On Savitri
THEME/S
The opening pages of the earliest known manuscript of Savitri are dated August 8-9th 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.
The process through which such a work took shape has a unique interest. The manuscripts and typescripts of Savitri—amounting to eight thousand pages or so, with some passages evolving through as many as fifty versions—tell the story of a labour without parallel in the history of literary creation. But an adequate presentation of the details of this process would require several volumes. Even a brief account, with examples from each of the twelve books illustrating the various phases of the poem's development, would need more space than is available here.1
Therefore this essay will be confined to some reflections on the origin of Savitri and the background of its composition. The version dated August to October 1916 has a strong claim to be considered the starting-point of the materialisation, in the form in which we know it, of the vision Sri Aurobindo was moved to express in Savitri. Once he had taken up this theme, he found himself compelled, as it were, by the creative impetus with which he began, by his constantly enlarging experience and by the inner life of the ancient myth itself, to go on expanding, heightening and deepening his treatment of it.
What Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1916 was a minor poem compared to the final epic. Yet this uneven but powerful sketch should not be underestimated. Its inspiration may be exempli Tied by some lines from a passage found near the end of the notebook that contains the first known draft. Spoken to Savitri by the godhead into whom Death has been transformed, these lines are similar, despite some later additions
1 See "The Composition of Savitri in Mother India, beginning in the issue of October 1999. A shorter synopsis, published as the "Note on the Text" at the end of volume 34 of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (1997), has been reprinted in the tenth impression (2000) of the fourth edition of Savitri.
* Representative facsimiles of Savitri belonging to different periods of drafting are presented in Richard Hartz's article at the end of this volume.
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and reordering, to lines that now come in Book Eleven at the climax of the epic. In 1916, Sri Aurobindo had written them as follows:
I will pour delight from thee as from a jar,
And whirl thee as my chariot through the ways,
And use thee as my sword and as my lyre,
And play on thee my minstrelsies of thought.
And when thou art vibrant with all ecstasies
And when thou liv'st one spirit with all things,
Men seeing thee shall feel my siege of joy,
And nearer draw to me because thou art
Enamoured of thy spirit's loveliness
They shall embrace my body in thy soul,
Hear in thy life the beauty of my laugh,
Know the thrilled bliss with which I made the world.
This shalt thou henceforth learn from thy heartbeats
That conquering me thou art my captive made,
And who possess me are by me possessed.
For ever love, O beautiful slave of God.2
The last line differs in the final text only by being punctuated with an exclamation mark. With regard to this line, the Mother once said that it was the "line from Savitri that gave me the most tremendous experience of the entire book . I was as if suddenly swept up and engulfed in... eternal Truth. Everything was abolished except this:
For ever love, O beautiful slave of God!
That alone existed."3
The Mahabharata and Savitri
Although the manuscripts go back only to 1916, Sri Aurobindo's interest in the theme of Savitri can be traced to the turn of the century, when he was in Baroda and was reading the Mahabharata in Sanskrit In his essay "Notes on the Mahabharata", written around 1901, he explained why, on stylistic grounds, be considered this episode to be an early but authentic composition by Vyasa, the author of the original Mahabharata into whose vast structure so much other matter was later
2 A transcript of these lines has been published in the "Concluding Passage" to "Sri Aurobindo's First Fair Copy of Ins Earliest Version of Savitri", Mother India, February 1982, pp. 82-83. Cf. the final version in Savitri (1993), pp. 701-2.
3Mother'sAgenda, Vol. 2, pp. 27-28 (1961).
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interpolated. He expressed his appreciation of Vyasa's manner of telling the story:
Vyasa... had one object, to paint the power of a woman's silent love and he rejected everything which went beyond this or which would have been merely decorative. 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 a Savitri.4
The Mahabharata, besides being the source of the legend of Savitri and Satyavan as it has come down to us, influenced the style of Sri Aurobindo's epic and his characterisation of the heroine. The strength and directness of the language Vyasa uses to depict Savitri are matched by Sri Aurobindo's portrayal of her sweet but indomitable personality.
