unadorned poetry of Vyasa is as delightful as to bathe in a chill fountain in the heats of summer."61 Let us take a verse from the Gita:
bahūnām janmanām ante jnānavān mām prapadyate/
Vāsudevaḥ sarvam iti sa mahātmā sudurlabhaḥll62
At the end of many lives the man of knowledge attains me.
That great soul who knows, "Vasudeva is all", is very rare.
Here Krishna announces a sublime truth in a style that is bare and simple, restrained and low-key. The language is colloquial, devoid of any formal device. The strength of the idea itself is sufficient to impart to the expression great poetic intensity and inevitability. The phrase "Vāsudevaḥ sarvam iti" is the essence of the whole verse; the other ideas and words are there only to create a general background, quite flat even, out of which rise up the sublime height of idea cristalised in three simple words. The man of knowledge who knows the truth "draws back from the confused and perturbed whirl of the
58The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 193.
59Many scholars consider the Gita as a later interpolation and as such not a work of Vyasa. Sri Aurobindo says that "there is nothing to disprove his authorship" and adds that "the style is undoubtedly his or so closely modelled on his as to defy differentiation." "Notes on the Mahabharata", Vol. 3, pp. 168-69.
60The Harmony of Virtue, SABCL, Vol. 3, p. 164.
61Ibid, p. 147.
62The Gita, VII. 19.
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lower nature to dwell in the still and inalienable calm and light of the self-existent spirit."63 We can also say that the man of poetic taste (rasika), one who can be of one mind with the poet (sahṛdaya) can also experience the joy of calmness (śānta rasa) and the withdrawal from the whirl of lower nature.64 This bare strength of expression can be found also in Savitri. We shall quote a few:
All can be done if the God-touch is there.65
God found in Nature, Nature fulfilled in God. 66
All was made wide above, all lit below. 67
Not only in the Gita but scattered all over the Mahabharata there are expressions of the philosophising mind transmuted into poetry without the normal use of tropes:
na karmaṇā labhyate cintayā vā nāpy asya dātā puruṣasya kaś-cit/
paryāya-yogād vihitaṃ vidhātrā kālena sarvaṃ labhate manuṣyaḥ//...
kālena ślghrāḥ pravivānti vātāḥ kālena vṛṣṭ jaladān upaiti/
kalena padmotpalavaj jalaṃ ca kālena puṣyanti nagā vaneṣu/ /...
sarvān evaiṣa paryāyo martyān spṛśati dustaraḥ/
kālena paripakvā hi mriyante sarva-mānavāḥ//68
Not by work nor thought does a person gain something, neither is it that someone gives it to him.
The divine Ordainer has decreed everything by means of the succession of time: by the power of time man gains everything. By the power of time the swift wind blows, by the power of time rain follows the clouds, by the power of time water holds white and blue lotuses and by the power of time trees thrive in the forests.
63Essays on the Gita, SABCL, Vol. 13, p. 309.
64The ancient Indian poetics recognised that the poetic experience was bom from the same womb as the experience of Brahman (brahmāsvādanasahodara).
65 Savitri, p. 3. 66 Ibid, p. 37. 67 Savitri, p. 41.
68The Mahabharata, 12.26.5, 8.14.
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This inexorable course of time effects indeed all mortals,
for, consumed by time all men die.
Now a passage from Sri Aurobindo:
... in the march of all-fulfilling Time
The hour must come of the Transcendent's will:
All turns and winds towards his predestined ends
In Nature's fixed inevitable course
Decreed since the beginning of the worlds
In the deep essence of created things:
Even there shall come as a high crown of all
The end of Death, the death of Ignorance.69
These lines have the same directness and clarity that Sri Aurobindo admired in Vyasa. We do not know whether he had the verses of Vyasa in mind when he wrote the above lines, but the influence is clear. However, Sri Aurobindo gives a new turn to the idea of time in the last two lines in accordance with his philosophy of the divine life. Whereas in Vyasa time is ultimately Death the Ender, in Sri Aurobindo even in Time there shall come the end of Death.
There is also an evident link between the two poets through the common theme. Sri Aurobindo borrows the theme of his epic from Vyasa. The choice of a theme is not arbitrary; it is an "esthetic decision"70 that the poet makes. He chooses a theme because he feels a deep affinity with it; because he feels that through it he can express his ideas, emotions and vision. Sri Aurobindo considers Vyasa's tale of Savitri (Sāvitryopākhyāna) as an early work which still retains the romantic grace and youthful glow of the time when he had not yet "scaled the mountain-tops of thought."71 But he has already the sobriety of style and the economy of words that marks his poetry. We have seen above how, in the Ramayana, Rama speaks of the hardships of the forest to dissuade Sita from accompanying him. Vyasa makes Satyavan say but two simple lines to dissuade Savitri:
vanaṃ na gata-pūrvaṃ te duḥkhaḥ panthas ca bhāmini/
vratopavāsa-kṣāmd ca kathaṃ padbhyāṃ gamiṣyasi//72
69Savitri, p. 708.
70Harry Levin, "Thematics and Criticism", Grounds for Comparision, Cambridge, Mass., 1972, p. 109.
71The Harmony of Virtue, SABCL, Vol. 3, p. 154.
72 The Mahabharata, 3.280.20.
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You have not gone to the forest earlier, O spirited, and the path is difficult
And you are week from the vow of fasting. How can you move on your feet?
