Vidula : the historical queen of Sauvira described in the Udyoga-parva of the Mahābhārata. She reproached her son Sanjaya for deserting the battlefield when facing defeat at hands of king of Sindhu; & sent him back into the battlefield with the result that Sanjaya returned victorious. (See The Mother to her Son)
... suddenly, leaving us with the sense of promises unfulfilled. Vidula, also from the Mahabharata, is a maturer work than the fragments considered so far, and when it first appeared in the Bande Mataram it was admirably pointed to the occasion and carried the caption "The Mother to Her Son". The "mother" in the poem is Vidula, a widowed Queen; her son, Sunjoy, has been dispossessed of his... dishonour. Vidula, on the contrary, is an "unwomanly woman" in the Shavian sense; she addresses Page 86 spirited words to her son so unmanly, trying to rouse him to manliness and action. Death is preferable to slavery; death on the battlefield is to be preferred to eating one's heart out in the supposed security of one's, (Kafkaesque) burrow of abject retreat. Vidula, woman though... speed of poetic composition, often some 200 lines in less than an hour. So too we shall find him, in the thick of the political period, essaying powerful verse narratives like Baji Prabhou and Vidula or adventuring into the realm of poetic drama in Perseus the Deliverer. Although Sri Aurobindo's first acquaintance and his growing intimacy with Bengali and Sanskrit literature opened a ...
... of the Moment — Bande Mataram, March 22, 1908 On June 2, 1907, the weekly edition of the Bande Mataram was started. In its second issue, dated 9th June, Sri Aurobindo's patriotic poem, Vidula, began to be published in a serial form. We shall deal with this poem when, in due Page 239 course, we take up the study of Sri Aurobindo's poetry. Here we quote only a few lines from... servitude, which were inspiring Sri Aurobindo's thoughts, writings and activities in Bengal at that time. "There are few more interesting passages in the Mahabharata than the conversation of Vidula with her son. It comes into the main poem as an exhortation from Kunti to Yudhisthir to give up the weak spirit of submission, moderation, prudence, and fight like a true warrior and Kshatriya for... countrymen to revolt against the yoke of the foreigner.... The poet seeks to fire the spirit of the conquered and subject people and impel them to throw off the hated subjection. He personifies in Vidula the spirit of the motherland speaking to her degenerate son and striving to wake in him the inherited Aryan manhood and the Kshatriya's preference of death to servitude." We may note here that ...
... Autobiographical Notes The Policy of the Bande Mataram In other ways also Sri Aurobindo sought to appeal to the hearts of the Indian and British peoples.... Vidula ... appeared in the second issue of the Weekly Bandemataram, which also contained "An Unreported Conversation" in verse between a Briton and Ajit Singh on the eve of his arrest. Another inspiring item... appeal to the British people; that he would have considered as part of the mendicant policy. These articles and other items (satiric verse, parodies, etc.) referred to in these pages (not of course Vidula and Perseus) were the work of Shyamsundar Chakrabarti, not of Sri Aurobindo. Shyamsundar was a witty parodist and could write with much humour, as also with a telling rhetoric; he had caught some imitation ...
... edition of Bande Mataram was published from June 1907 to September 1908, in which editorials and articles from the daily edition were reprinted. The play Perseus the Deliverer and the translation Vidula first appeared in this weekly edition Karmayogin English Weekly Calcutta "A Weekly Review of National Religion, Literature, Science, Philosophy... November 14 and 28 and December 12, 1920; "Ahana" (revised and enlarged version of 520 lines; See 3). Translations: The Century of Life (See 11), "Hymn to the Mother" ("Bande Mataram"; See 7); "Vidula", originally appeared under the title "The Mother to Her Son" in the weekly Bande Mataram, June 9, 1907; Songs of the Sea (See 79). 1930: Six Poems (See 78); "Transformation" and ...
... Bande Mataram, 76; translation from Dwijendralal, 77; Sagar, Sangit, tr. of, 77ff, 411; on Vyasa & Valmiki, 79ff; tr. from the Ramāyāna, 8 1ff; from the Mahabharata, 84ff; on Nala and Savitri, 85-6; Vidula, 87; translation from Bhartrihari, 88; from Kalidasa, 90ff; The Birth of the War-God, 92ff; The Hero and the Nymph, 94ff; on Vikramorvasie, 98fn; Urvasie, 99-107; Love and Death, 108; Baji... Vasavadutta, 120, 147ff; sources, 147; moves and counter-moves, 148ff; "controlled experiment", 150; psychological subtlety and dramatic intensity, 152 Venkatanatha (Vedanta Desika), 97 Vidula ,68,86ff,185,242 Vidyapati, 72 Vikramorvasie, 94,98m, 99 Vidyasagar, Iswar Chandra, 14-15,16 Vijayaraghavachar, c., 529 Vijayatunga, J., 736 Vision ...