In the Mahabharata, for instance, after Narad discloses the fate of Satyavan, Savitri affirms the finality of her choice with these words:
Once I have chosen a husband, I choose not a second.
Sri Aurobindo has translated this into English in an even more compactly forceful line:
Once my heart chose and chooses not again.6
But it is only in rare lines that he followed the Mahabharata soclosely. For some parts of the narrative, he took the tale told in the Sanskrit epic as a starting-point Elsewhere, and especially in Savitri'sconfrontation with Death, he diverged widely from Vyasa even in the earliest versions of Savitri. The nature of these divergences is significant, for Sri Aurobindo' s innovations in retelling the story reveal his creative purpose.
In the Mahabharata when Yama sees Savitri following him, he addresses her with words such as might be expected from one who is not only the God of Death, but also the Lord of Dharma:
Savitri, turn back and attend to the funeral rites of the dead; you have now paid the debt to your husband and are free of it; as far as you could go with him, you have come.7
4 The Harmony of Virtue, SABCL, Vol. 3, p. 155.
5 Mahabharata (Gita Press, Gorakhpur), Vana Parva, 294.27.
6Savitri, p. 432.
7Translation by R. Y. Deshpande, Vyasa's Savitri: A Verse-by-Verse Rendering and Some Perspectives (1996), p. 44.
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Savitri replies by asserting her right to follow her husband wherever he goes. Yama repeatedly asks her to turn back. But she is undaunted and responds with a series of aphorisms on Dharma. Pleased by her intelligence, virtue and constancy, and yielding to her tenacity, Yama grants boon after boon. As the final boon, he restores Satyavan to life.
At no point in Vyasa's dialogue does Savitri openly defy the authority of Yama or challenge the established order of things. Her success in winning boons from the God of Death is a tribute to her qualities as an ideal Kshatriya woman. But her personal victory seems only an isolated exception to the universal law of life's subjection to the arbitrary intervention of death. It offers little hope that the law will be abrogated.
Sri Aurobindo, the Revolutionary
Sri Aurobindo approached the problems of death, fate and pain from a different angle, causing him to give a new turn to the legend. The revolutionary in him had not disappeared, but had only been sublimated when he left the political field for the spiritual. So long as the spirit is a slave of ignorant forces, the maintenance of the settled order was not a part of his aim.
At an early age, he "had already received strongly the impression that a period of general upheaval and great revolutionary changes was coming in the world and he himself was destined to play apart in it."* Eventually, he realised that a radical change of consciousness was the one revolution that could solve all problems. He wrote Savitri with the idea that the power of the word—especially the inspired and revelatory poetic word that comes from the heights or the depths and speaks to the inner being, not only to the surface mind—could help to bring about this change.
The 1916 version of Savitri already shows the profoundly revolutionary spirit of Sri Aurobindo's approach to the subject of the poem. In a world governed by ignorance and death, Savitri is engaged in an inner freedom-struggle much more difficult to win than any political conflict. Her opponent has the entire machinery of the material universe on his side. Yet, in lines found even in the first surviving draft, Savitri dares to say to Death:
8 On Himself, SABCL, Vol. 26, p. 4.
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I trample on thy Law with living feet,
For to arise in freedom I was born.9
One with such aspirations could not be content with boons that are meant to placate discontent and do not alter the human condition. It may be relevant to observe that in Sri Aurobindo's political writings, "boons" from the colonial rulers were invariably mentioned ironically. For instance, take his comment in Bande Mataram on a new set of reforms that would leave the conditions of political life in India "precisely the same as before":
Let us take them one by one, these precious and inestimable boons. They are three in number, a trinity of marvels....10
Savitri would seem to have little in common with a political newspaper. Yet its heroine taunts Death with words that, if deeper in their import, are not dissimilar in their tone to the Bande Mataram quotation:
Offer, O King, thy boons to tired spirits...
Surely thy boons are great since thou art He!11
These last lines were written in 1947. But even in the earliest manuscript of the poem, in apassage dated 18 October 1916, Savitri's first reply to Death shows how far Sri Aurobindo had departed from the traditional content of the dialogue:
Then Death again sent forth his mighty voice.