But as in the case of Sita here too it is of no avail. Nevertheless this example gives us a better understanding of Vyasa's style. There was much scope for the depiction of human sentiments and natural beauty, but he chose to paint soberly and without any romantic trappings "the power of a woman's silent love." "We cannot regret his choice. There have been plenty of poets who could have given us imaginative and passionate pictures of Love struggling with Death, but there has been only one who could give us Savitri."73
Sri Aurobindo has taken this theme for his psycho-spiritual epic. The central idea of the struggle between Love and Death is also central to Sri Aurobindo, but he has immensely enlarged the scope. The main story has not undergone much change. But within the ancient framework he has given form to a vast and eternal vision encompassing many planes of individual and universal life, physical, occult and spiritual. In the study of influence we could analyse how the original tale has grown, what the additions and modifications are.74 Although it would be an interesting study yet it would not add much to our understanding of the deeper influences of vision and expression. It will be more rewarding to point out how some phrases of Vyasa have been modified by Sri Aurobindo to fit his grandiose epic range.
When on the fateful day Satyavan was preparing to go to the forest for cutting wood Savitri asks the permission of her parents-in-law to accompany her husband. She says:
samvatsaraḥ kiṃcid ūno na niṣkrāntāham āśramāt/
vanaṃ kusumitaṃ draṣṭuṃ paraṃ kautūhalaṃ hi me//75
It is almost a year that I have not gone out of the hermitage;
I would very much love to see the flowering forest.
73Ibid, p. 155.
74See, Prema Nandakumar, A Study of Savitri, Pondicherry, 1962, pp. 296-99, for a comparative tabular analysis of the action of Vyasa's tale and of Sri Aurobindo's epic.
75The Mahabharata, 3.280.26.
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In Sri Aurobindo's epic:
One year that I have lived with Satyavan
Here on the emerald edge of the vast woods,
In the iron ring of the enormous peaks,
Under the blue rifts of the forest sky,
I have not gone into the silences
Of this great woodland that enringed my thoughts
With mystery, nor in its green miracles
Wandered, but this small clearing was my world.
Now has a strong desire seized all my heart
To go with Satyavan holding his hand
Into the life that he has loved and touch
Herbs he has trod and know the forest flowers.76
Or when Satyavan opens his eyes after Death has released him, he asks,
kva cāsau puruṣaḥ śyāmo yo 'sau maṃ saṃcakarṣa ha/71
Who was that dark-hued person who dragged me away?
This becomes:
Where now has passed that formidable Shape
Which rose against us, the Spirit of the Void,
Claiming the world for Death and Nothingness,
Denying God and Soul?78
In both the above passages there is elaboration bringing out epically the suggestions latent in Vyasa's text. I shall now take two examples in which Sri Aurobindo has retained the intensity and power using the same terseness as in Sanskrit. When Death exhorts Savitri to go back, she replies:
yataḥ patiṃ naṣyasi tatra me gatih.19
76Savitri, p. 562.
77The Mahabharata, 3.281.63.
78Savjfn',p.717.
79 The Mahabharata, 3.281.28.
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Wherever you lead my husband there I go.
This line has become:
Wherever thou leadst his soul I shall pursue.80
Or the line that says that the fateful day has arrived:
prāptaḥ sa kālo martavyaṃ yatra Satyavatā nṛpa/81
That time has come, O King, when Satyavan must die.
And in Sri Aurobindo:
This was the day when Satyavan must die.82
About this last line Sri Aurobindo writes in a letter that "an occasionally bare and straightforward line without any trailing of luminous robes is not an improper element."83 Clarity, concentration and bareness are some of the qualities of Vyasa's poetic craftmanship which we find also in Savitri as the few examples make clear.
In the grand synthesis proposed by Sri Aurobindo besides the life-world of Valmiki the thought-world of Vyasa is an element of great consequence. Next we shall talk about the third element of the synthesis: the material world.
iii) Kalidasa and Sri Aurobindo
Kalidasa's writings, says Sri Aurobindo, show "a keen appreciation of high ideal and lofty thought, but the appreciation is aesthetic in its nature: he elaborates and seeks to bring out the effectiveness of these on the imaginative sense of the noble and grandiose, applying to the things of the mind and soul the same aesthetic standard as to the things of sense themselves."84 He was bom in an age when the elemental energies of morality, religion and thought had been subdued and a classical awareness of artistry had replaced the natural vigour of moral sense, thought and emotion. Poetry was not lost but it was a new kind of poetry that had taken birth. The poet was highly
80 Savitri, p. 590. 81 The Mahabharata, 3.280.1.
82Savitri, p. 10. 83Ibid, p. 772.
84 The Harmony of Virtue, SABCL, Vol. 3, p. 223.
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conscious of his art. Unlike Valmiki and Vyasa his aim was essentially aesthetic. In spite of the grandeur of his imagination and the artistic value of his poetry, which had greatly influenced and formed Kalidasa, Valmiki's aim was not altogether aesthetic: the ethical and the mythological are there the dominant factors; even the mythological is there at the service of the ethical. Nevertheless we should remember that the Indian mind attributed to him the origin of the awareness of aesthetic experience (rasa). Neither was Vyasa's aim aesthetic. He was the great thinker and the teacher of peoples.
Kalidasa combines with all the beauty and grandeur and sensuousness of the material culture the essential expressions of the past. Neither morality nor thought are alien to his vision. Ethical powers of the life-forces and intellectual powers of the mind are synthesised with the physical and sensuous powers of matter. But this synthesis is aesthetic: moral law (dharma), philosophical ideas and the world of the senses are aesthetically transformed:"... morality is aestheticised, intellect suffused and governed with the sense of beauty."85Sensual love (kāma) is the great driving force of Kalidasa's poetry: the beauty of nature is an expression of love, even the great divine ascetic Shiva abandons asceticism (tapas) and submits to the influence of Kama, the god of sensual love. However, there is no rejection of dharma, for Kalidasa recognises it as the essence of the three ideals of human life: dharma...tri-varga-sāraḥ85 i.e. sensual love and material prosperity should be guided and purified by the principle of higher moral law.87 This expresses also the idea propounded by Krishna when he declares, in the Gita, that in all creatures he is that kāma which is not contrary to dharma:
dharmāviruddho bhūteṣu kamo 'smi
In Kalidasa the physical body is of the foremost importance for the practice of religion and morality:
85 Ibid., p. 226.
86Kumārasaṃbhava, 5.38.