... translations were published—the five-act blank verse drama, Perseus the Deliverer, Vidula or "The Mother to her Son' (from the Mahabharata) in Bande Mataram, and Baji Prabhou in Karmayogin. At the time of publication, all these had a pointed political appeal. In the play the stress was on the word 'deliverer'; Vidula exhorts her son to fight while Baji lays down his life in defence of his country ...
... the rest in Baroda.] It is the other way round; all the poems in the book were written Page 44 in England except five later ones which were written after his return to India. Vidula ... originally appeared in the Weekly Bandemataram of June 9, 1907; Baji Prabhou appeared serially in the Weekly Karmayogin in 1910. It is not, however, unlikely that they had been actually written ...
... Urvasie 40, 52,201,318,340,342,363,386, 421-423, 458 Valmiki 243,340,341,384 Van Ruvsbroeck, Jan 326 Vasavadutla 47-49, 318 Vidula 12, 46, 458 Vidyapati 45 Vijayatunga J. 18 Virgil 33, 54, 309, 376, 380, 381, 383, 384, 395, 417 Vivekananda, Swami 4, 5,19 Viziers of Bassora, The 47, 49, ...
... her pain. This is from the early Baroda period, and perhaps not revised for publication (it is from a posthumously published volume), but the touch is light, and the sentiment is sugary. Vidula (1907) from the Udyog-Parva of the Mahabharata has a deeper voice as befits the theme, and Songs of the Sea (which belongs to an even later period) are more satisfying still.There are forty ...
... up here and there the sharp edges of his current political and revolutionary preoccupations. It was seen earlier that Sri Aurobindo's Urvasie, Love and Death, Baji Prabhou, Chitrangada and Vidula are not merely notable for their evocative power, but they are also poems - or translation - with a purpose. How shall man conduct himself on what seems to be no better than the constant challenge ...
... and Death truly indubitable poetic creations in the epic genre. III If Urvasie and Love and Death are romances or romantic epics, Baji Prabhou is quite obvious a heroic poem. Like Vidula, Baji Prabhou also was written during the period of active political life, and first appeared, not long after, in February-March 1910 in the Karmayogin; but it was during his stay at Baroda that ...
... on account of anticipated calamities which may never happen, we may stand charged before posterity with the crime of sacrificing the future to vain and timid imaginations. Here again the wisdom of Vidula has a word in season for us; "Make not great thy foeman by thy terrors, panic eyes behind." The bureaucracy will use every method to kill the movement, guile as well as terrorism; they will try to ...
... book Collected Poems and Plays was being compiled. He wrote then to his secretary that he had published in the weekly Bande Mataram not only the play Perseus the Deliverer and the translation Vidula , but also "a political satire in verse purporting to be the report of the Reception Committee Chairman at a Moderate Conference". The piece could not be located at that time because it had been ...
... stories that Rishi Markandeya narrated to Yuddhishtira during the year of his exile to console him and fortify his spirits. Several of Sri Aurobindo's narrative poems or fragments — Love and Death, Vidula, Chitrangada, Uloupy, Nala — were based on, or translated from, the Mahabharata, yet the fascination was inexhaustible, and in particular the Savitri story, like the Nala story, had a special ...
... second lacking in real womanliness or respect for elders or reverence for tradition. Winternitz is right when he says that Savitri "recalls more the women of heroic poetry, such as Draupadi, Kunti and Vidula, than the brahmanical ideal of woman", 8 though it is doubtful whether even these, great as is their capacity to suffer and sacrifice, measure upto Savitri's incandescent purity of motive and action ...
... poetry— Songs to Myrtilla, Urvasie, Love and Death and follow his career as a poet; his renderings from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata —the fragments, Nala and Chitrangada, the 'heroic' Vidula and Baji Prabhou, the blank verse dramas, the many philosophical poems culminating in Ahana —the numerous 'mystical' pieces included in the 1941 volume and in Last Poems —the varied experiments ...
... Penthesilea". And Book IX is mostly filled with the ambience of her prowess and personality. The bold "unwomanly" woman, woman as uncompromising Shakti, had been sketched earlier by Sri Aurobindo in Vidula (after the Mahabharata), in Chitrangada, in Cleopatra of Rodogune, in Aslaug of Eric, in Cassiopea of Perseus the Deliverer; and Andromeda was the portrait of a woman fearless as well as ...
... stories that Rishi Markandeya narrated to Yudhishthira during the years of his exile to console him and fortify his spirits. Several of Sri Aurobindo's narrative poems or fragments - Love and Death, Vidula, Chitrangada, Uloupy, Nala - were based on, or translated from, the Mahabharata, yet the fascination was inexhaustible, and in particular the Savitri story, like the Nala story, had a special ...
... people; and the Bande Mataram also avoided any such exercise in mendicancy. But the paper certainly tried to prod and awaken the Indian nation from its unconscionable slumber. Sri Aurobindo's Vidula - to which reference has already been made in an earlier chapter (4. VI) appeared in the second issue of the Bande Mataram Weekly, which also contained Shyamsundar's "Unreported Conversation" ...
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