"O Savitri, who first in human limbs
Hast traversed without death the living night,
Turn back. Whatever boon thy heart desires
Save this that shakes the order of the world,
Ask." And she spoke, she answered now, "I choose
No boon; desire lives not within my heart.
What is to me the order of thy world,
O Death, who am immortal and beyond?"
Most of the boons that figure so prominently in the well-known
9These lines are worded the same in the final text of Savitri, p. 652.
10Bande Mataram, SABCL, Vol. 1, p. 414.
11Savitri, p. 647.
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Savitri-story have been retained in some form in Sri Aurobindo's final version, but only incidentally. Savitri, if she asks for boons at all, demands them defiantly and knows that Death cannot refuse. Death grants them with disdain for the illusions he will soon dissolve. But a fundamental difference from the traditional account is that Death does not restore Satyavan's life as a boon.
In the Mahabharata, Yama grants this boon in the end, keeping his absolute authority intact. In Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, on the other hand, Death suffers a real defeat. Stated in the terms of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy and Yoga, there is a victory of spiritual force over the laws of a world that has emerged from the Inconscient. The world is not transformed at a single stroke, but a decisive precedent is set that clears the way for a freer outflowering of the soul in Matter. This is the central idea of Savitri. Much of the power with which it is presented in the final version is due to Sri Aurobindo's later revision. But in its essence, it was already formulated clearly enough in 1916 in what appears to be the first draft of the poem.
Savitri and Love and Death
We can only guess when Sri Aurobindo's reinterpretation of the tale he had read in the Mahabharata began to take shape in his mind. His passing comments in "Notes on the Mahabharata" are concerned with style rather than with substance. They only suggest that for him the essence of the story lay not in the intellectual and ethical content of Savitri's dialogue with Yama, but in "the power of a woman's silent love". This is the principal element in common between Vyasa's version and Sri Aurobindo's. The latter's originality lies in the answer to a simple question: "But what kind of love can be stronger than death?"
To the modem mind it may seem that the answer given in the Mahabharata, based on a belief in the rewards of virtue, does not correspond to the facts of life closely enough to be more than a pleasing fiction. To overcome this objection and to make the victory of love over death both artistically convincing and spiritually inevitable was perhaps the greatest challenge Sri Aurobindo faced in writing Savitri. For the whole of human experience seems to point to the opposite conclusion, that death is more powerful.
The expansion of Savitri to the epic it is today was ultimately necessary to justify Sri Aurobindo's solution of this problem, as well
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as to bring out the symbolism of the ancient myth and incorporate the experiences of his own Yoga. Aswapati had to ascend to hitherto undreamed-of spiritual heights and invoke a consciousness and force greater than any yet manifested in the terrestrial evolution, since only the intervention of such a force, embodied in Savitri, could make Satyavan's return to life believable and meaningful. The momentous theme could only be handled on a monumental scale.
As early as 1899, Sri Aurobindo had grappled with the problem in another form, when he took the related Mahabharata episode of Rum and Pramadvara as the subject of Love and Death. This story is told briefly in the Mahabharata, but not in the high style Sri Aurobindo identified as Vyasa's. Presumably it forms part of the mass of accretions, often not without their own value, that swelled the original epic to gigantic proportions. The idea of the husband giving half of his own life to bring his wife back from the dead was reconceived and elaborated by Sri Aurobindo's youthful romantic imagination in vivid and sensuous language of exceptional beauty in its own kind.
No doubt, the intense feeling expressed in this poem was drawn from a general empathy with the human condition more than from any experience in Sri Aurobindo's personal life. But this does not diminish the authenticity of Rum's words:
He spoke, with sorrow pale: "O grim cold Death!...
O secrecy terrific, darkness vast,
At which we shudder! Somewhere, I know not where,
Somehow, I know not how, I shall confront
Thy gloom, tremendous spirit, and seize with hands
And prove what thou art and what man."12
We should not imagine Sri Aurobindo himself pale with sorrow as he wrote these lines. Yet they are in a sense prophetically autobiographical. The struggle with the "darkness vast" was to preoccupy him in one way or another for the rest of his earthly existence. It would be the central theme of the epic Savitri, which he left behind as the witness to a life that had "not been on the surface for men to see."13 Some decades after writing Rum's words, already full of a vague sense that the human spirit is mightier than all that limits and oppresses it, Sri Aurobindo would arrive at the triumphant tone of
12Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, pp. 236-37.