87For the moral significance of one form of love, priti, in Kalidasa, see, Ranajit Sarkar, "Meghaduta: A study of the interplay of 'dark' and 'bright' images", p.387, in: Ludwik Stembach Felicitation Volume, Lucknow,1979, pp. 371-97.
88TheGita, VII. 11.
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śarlram ādyaṃ khalu dharma-sādhanam89
He does not shun thoughts and ideas. The above is an illustration of the concise and bare expression that reminds us of Vyasa. Scattered in all his plays and poems we find pithily uttered thoughts, for instance in Kumārasaṃbhava:
vikāra-hetau sati vikriyante yeṣāṃ na cetāṃsi ta eva dhirāh90
They alone are really calm whose minds are not perturbed even when there is cause of perturbation.
But more often thoughts are transmuted into concrete images and symbols, i.e. into aesthetic matter.91 Sri Aurobindo recognises this synthesis in Kalidasa. "His main achievement is to have taken every poetic element, all great poetic forms and subdued them to a harmony of artistic perfection set in the key of sensuous beauty."92 Not only the ideals of the three ages, moral, intellectual and material, are harmonised in him but the spiritual tendencies "are also outlined with extraordinary grandeur."93
The aesthetic sensuousness of Kalidasa is nowhere so intensely articulated as in his descriptions of nature. These descriptions are however not for the sake of descriptions alone but they also are the concretisation of the physical, moral and psychological movements of the human soul. His descriptions of the outward nature are not cofined to the outward alone; he has made them one with the soul of his characters.94 The definition that Sri Aurobindo gives of art applies perfectly to the descriptive art of Kalidasa. It is not, he writes, "an imitation or reproduction of outward Nature, but rather missioned to give by the aid of a transmuting faculty something more inwardly true than the external life and appearance."95
The society in which Kalidasa lived was committed to beauty in all its expressions.The landscape with its mountains and forests, lakes
89 Kumārasaṃbhava, 5.33. 90Ibid, p. 58.
91See, Ranajit Sarkar, In Search of Kalidasa's Thought-World, Lucknow, 1985.
92The Harmony of Virtue, SABCL, Vol. 3, p. 223.
93Ibid, p. 225.
94See, Rabindranath Thakur,"Sakuntala", p. 395, in, Dipikā, ed. Sudhiranjan Das, Calcutta 1964.
95The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 209.
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and rivers, birds and beasts was "romanticised by Kalidasa's warm humanism"96 and became a veritable soulscape. Sri Aurobindo finds that even Kalidasa's early poem, Rtusamhdra, depicting the six Indian seasons, is "a work of extraordinary force and immense promise."97 And about the description of summer he says that it is "surcharged with the life of men and animals and the life of trees and plants."98 In Savitri too we find the description of the cycle of seasons; the name itself of Kalidasa's poem is elaborated by him into beautiful lines of poetry:
In ceaseless motion round the purple rim
Day after day sped by like coloured spokes,
And through a glamour of shifting hues of air
The seasons drew in linked significant dance
The symbol pageant of the changing year.99
Isn't "the linked seasons" a poetic rendering of ṛtusaṃhāra! And Sri Aurobindo gives us, one by one, wonderful pictures of the six seasons. Here there is no scope for a detailed study of all the seasons. I shall quote only a few passages from his description of Spring:
Then Spring, an ardent lover, leaped through leaves
And caught the earth-bride in his eager clasp;
His advent was a fire of irised hues,
His arms were a circle of the arrival of joy.100
Sri Aurobindo personifies Spring as does Kalidasa. In Kumārasaṃbhava, Kama, the god of sensual love, is accompanied by Vasanta (Spring): Mādhavenābhimatena sakhyā (3.23). As soon as Spring enters the forest, it is changed into a joyous riot of colour and song:
lagna-dvirephānjana-bhakti-citraṃ mukhe madhu-śris tilakaṃ prakāśya/
ragena balaruna-komalena cuta-pravalostham alam-cakara/101
She unveiled her face, the beauty-goddess of spring:
her eyes were lined with a string of black bees as with collyrium;
96The Harmony of Virtue, SABCL, Vol. 3, p. 225.
97Ibid, p. 256. 98Ibid,. p. 253. 99 Savitri, p. 349.
100 Ibid, p. 351. 101 Kumārasaṃbhava, 3.30.
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a tilaka-flower was the tilaka-mark on her forehead, she painted her lips that were the mango-leaves with the subtle hue of the rising sun.
The coming of Spring is indeed "a fire of irised hues". In one single line Sri Aurobindo seizes the quintessence of Kalidasa's description. In order to appreciate fully the suggestiveness of this line, we have to recall to our mind Kalidasa's Vasanta.
Also Kalidasian is the role of the lover, the romantic hero (nāyaka) that Sri Aurobindo attributes to Spring and of the loved heroine (nāyaka) to Earth. Kalidasa writes:
bālendu-vakrāṇy avikāṣa-bhāvād babhuḥ palaśāny atilohitāni/
sadyo vasantena samāgatānāṃ nakha-kṣatānlva vanasthallnām//102
They are curved like the crescent moon, the intensely red palāśa-buds,
because they are not yet fully open;
they look like nail-marks on the body of "Woodlands"
who have just made love with Spring.
