Sri Aurobindo's Savitri and its Critics

Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri and its Critics

ROMEN PALIT
Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry

Of late Sri Aurobindo has been recognised and accepted as a poet of superlative quality, apart from his being a politician and a seer. His earlier poems or dramas do not offer any difficulties in comprehension both to the reader or to the critic. But it is his Savitri, his greatest and most enduring work which, due to its extraordinary quality both in symbol and language, baffles the critic. Savitriis a work which has no parallel in English, perhaps in the world literature–for its whole turn, approach, its language, its imagery and symbolisms are of a radically different type we meet in the poets–past or present. This is because Sri Aurobindo deals with facts of consciousness, the vast drama of subtle realities, powers and truths. Yet it is not an allegory like the Faerie Qyeene or epics like Vita Nouvova or The Paradise Lost. It does not deal with heroic deeds as in Iliad or the Aeneid. Hence Savitrineeds a new approach to estimate or judge it as a poem. We shall examine a few outstanding critics who have tried to understand or misunderstand this great opus.

This is what appeared in Times Literary Supplement, shortly after Savitriwas published: “It cannot be said that Aurobindo shows any organic adaptation to music and melody. His thoughts are profound, his technical devices commendable, but the music that enchants or disturbs is not there. Aurobindo is not another Tagore, or Iqbal or even Sarojini Naidu.” (Quoted in “The poetic genius of Sri Aurobindo”–K. D. Sethna, Pondicherry. 1947 p. 103).  

Not only that an eminent English critic voiced the opinion that Savitriwas fit only for the waste paper basket. The entire edifice and magnificent symbols and images went right above the critic’s head. It is true that it was not easy to understand or appreciate Savitri, for it belonged to another sphere of reality. Further, the Anglo-Saxon mind is rigid and stubborn to the point of foolishness and at a period when India had attained her freedom and the British mind was smarting under the ignominy of having lost a valuable part of its stronghold, it was exactly at this juncture Savitriwas published. Hence, expecting the appreciation from a dogmatic nation of a work which belonged to slave-nation, was asking the impossible.

Fortunately all the critics are not of the same calibre. Sethna is, however, of the opinion, “The huge epic Savitri... is a marvel which places him (Sri Aurobindo) at once in the company of the absolute top-rankers by a sustained abundance of first-rate quality.” (Ibid)

Sethna further says, “His poetry traverses regions on which the steps of the ancients never fell.” (Ibid, p. 103) The critic is referring to the “Overhead” source of poetical inspiration. He goes to point out the double movement to Savitri, one was “the harking ” going to the past, the legend, the other was “which springs forward” going into the unexplored future, of which the entire legend was a symbol. Sri Aurobindo, according to Sethna, brings also simultaneous double movements of rising to the spirit’s heights and leaping down into the deeps of inconscience.

“Death assumes another significance in Sri Aurobindo. It regains its Vedic and Upanishadic connotations” (Ibid. p. 106) There the “Death is the world’s ignorance of its own divine self, the falling asunder of the body and the blowing out of its little day are only the most external aspects of the night that is hidden from us, our own Godhead. But Sri Aurobindo goes beyond the old Indian idea of what God attainment is.” (Ibid)

That is, while the Vedas and Upanishads claim that the final and supreme fulfilment could come only when “the gross body had doffed and a status reached outside the cosmic round of rebirth.” (Ibid. p. 107) Sri Aurobindo, as revealed in Savitri, showed that “an attainment of this archetypal Truth and to evolve the divine counterpart of each side of our complex constitution is the full aim of Yoga.” (Ibid) This being so, it axiomatically follows that, “even the gross body with its energies cannot be neglected as untransmutable into a luminous and immortal vehicle,” (Ibid)

It is not possible to improve on the Vedas. Sri Aurobindo does not do it. He only departs from its standpoint to bring into light the fact of the evolution of consciousness and by this process goes beyond the iron law of the Death, which was revealed to be a physical power, and thereby make valid the conquest of Death by Savitri as an incarnation of the Supreme Shakti. What was miracle in the legend becomes a spiritual fact in Savitri. What was a minor episode among countless others in the Mahabharata assumes an issue of capital importance in Sri Aurobindo.

“In Mahabharata,” says Sethna, “the legend of Savitri is at best a myth, but is not so in, Sri Aurobindo...Savitri, fighting Satyavan’s death, is in Sri Aurobindo’s hand an Avatar of the immortal Beauty and Love plunging into the trials of terrestrial life and seeking to overcome them not only in herself but also in the world she has embraced as her own.” (Ibid) That would mean in its ultimate conclusion that Savitri “is sworn to put an utter end to earth’s estrangement from God.” (Ibid)

Sethna has attempted to delve into the central and philosophical aspect of the epic. He has not touched on the poetical aspect in detail or has attempted to show by what merit in language, inspiration or style Savitristands out pre-eminently as one of great epics of the world as a poetical creation. That would, perhaps, need a much, a vaster and detailed work.