13On Himself, SABCL, Vol. 26, p. 378.
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Savitri's assertion to the "sombre Shadow":
Yes, I am human. Yet shall man by me,
Since in humanity waits his hour the God,
Trample thee down to reach the immortal heights,
Transcending grief and pain and fate and death.14
In 1899 Sri Aurobindo could describe only an inconclusive Pyrrhic victory of love over death. For the outcome of Love and Death illustrates the potency of sacrifice, not the unconditional power of love. The divinity of love appears there in the form of Kama, but Kama himself is realistically diffident about what he can do against death:
So much I can, as even the great Gods learn.
Only with death I wrestle in vain, until
My passionate godhead all becomes a doubt.
Mortal, I am the light in stars, of flowers
The bloom, the nameless fragrance that pervades
Creation: but behind me, older than me,
He comes with night and cold tremendous shade.15
True, the god of love gives the flower that enables Ruru to pass unharmed through the underworld. But only many years after creating this image could Sri Aurobindo, in Savitri, speak of love as not only an all-pervading and all-suffering, but an all-transforming power:
The eyes of love gaze starlike through death's night,
The feet of love tread naked hardest worlds.
He labours in the depths, exults on the heights;
He shall remake thy universe, O Death.16
Such affirmations have a force that springs from direct spiritual vision, the characteristic that gives Savitri a unique place among the world's epics. This element in the poem increased greatly over the years. But the form in which Savitri first emerges to view in manuscripts of 1916 bears already the stamp of yogic knowledge and experience in many passages and in its conception as a whole. This is evidently why most of the original narrative and symbolic structure
14Savitri, p. 634.
15Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 242.
16Savitri, p. 592.
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could remain intact through the repeated rewriting from higher and higher levels of consciousness to which Sri Aurobindo alluded in his letters.
A Baroda Savitri?
We are often told that the composition of Savitri began with a version Sri Aurobindo is supposed to have written in Baroda around 1900, even before he took up Yoga. There is evidence for and against the hypothesis that such a version existed. Its basis is a passing remark by one Dinendra Kumar Roy, who stayed with Sri Aurobindo for some time in Baroda and later wrote that he had seen him writing an English poem on the tale of Savitri and Satyavan. But it has been plausibly suggested that the poem Sri Aurobindo was seen working on may have been Love and Death, which he was then writing and whose story, also taken from the Mahabharata, resembles the much better-known Savitri episode enough that it could have been confused with it.
The fact that no manuscript of a Baroda Savitri survives does not, by itself, prove that there was no such version. But thousands of pages of manuscripts of Savitri, extending in a virtually unbroken series from 1916 to the 1940s, have been preserved. A number of notebooks which Sri Aurobindo used in Baroda for various writings, and later brought with him to Pondicherry, also exist. If he was starting from a version of Savitri written in Baroda when he began to work on the poem in Pondicherry in 1916, it should have been kept along with the other manuscripts. Since it has not been found, it is likely that any poem he might have written on this subject in Baroda did not come with him to Pondicherry.
Sri Aurobindo's own references to the beginnings of Savitri do not seem to support the theory of a Baroda version. He wrote in 1936: "Savitri was originally written many years ago before the Mother came...."17 This surely refers to Pondicherry. For if Sri Aurobindo had written Savitri originally in Baroda, he would have had no reason to speak of its origin in relation to the Mother's coming to Pondicherry.
In the same letter, Sri Aurobindo says more about what he had written "before the Mother came". He mentions that there were two parts of four books each. Several manuscripts in this form exist.
17 Ibid, p. 729.
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Though not dated by Sri Aurobindo, they belong to a more advanced stage in the development of Savitri than the much shorter version without parts, books or cantos on which he wrote dates in August and October 1916. It follows that the phrase "before the Mother came" must refer to her return to India in 1920, not to her first arrival in 1914.