Like Spring and his Earth-bride we have here Vasanta and Vanasthali as nāyaka and ndyika. But whereas in Kalidasa the whole tone and mood is sensuous, in Sri Aurobindo there is a spiritual transmutation. The joy of union is not an eroto-aesthetic enjoyment but the primal ānanda, "the thrill that made the world". His Spring speaks to the soul; his is not the voice of the sweet-singing cuckoo that calls to the senses:
His voice was a call to the Transcendent's sphere
Whose secret touch upon our mortal lives
Keeps ever new the thrill that made the world.103
In Sri Aurobindo's description there are also birds and beasts, flowers and insects that make spring glorious and vocal:
Asocas burned in crimson spots of flame,
Pure like the breath of an unstained desire
White jasmines haunted the enamoured air,
102Ibid, 3.29. 103 Savitri, p. 351.
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Pale mango-blossoms fed the liquid voice
Of the love-maddened coil, and the brown bee
Muttered in fragrance mid the honey-buds.104
Let us now hear what Kalidasa has to say about the male cuckoo and the bee:
puṃs-kokilaś cūta-rasāsavena mattaḥ priyām cumbati ragahrstah\
gunjad-dvirepho 'py ayam ambuja-sthaḥ priyaṃ priyāyaḥ prakaroti cāṭ\\105
The male cuckoo, drunk with wine of the juice of the mango-flower, kisses his beloved, glad of the sweet attraction, and here the bee murmuring in the lotus-blossom hums flattery's sweetness to his sweet.
(Sri Aurobindo's translation, Kalidasa, SABCL, Vol. 3, p. 259.)
cūtāṅkurasvada-kaṣāya-kaṇṭthah puṃs-kokilo...madhuraṃ cukūja/06
Sweetly sang the male cuckoo whose voice had grown passionate from his relishing the mango-buds.
And about the white jasmine (kuṇda) Kalidasa says:
kundaiḥ sa-vibhrama-vadhū-hasitāvadātair uddyotitāny upavānani manoharāṇi/
cittam muner api haranti nivrtta-ragam...107
The white jasmines pure as the smile of a passionate bride steal even the passionless hearts of sages...
When we compare Kalidasa's lines with those of Sri Aurobindo we at once see the influence, but we also note the difference in their aesthetic views. Kalidasa's is a mental aesthesics, Sri Aurobindo's overmental. "Aesthetics is concerned," writes Sri Aurobindo, "mainly with beauty, but more general with rasa, the response of the mind, the vital feeling and sense to a certain 'taste' in things which often
104 Ibid., p. 352. 105Ṛtusaṃhāra, 6.14.
106 Kumārasaṃbhava, 3.32. 107Ṛtusaṃhāra, 6.23.
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may be but is not necessarily a spiritual feeling. Aesthetics belongs to the mental range and all that depends upon it..."108 But Sri Aurobindo, we shall see, develops a new aesthetics, in which the sensual, emotional and imaginative enjoyment is changed "to some form of the spirit's delight of existence."109
We can hear many distant echos of Kalidasa's verse in Savitri, where the rasa-aesthetics is transformed and lifted to the spiritual Overmind aesthesis. Before closing this section I shall give one more example of this transformation. There is, I think, a subtle relation between the birth and growth of Kalidasa's Parvati and that of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri. Parvati is the Mother of the Universe bom as Himalaya's daughter. Mythologically she is divine. Yet when we read carefully about her birth and childhood, about her childish plays with her friends, about her youth the beauty of which Kalidasa describes in most sensuous and glowing words and images, about her ascetic practices and finally about her marriage and union with Shiva, we realise that she is intensely human: she is at once the goddess and her physical incarnation.
Savitri too is the Mother of the Universe: she is "represented in the poem as an incarnation of the Divine Mother;110 she takes a human body without losing her divinity. Sri Aurobindo describes her birth and childhood, her youth and her quest. In keeping with the new aesthesis the sensuous is transmuted into the spiritually tangible. Savitri's childhood, and youth surrounded by her companions are not less vividly depicted than Parvati's, but it is a different kind of vividness. About the day when Parvati was bom Kalidasa writes:
śaririṇam sthāvara-jaṅgamānāṃ sukhāya taj-janma-dinam babhūva/111
The day of her birth made happy all embodied creatures both moving and unmoving.
Sri Aurobindo's rendering of this line is:
Earth answered to the rapture of the skies
And all her moving and unmoving life
Felt happiness because the Bride was bom.112
108Savitri, p. 743. 109Ibid., p. 809. 110Ibid., p. 729.
111 Kumārasaṃbhava, 1.22.
112 The Translations, SABCL, Vol. 8, p. 107.
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And now what Sri Aurobindo writes about Savitri's birth:
In this high signal moment of the gods
Answering earth's yearning and her cry for bliss
A greatness from our other countries came.113
In Kalidasa, as in Valmiki and Vyasa, the ancient spirituality was not absent, but it was not their all-embracing preoccupation: the Upanishadic vision of the all-pervading Brahman, the spirit immanent in all things, was treated ethically, theologically, philosophically and metaphorically. Speaking of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, Sri Aurobindo says that in both these poems "it is a high poetic soul that is at work; the directly intuitive mind of the Veda and the Upanishads has retired behind the veil of the intellectual and outwardly physical imagination.""4 In Kalidasa too the direct intuition is veiled by sensuous symbols and metaphors. He had arrived at a synthesis— we have seen earlier—of the three elements, but Sri Aurobindo foresees a new poetic age in which poetry will express a vaster synthesis, an age "in which moral, intellectual and material development should be all equally harmonised and spiritualised.1115
Overmind Aesthesis: the Great Synthesis
The poetry of the new age will express "a harmonious and luminous totality of man's being;""6 besides the material, moral and intellectual worlds it will embrace the spiritual world too which will no longer be remote and detached. Sri Aurobindo finds this living and intimate spirituality in the Veda. The ancient seers gave utterance to it in the symbolic poetry of the Rigveda and the intuitively metaphysical poetry of the Upanishads.
i) Influence of the Veda and the Upanishads.
Sri Aurobindo says that the day of salvation for poetry will come when we get back "to the ancient worship of delight and beauty.. .for without these things there can be neither an assured nobility nor a satisfied dignity and fullness of life nor a harmonious perfection of
113Savitri, p. 353.
114The Foundations of Indian Culture, SABCL, Vol. 14, p. 291.
115The Harmony of Virtue, SABCL Vol. 3, p. 227.
116The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 197.
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the spirit."117 For the poetry of the future—the poetry that he himself wished to create and has created in Savitri—it is then essential that we turn to the earliest poetry of the Veda and the Upanishads. This turning does not mean that future poets should write poetry in imitation of the ancient poets; it only means that their influence has to be assimilated within a great synthesis.
The Vedic poetry is the first utterance of the seeing soul clothed in polyvalent symbols and intuitive images. But this poetry is not easily accessible to many, firstly because its language is archaic. Moreover it represents "an early intuitive and symbolical mentality""8 which is quite alien to the modem mind. Today we see poetry as a revel of intellect and fancy, imagination as a caterer for our amusement, an entertainer for the pleasure of our mind and vital sensations. But to the ancients the image was "a revelative symbol of the unrevealed and it was used because it could hint luminously to the mind what the precise intellectual word... could not at all hope to manifest."119
Sri Aurobindo has cleared for us a way through the forest of Vedic symbols, and if we follow his lead we can perhaps seize "the imaged spiritual intuition" of that first poetry. He himself had a great admiration for it and praises it eloquently and unreservedly. "The utterances of the greatest seers... touch the most extraordinary heights and amplitudes of a sublime and mystic poetry and there are poems like the Hymn of Creation that move in a powerful clarity on the summits of thought on which the Upanishads lived constantly with a more sustained breathing."120
117 Ibid, pp. 237-38.
118 The Foundations of Indian Culture, SABCL, Vol. 14, p. 259.
119 The Human Cycle, SABCL, Vol. 15, p. 5. Some recent Vedic scholars recognise the poetic-intuitive and revelatory power of the Vedic hymns. "In all times," writes J. Gonda, "and among many peoples there have— independently of religious faith and often also of moral preparation— been men, who were aware of the reality of 'visions' and intuitions, of inspirations and sudden thoughts and ideas, men who understood that besides the purely sensuous impression a thought, a flash of intuition, in short knowledge, may come to the human mind, as it were spontaneously, at least without any conscious activity of the organ of sensory perception and which leaves an impression of great reality; men who know that the 'doors of the mind may be opened' (RV. 9.10.6)." Jan Gonda, The Vision of the Vedic Poet, The Hague, 1963, p. 17.
120The Foundations of Indian Culture, SABCL, Vol. 14, p. 267.
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In Savitri Sri Aurobindo has used effectively and suggestively many Vedic symbols and images. The very first canto, entitled the Symbol Dawn, reminds us of the Vedic dawn, uṣas:
A glamour from the unreached transcendences
Iridescent with the glory of the Unseen,
A message from the unknown immortal Light
Ablaze upon creation's quivering edge,
Dawn built her aura of magnificent hues.121
The Vedic poet sings:
idaṃ śreṣṭhaṃ jyotiṣām jyotir āgāc citraḥ praketo 'janiṣṭa vibhvā 122
There comes the most brilliant light of all lights; the beacon is bom flashing on all sides.
The lines of Savitri give us the same impression of light as in the Vedic verse. The idea of the beacon (praketa) is there furnished by "a message ... ablaze upon creation's quivering edge."
One of the most significant of Vedic myths was that of the cows stolen by the robbers (pani) who kept them hidden in dark rocky caves. The cows were found by Sarama, the divine hound and liberated by Indra. Sri Aurobindo has analysed the myth and brought out the rich spiritual significance in The Secret of the Veda.123 The passage below makes a striking allusion to the myth:
A darkness carrying morning in its breast
Looked for the eternal wide returning gleam,
Waiting the advent of a larger ray
And rescue of the lost herds of the Sun.
In a splendid extravagance of the waste of God
Dropped carelessly in creation's spendthrift work,
Left in the chantiers of the bottomless world
And stolen by the robbers of the Deep,
The golden shekels of the Eternal lie,
Hoarded from touch and view and thought's desire,
Locked in blind antres of the ignorant flood
121 Savitri, pp. 3-4. 122 Rig Veda. 1.13.1.
123 The Secret of the Veda, SABCL, Vol. 10, pp. 203-32.
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Lest men should find them and be even as Gods.124
And elsewhere:
A cave of darkness guards the eternal Light.
The inspiration and vision of the early Vedic poets have certainly left their mark on Savitri, but it is the Upanishads that have directly contributed to the formulation of the new poetics. The Upanishads are, says Sri Aurobindo, "a continuation and a development and to a certain extent an enlarging transformation in the sense of bringing out into open expression all that was held covered in the symbolic Vedic speech as a mystery and a secret."126
In the above quotation the phrase "open expression" is of utmost importance for the modem man. We have lost the power of grasping spontaneously the meaning of symbolic speech as that of the Veda, for we are marked too much by thought. The poetry of the Upanishads is relatively more accessible to the thinking man. It "reveals," says Sri Aurobindo, "the very word of its self-expression and discovers to the mind the vibrations of rhythms which repeating themselves within in the spiritual hearing seem to build up the soul and set it satisfied and complete on the heights of self-knowledge."127
Sri Aurobindo gives the highest praise to the Upanishads; he calls them "epic hymns of self-knowledge and world-knowledge and God-knowledge," "chants of inspired knowledge," "spiritual poems of an absolute, an unfailing inspiration inevitable in phrase, wonderful in rhythm and expression."128 It is impossible to gauge the extent of spiritual, philosophic and poetic "influence" of the Upanishads on Sri Aurobindo, for he has made the Upanishadic vision his own; it has become a part and parcel of his own integral vision.