Between 1916 and 1920, Savitri grew from its first simple plan, with no formal divisions, through a version in two books, then a few drafts in six cantos, into a poem in two parts with eight books: "Quest", "Love", Fate" and "Death" in the first part and "Night", 'Twilight", "Day" and an epilogue in the second. These various versions account for Sri Aurobindo's allusions in the 1930s to "many retouchings" that produced the "previous draft", and to "eight or ten recasts" which he had made "originally under the old insufficient inspiration".18
Some manuscripts in the form of eight books are subtitled "A Tale and a Vision". By the early 1930s, the subtitle had become "A Legend and a Symbol". This reflects how the poem was then being transformed, bringing the inner significance of the legend into greater prominence. Sri Aurobindo's mention in 1931 of a previous draft of Savitri that "would have been a legend and not a symbol"19 has been taken to support a Baroda version. But his words need not be understood to imply that the legend itself or his earlier treatment of it were mere story-telling and devoid of deeper meaning. We may take his statement to mean simply that what was symbolised had not been brought out sufficiently in versions written before 1920, where the narrative element was predominant.
Especially the role of Aswapati, the symbol of "the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes,"20 was not developed at length until the period extending from the late 1920s to the early 1940s, when Sri Aurobindo set aside most of the rest of the poem in order to concentrate on what became Part One. Aswapati's part in the epic represents the ascent into a higher consciousness which is one of two principal movements in Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, the other being the descent of that consciousness and its forces into human nature, represented by Savitri. It was only after his siddhi in 1926 that Sri Aurobindo began to make Savitri
18Ibid., pp. 727-28.
19Aid, p. 727.
20 On Himself, SABCL, Vol. 26, p. 265. (The letter is used as "Author's Note" for Savitri)
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an epic symbol of the truth he announced in the first paragraph of The Mother.
There are two powers that alone can effect in their conjunction the great and difficult thing which is the aim of our endeavour, a fixed and unfailing aspiration that calls from below and a supreme Grace from above that answers.21
Simplifying this complex history, Sri Aurobindo telescoped all the early stages into one when he described the plan of "A Tale and a Vision" as that of "the first version"22 of Savitri, written "before the Mother came". That this last phrase refers to the Mother's return to India in 1920 was pointed out by K. D. Sethna, to whom the letter was written, in his introduction to a transcript of one of the 1916 manuscripts.23 It may be added that it was not at all unusual for Sri Aurobindo to speak of 1920 as the year when "the Mother came". For example, he wrote in 1935, that "between 1915 and 1920... the Sadhana and the work were waiting for the Mother's coming."24 Another letter commenting on the conditions of the Sadhana during the same period begins: "Before the Mother came..."25
All this would seem to leave little room for the theory that Savitri was begun in Baroda. However, perhaps we cannot rule out the possibility that Sri Aurobindo while he was in Baroda had written at least part of a poem on this subject, or else a translation of the Mahabharata episode, which may have been lost, so that it had no direct relation to what he began to write in 1916. This would agree with Dinendra Kumar Roy's report without contradicting Sri Aurobindo's own words. For there would be no need for him to mention such a version in referring to the beginnings of the poem he was working on in the 1930s.
The poem presumed to have been lost could then be regarded as a precursor of the poem written in Pondicherry, an exercise belonging to the period of the germination of the idea of the epic, early in Sri Aurobindo's almost lifelong engagement with the theme of his eventual magnum opus. What form it might have taken is a matter of speculation. But it is doubtful whether Sri Aurobindo at that time could have handled the Savitri-story as successfully as the tale of Rum. He was not yet fully equipped for the demands of the subject
21The Mother with Letters on the Mother, SABCL, VoL . 25, p. 1.
22Savitri, p. 729.
23Mother India, August 1981, p. 423.
24On Himself, SABCL, VoL 26, p. 459. 25 Ibid, p. 460.