In many passages of Savitri we can trace allusions to experiences and ideas of the Upanishads. Take, for example, the following lines:
Although of One these forms of greatness are
And by its breath of grace our lives abide,
Although more near to us than nearness' self,
It is some utter truth of what we are;
124 Savitri, p. 42. 125 Ibid., p. 305.
126The Foundations of Indian Culture, SABCL, Vol. 14, p. 274.
127Ibid., p. 269. 128 Ibid., pp. 272, 269.
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Hidden by its own works it seemed far off,
Impenetrable, occult, voiceless, obscure.129
In these lines are interwoven some great Upanishadic ideas:
1)sarvaṃ khalv idaṃ brahma
All this is indeed Brahman.130
2)yat prāṇena na prāṇiti yena prāṇah praṇiyatel
tad eva brahma tvaṃ viddhi...131
That which breathes not with the breath, that by which life-breath is led forward in its paths, know That to be the Brahman...( Sri Aurobindo's translation)
3)dūrāt sudūre tad ihāntike
Very far and farther than famess, it is here close to us. (Sri Aurobindo's translation)132
And the line:
The Sole in its solitude yearned towards the All.133
reminds us of the supreme Purusha who was alone in the beginning of time and did not enjoy himself (na rente); for, one does not enjoy oneself if one is alone (ekāki na ramate). (Bṛhadāraṇyaka Up. 1.4.5)
One could multiply such examples but that would not add anything new to our argument. What we must now see is how Sri Aurobindo conceives the new poetry - the poetry of the future - which has to harmonize the spiritual element within the aesthetic synthesis already made by Kalidasa
ii) The New Synthesis.
Sri Aurobindo established the psycho-philosophical basis of the new synthesis in his book The Future Poetry. It is not just an objective study of the evolution of poetry in the past and an indication of what
129 Savitri, p. 305. 130 Chandogya Upanishad, 3.14.1.
131 Kena Upanishad 1.8. 132 Mundaka Upanishad, 3.1.7.
133 Savitri, p. 326.
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poetry is likely to be in the future; it is also, and especially in the final chapters, a programme for the kind of poetry he wrote, and more particularly the poetry of Savitri.
Sri Aurobindo proposes a new aesthetics which is overmental. It is based on an integral perception of existence. Aesthetics as we generally understand it, "is condemned," says he, "to serve first and foremost our external interest in life or our interest in thought or in troubled personality or the demand of the senses or passions or bidden to make them beautiful and vivid to us by an active aesthetic celebration and artistic manufacture of the word or a supply of carefully apt or beautiful forms and measures."134 But there is also a higher and intenser joy which is hardly its field. The aesthetic enjoyment of the poetry of the Veda and the Upanishads was not taken into consideration by the ancient writers of poetics, for whom Valmiki was the first poet (ādi kavi).135 We have seen that Sri Aurobindo recognises the high value of the poetry of the seer-poets. But sublime though it was it did not embrace existence in all its multifarious expression. The Vedic poetry is founded on "a sacred and hieratic ars poetica"136 far from our present day mentality: we do not believe ourselves to be near to the gods nor feel their presence in our heart. The sublime philosophic and spiritual poetry of the Upanishads "has remained within the limited province of a purely inward experience." The Overmind aesthesis, on the other hand, is "an expansion of the inner way of vision to outer no less than to inner things."137 It is not "something hieratically remote, mystic, inward, shielded from the profane."138 All that Valmiki, Vyasa, Kalidasa and the seer-poets of the Veda and the Upanishads have realised has to be incorporated in this aesthesis. But synthesis is not eclecticism, not a bundling together of things that are disparate. In a true synthesis all the various elements have to undergo a sea-change and be assimilated by a vaster vision. In the present case the vaster vision is the Overmind aesthesis.
134The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 239. See also Savitri, p. 809.
135There is a similar neglect of the ancient hieratic poetry of Europe - a neglect more categorical than in India. Mallarme, whose dream was to create a poetry that would express deeper and higher truths, wondered if there were no poets before Homer, the Western ādi-kavi. His answer was that before Homer there was Orpheus: "Avant Homére, quoi? - Orphée."
136The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 201.
137 Ibid., p. 283. 138 Ibid., p. 202.
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There are higher ranges above the mind. The seer-soul rises sometimes to those regions beyond the darkness or half-light of sense-perceptions and mental knowings into the world of light and declares in glorious words:
vedāham etaṃ puruṣaṃ mahāntam adityavarṇaṃ tamasaḥ parastāt/139
I know this great Person who is beyond darkness and shining like the sun.
This knowledge reveals the identity of the soul and the supreme Light from which all things proceed and in which all things exist. In that oneness one finds "the word of light which can most powerfully illumine our human utterance."140 Is not the above line itself an example of such an utterance? The knowledge that the seer declares is not a mental but an intuitive revelation. Here the ordinary mind is no longer operative; it is a greater Mind that sees the truth directly. In the past such revelations have been sporadic. For the new poetry the poet has to visit the source of all things in his "superconscient mind": 'To find the way into that circle with the looking self is to be the seer-poet and discover the highest power of the inspired word, the mantra."141
The Overmind aesthesis is the aesthesis of mantric poetry. Aesthesis is the essence of poetry. On the higher ranges of intuition mental aesthesis has to be abandoned and replaced by a higher one. "As we climb beyond Mind," writes Sri Aurobindo, "higher and wider values replace the values of our limited mind, life and bodily consciousness. Aesthesis shares in that intensification of capacity... As it enters the Overhead planes the ordinary aesthesis turns into a pure delight and becomes capable of a high, a large or a deep abiding ecstacy... In the Overmind we have a first firm foundation of the experience of the universal beauty, a universal law, a universal delight."142 If the poet can make this aesthesis his own, he "becomes a spokesman of the eternal spirit of beauty and delight and shares the highest creative and self-expressive rapture
139Shwetashwatara Upanishad, 3.8.
140Ibid., p. 221. 141 Ibid., p. 222.
142 Savitri, p. 809 ff.
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which is close to the original ecstasy that made existence, the divine Ananda."143
The great powers and expressions of the poets Valmiki, Vyasa and Kalidasa and the ancient seer-poets are not denied in this synthesis, nor those of the great poets of world literature. There are five universal powers of poetry: truth, beauty, delight, life and spirit.144 In the Overmind aesthesis all these find their adequate place within a harmonious structure. These powers have evolved from the beginning of the world and have taken various forms. They are, we may say, the pure forms of the powers we have spoken of: truth is the highest expression of intellectualism (Vyasa), life that of morality (Valmiki), beauty and delight that of joy even in the most physical things (Kalidasa) and spirit the highest heights that the Vedic and Upanishadic poets have reached. Poetry of the Overmind aesthesis has "occasionally and inadequately" been written but the poet of the spiritual age will write "adequately and constantly."145 This is the kind of poetry Sri Aurobindo had in mind when he wrote and rewrote Savitri, seizing an ever higher inspiration to make it the first expression of the great harmonising and transformative vision.146 This poetry takes the whole of existence for its subject: "God and Nature and man and all the worlds, the field of the finite and the infinite."147
iii) The Form of the New Poetry: Kalidasian and Upanishadic.
We cannot judge or appreciate the poetry of Savitri in terms of older poetry and aesthetics. It is, says Sri Aurobindo, "an experiment in mystic poetry, spiritual poetry cast into a symbolic figure... it is really a new attempt and cannot be hampered by old ideas of technique except when they are assimilable."148 This is not the place for the study of the poetic technique of Savitri, here we shall only speak of some aspects of that technique which Sri Aurobindo has assimilated from Sanskrit poetry. The blank verse of Savitri is different from the
143The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 241. See, Taittirlya Up. (3.6.1 ): ānandādd hy eva khalv imāni bhūtani jāyante, It is, verily, from ecstasy that these beings are bom.
144See, The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, pp. 203-204. Hi Savitri, p. 816.
146"I used Savitri" writes Sri Aurobindo, "as a means of ascensioa " Ibid., p. 727.
147The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 198.
148Savitri, p. 750.
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English blank verse of such poets as Shakespeare, Milton or Wordsworth. It is a form that he has evolved as the most apt vehicle for his purpose. In a letter he speaks of some of the technical peculiarities as well as the two most important influences that led to this technique: it is, he writes, "blank verse without enjambement (except rarely)—each line a thing by itself and arranged in paragraphs of one, two, three, four, five lines (rarely a longer series), in an attempt to catch something of the Upanishadic and the Kalidasian movement so far as that is possible in English."149
In poetry there is an essential relation between the linguistic form (śabda) and the content (artha). Form is that which embodies the vision, the poetic truth. Kalidasa compares the union (sahitya, togetherness) of the form and content with the union of Shiva, the supreme Lord, and Parvati, the Mother Nature.150 Shiva is the soul, Parvati the body. Without the soul the body is meaningless, without the body the soul is unmanifest: "...form only exists as a manifestation of spirit and has no independent being."'51 Bearing this in mind we can nevertheless describe some outward formal characteristics of the body. What Sri Aurobindo says about the blank verse is about the body of poetry. I would like to suggest that the blank verse of Savitri has evolved from Kalidasian influence and culminated to what it is through that of the metrical Upanishads.
I shall first consider the influence of Kalidasa. The translations from Kalidasa had taught Sri Aurobindo the manner of catching the mood of Sanskrit versification and transposing it in English verse. These translations are creative transformations of the spirit of Sanskrit metrical pattern.
The metres that Kalidasa uses are varied. In epic poems (mahākāvya) Sanskrit poets do not use the same metre throughout; however, one whole canto (sarga) has one single metre except the closing verse. As a general rule each verse-unit is self-contained. A canto is thus a string of verses of the same metrical pattern. The verse-unit is composed of four quarters (pāda). The patterns that Kalidasa uses in the epics are quite simple and limited in number: the metres most used are: anuṣṭup (or śloka, quarter of eight syllables) and indravajrā with its two slightly varied forms, upendravajrā and upajāti (quarter of eleven syllables). A verse-unit is thus a quatrain (four quarters).
149 Ibid., p. 727. 150 Raghuvaṃśa, 1.1.
151 Supplement, SABCL, Vol. 27, p. 87.
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How does Sri Aurobindo translate these verses? It is generally not possible to fit the whole content of a Kalidasian four-quartered verse in an English quatrain of iambic pentameter. In his translations Sri Aurobindo does not hesitate to use more lines whenever he thinks it necessary. The important thing is the metrical mood and the metrical structure. Sanskrit epics are architectural. Their structure is made of verses which are like finely chiseled stones.152 Sri Aurobindo's translation recreates the structure in English. I shall take an example.