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Even about Love and Death, he wrote around 1920:
For full success, however, it should have had a more faithfully Hindu colouring, but it was written a score of years ago* when I had not penetrated to the heart of the Indian idea and its traditions, and the shadow of the Greek underworld and Tartarus with the sentiment of life and love and death which hangs about them has got into the legendary framework of the Indian Patala and hells.26
Vedic Symbolism and The Human Cycle
A fundamental difference between the Savitri that began to take shape in 1916 and any version Sri Aurobindo might have written in Baroda would have been due to his study of the Veda after coming to Pondicherry. For even if he had been able to give a Baroda version of Savitri "a more faithfully Hindu colouring" than Love and Death, he could hardly have imbued it with the symbolism that is built into the plan of the poem as we know it. From the earliest manuscripts an essentially Vedic symbolism is implied in the later part where, as Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1936 about "the first version", Savitri moves "through the worlds of Night, of Twilight, of Day—all of course in a spiritual sense."27
The Mahabharata was the source of many of the narrative elements in Savitri. But it was Sri Aurobindo's exploration of the meaning of the Veda that led him to find in this legend clues to a symbolic dimension much older than Vyasa. In August 1916, the month when he drafted the first passages for Savitri, he wrote in the Arya that the remote and dateless past which seemed to be dead is returning upon us with an effulgence of many luminous secrets long lost to the consciousness of mankind but now breaking out again from behind the veil.28
The Veda was for Sri Aurobindo the richest mine of such secrets, formulas of knowledge that had long been obscured by a screen of ill-understood symbols, but which "illuminated with a clear and exact light"29 experiences of his own for which he could find no other explanation.
24 Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 258. *In 1899.
27Savitri, p. 729.
28Essays on the Gita (1997), p. 10; first published in the Arya, 15 August 1916, p. 48.
29The Secret of the Veda (1998), p. 39; first published in the Arya, 15 December 1914, p. 279.
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Though the myth of Savitri and Satyavan does not occur in the hymns that have actually been preserved from that far-off age, the distinctly Vedic names of the characters and several features of the tale gave Sri Aurobindo reason to believe that what was retold in the Mahabharata had been originally "one of the many symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle."30 So reinterpreted, it represents a victory of light over darkness, of the principle of immortality over the disabilities of our mortal state, such as Sri Aurobindo had come to envisage as the object of his own Yoga.
The August 1916 issue of the Arya also contained the first instalment of a series called The Psychology of Social Development. In this book, later revised and published as The Human Cycle, Sri Aurobindo put forward ideas that shed light on the evolution of the Savitri-tale from its Vedic origins to the poem he was then beginning to write. From this point Of view, the legend can be seen passing through a number of forms and interpretations according to the mentality of the times.
After the waning of the symbolic age that created it, the myth was humanised in the "typal" period of the Mahabharata. As retold by Vyasa, it became a force for the formation of character and the inculcation of a social and ethical ideal. Transmitted, next, to the conventional age of Indian society, it underwent a paradoxical conversion. Vyasa's Savitri, whose beauty and "flaming strength" (tejas) no prince dared to claim, who went out into the world to choose her own husband and whom the God of Death himself could not intimidate, became a stereotype of the model wife in a society that discouraged women from exercising initiative or independence.
When Western individualism and rationalism had made inroads into India, the legend attracted the attention of Sri Aurobindo at a point where the transition to a deeper subjective age of the cycle was being attempted. His initial reading of it, focusing on "the power of a woman's silent love," belongs to this stage.
Finally, taking up the theme in earnest when his Yoga was well advanced, Sri Aurobindo gave it an interpretation that overleaps, perhaps by centuries, the stage of development achieved by the collective mind. At the same time, his synthesis includes elements from most of the previous periods: the Vedic symbolism, the strength of character of Vyasa's heroine, the individualistic spirit of revolt, and an intimately subjective handling of the human aspect of the story.
30 Savitri, "Author's Note", Op. cit.
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The original sense of the ancient legend was recovered on a higher plane of spiritual vision. Through Sri Aurobindo's genius and untiring labour, Savitri grew into the prophetic poem, not only of a future India, but of a future humanity.
RICHARD HARTZ
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