We have three different translations of a fragment of Kumārasaṃbhava. The first is in five-line rhymed stanzas, the other two are in blank verse. I shall take the rendering, from the second version, of a verse describing Himalaya. The original is:
āmekhalaṃ saṇcaratāṃ ghanānāṃ
chāyām adhaḥ-sānu-gatāṃ niśevya/
udvejitā vṛṣtibhir āsrayante
śṛngāni yasyātapavanti siddhāḥ (1.5)
Sri Aurobindo's translation:
Far down the clouds droop to his girdle-waist;
Then by the low-hung plateaus' coolness drawn
The siddhas in soft shade repose, but flee
Soon upward by wild driving rain distressed
To summits splendid in the veilless sun.153
We have here the type of Savitri's blank verse as described above. Sri Aurobindo has attempted even the blank verse quatrain that would correspond more closely to the Sanskrit verse, but he found, he says, that "it led to a stiff monotony,"154 therefore he varied the length of the paragraphs.
The influence of the Upanishadic verse perfected the metrical pattern. There is less metrical variety in the Upanishads but the form is sublimely suited to their "revelatory utterance". The "characteristic voice" of this poetry has developed from its "spiritual vision and the
l52About the blank verse in Savitri Sri Aurobindo writes: "...each line must be strong enough to stand by itself, while at the same time it fits harmoniously into the sentence or paragraph like stone added to stone." Sri Aurobindo on Himself, Vol. 26, p. 248.
153The Translations, SABCL, Vol. 8, p. 104.
154Sri Aurobindo on Himself, SABCL, Vol. 26, p. 308.
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sense of things behind life and above the intellect;"155 it has "a body of ideal transparency through which we look into the illimitable."156
Each quarter (pāda) or "step" of the verse is "brief and marked off by the distinctness of its pause, full of echoing cadences that remain long vibrating in the inner hearing: each is as if a wave of the infinite that carries in it the whole voice and rumour of the ocean."157 The step in Savitri is the line: what Sri Aurobindo says above applies perfectly to the blank verse of his epic.
Form ((śabda) cannot fully be apprehended except in union with the content (artha). The true poet is "the seer of things," a "delight-soul in touch with the impersonal and eternal fountains of joy and beauty who creates from that source and transmutes by its alchemy all experience into a form of the spirit's Ananda."158 Form is not superimposed on the substance, nor the substance fitted to a given form; there is here "a spiritual transmutation of the substance got by sinking the mental and vital interests in a deeper soul experience which brings the inevitable word and the supreme form and the unanalysable rhythm."159
Influences prepare the basic structure so that the spirit can seize and transmute it and make it an instrument of its self-expression. It is by becoming or getting into what he sees that the poet finds the true soul-form. By getting into the poet receives the gift of the word: this is what we call inspiration. The form is also a divine gift (devaprasādd). "I don't think," writes Sri Aurobindo, "about technique because thinking is no longer in my line."160 But all inspiration does not belong to the Overmind aesthesis. As Sri Aurobindo ascended from height to height in his superconscient adventure the inspiration too changed, and therefore he had to make several revisions: "...there have been made several successive revisions each trying to lift the general level higher and higher towards a possible Overmind poetry."161
155The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 113.
156The Foundations of Indian Culture, SABCL, Vol. 14, p. 271.
157Ibid., p. 274.
158The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 241.
159Ibid.
160Savitri, p. 729.
161Ibid., p. 729.
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Conclusion
Here I would like to say a few words about the Mantra, a potent Vedic notion which has greatly influenced Sri Aurobindo's poetics and poetical work. "The Vedic poets," says he, "regarded their poetry as Mantras, they were the vehicles of their own realisations and could become vehicles of realisations for others."162 And the Mantra meant to the sages "an inspired and revealed seeing and visioned thinking, attended by a realisation...of some inmost truth of God and self and man and Nature and cosmos and life and thing and thought and experience and deed."163 All true poetry is seeing (darśana)— thinking itself is visioned—expressed in language (varṇana). What makes the poetry mantric is that the creative force behind it is not "imagination" but "realisation", i.e. making real in one's life the truth seen. Now, the truth seen is not by itself the highest reality that Mantra realises. Mantra is bom, says Sri Aurobindo, "through the heart and shaped or massed by the thinking mind into a chariot of that godhead of the Eternal of whom the truth seen is a face or form."164 That means that it brings the Eternal itself to the hearts of those who are prepared to receive Him.
The highest poetry is "the Mantra of the Real".165 This poetry comes "when the poet becomes the seer and reveals to man his eternal self and the godheads of its manifestation."166 One becomes a seer (Rishi) when one rises above mind and sees the Real; he is the beholder of the highest light beyond darkness. The Vedic poet sings:
ud vayaṃ tamasas pari jyotis paśyanta uttaram/167
devaṃ devatrā sūryam aganma jyotir uttamam//
Beholding a higher Light beyond this darkness we have followed it and reached the highest Light of all, Surya divine in the divine Being.
The above verse is at once the definition of the seer and an example of the Vedic Mantra. In the vision of the Overmind aesthesis, we have seen, there is the same reaching to the highest that the mind is capable
162 Sri Aurobindo on Himself, SABCL, Vol. 26, pp. 277-78.
165 The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol 9, p. 199.
164Ibid, p. 200. 165Ibid., p. 9 . 166Ibid., p. 255. 167Rig Veda, 1.50.10.
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of. And the poetry that is bom there is mantric in nature, but the form is not altogether the same as in the ancient poetry. Savitri is the first example of this new mantric poetry; it is, as Sri Aurobindo himself says, "a new poetry with a new law of expression and technique,"168 "the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind and is often very far from what the general human mind sees and experiences."169 It is the illustration and the justification of the spiritual theory of Overmind aesthesis.
To conclude, we can say that Savitri is a vast architecture of high spiritual mantric poetry: it is the poetry of the future built on the great poetic realisations of the past.
RANAJIT SARKAR
168 Sri Aurobindo on Himself, SABCL, Vol. 26, p. 259. See also Savitri, p. 798. 169 Ibid., p. 249. See also Savitri, p. 794.
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