Rameshwar Gupta in his Eternity in Words gives us another approach. But written with seizable sympathy, the book can be taken as an introduction to the epic. It does not pretend to examine it in detail, except to give some parallels or contrasts to European poetry. He rightly comments that Sri Aurobindo in not a seer on an ivory tower; his epic is “always objective, very solid in texture,” (Eternity in Words, Rameshwar Gupta, p. 107) which had not the amorphous fluidity of Wordsworth’s Prelude or Tennyson’s In Memorium. On the contrary Savitri“is mainly and essentially a story of the spirit rather than ostensibly of Savitri and Satyavan and the action too mainly and essentially takes place within the heart of man and Nature rather than any ostensible battlefield. Ashwapaty’s Odysseus-like journey too is in the boundless extension of the psyche and Savitri’s confrontation with Death is again in her soul.” (Ibid. pp. 107-8)

Gupta, like Sethna, has not endeavoured to delve into a penetrating study, which for Savitriis a world in itself, the world of the spirit. Anyway, his study could be taken as an introduction to the understanding of Savitri. He delineates pointers which are quite interesting and, to anyone who knows nothing of the epic, it could serve as a good ground. He has also outlined the poet’s life and finally given some analysis of the style of the epic. Assessing Sri Aurobindo’s poetical creation as a whole Gupta comments: “Hills peep over hills, and Alps Alps arise.” (Ibid. p. 57)

As this book is not a detailed treatise, there are some omissions of essential facts like Ashwapaty’s world journey and Savitri’s struggle with Death. Nevertheless his conclusions are sound. Savitridoes not represent an ideal of escape; Sri Aurobindo never agreed that the world was an illusion. “The epic” he concludes, “is addressed to man and not mystic, but man working out his destiny in the world.” (Ibid. p. 92)

Another good introduction to Savitriis by A. B. Purani, who was a close associate of the Master for over half a century.

Purani is a Vedic scholar and he, therefore, has emphasised with parallel quotations from the Vedas and Savitrito show the identity of thoughts between them. To him, “The symbol dawn” of the first canto, of the first book in Savitriforms the paramount part of the epic. No doubt, “the symbol dawn” forms a very important part because it opens our consciousness to the central theme; but of equal importance are the cosmic voyage of Ashwapaty, the great boon of the Divine Mother, the word of fate by Narada, the protracted struggle with Death by Savitri and finally the last magnificent book “The Book of the Everlasting Day.” Unless we regarded all these elements in a global whole, our estimate of Savitriwould sure to be one-sided.

Purani brings home the cardinal point that Savitrineeds another level of consciousness and mentality for the full comprehension of this epic. This point should not be forgotten both by the critic and the reader.

Purani also gives us some very interesting points. He says: The word Savitri is derived from the word “Savitru” in turn is derived from the root “Su”, to give birth to. The word, “Soma” which indicates “an exhilarating drink”, symbolising spiritual ecstasy or delight, is also derived from the same word, “Su”. It links therefore to creation. “Savitru therefore means the creation.” (Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri, p. 2)

Taking his cue from Sri Aurobindo himself, who has, in his letters, explained some major symbols in Savitri, Purani says, “Ashwapaty, the father of Savitri, is called by the poet, the Lord of life.” (Book II, Canto XV) “The name suggests an affinity to Vedic symbolism. In the Veda, Ashwa, the horse, is the symbol of life-energy or vital-power. Ashwa plus paty, Lord, would mean the “Lord of life.” In the poem King Ashwapaty is the symbol of the aspiring soul of man as manifested in life on earth.” (Ibid. p. 3)

About the epic itself, Purani comments, “The legend has been kept almost intact in the story-part by the poet. But the legend itself can be interpreted as a symbol and the poet has interpreted it, but in fact has transformed into a living symbol.” (Ibid p. 5)

From Purani we now turn to Rohit Mehta. Rohit Mehta’s study of Savitriin his “The Dialogue with Death” is a curious blending of half-truths, errors and verities. He has mixed up issues, mis-interpreted the basic symbols and offered his own interpretations of those which are sometimes fanciful if not absurd.

For example, he juxtaposes the states of subliminal consciousness with the hierarchies of greater Mind’s realm as revealed by Sri Aurobindo. To Mehta the state of wakefulness is Jagritsynonymous to the Higher Mind in Sri Aurobindo; the Illumined Mind is Swapna, the Intuitive Mind is equivalent to Sushuptiand finally Turiyais Overmind. Now Mehta faces a hurdle. According to him Turiyais the transcendental consciousness and logically there could
be no higher state of consciousness than this. Then what about the supermind? Mehta is supposed to be a follower of Sri Aurobindo in whom the concept of the Supermind finds an eminent place. So in order to cut the body to the cloth, he coins a new word, Turiyatit, that what was beyond the Transcendent. This is an absurdity as a Yogic fact or as a philosophical concept.

In contrast let us see what Sri Aurobindo himself says about thee realms in question in The Life Divine.

This is the Higher Mind: “Our first decisive step out of our human intelligence, our normal mentality, is an ascent into a Higher Mind, mind no longer mingled light and obscurity of half-light.” (Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Ed. Vol. 19. p. 934)

This is the Illumined Mind which “does not work primarily by thought, but by vision; thought if here only a subordinate movement expressing a sight.” (Ibid. p. 944)

Crossing into the zone of Intuition, we would discover that “Intuition has a four-fold power. A power of revelatory truth-seeing, a power of inspiration or truth-hearing, a power of truth-touch...a power of true and automatic discrimination.” (Ibid. p. 949)

The Overmind is the region of the Vedic and some Puranic gods. In its essentiality, it is yet the reign of duality. Sri Aurobindo says that the Overmind “is still a power of cosmic consciousness, a principle of global knowledge, which in it has a delegated light of the Supramental Gnosis.” (Ibid. p. 950)

Sri Aurobindo has described these regions of consciousness in his Savitriin Book II, Cantos eleven to fifteen.

Apart from this gross mis-statement, Mehta has omitted to mention the entire first part of the Book of the Traveller of the worlds which describes realms between subtle matter up to greater life, including Ashwapaty’s descent into life-inferno. Without the mention of these, the global aspect of Savitriis missed.

In chapter eleven Mehta says, referring to Ashwapaty’s surrender to the Supreme Mother in Book Ill, :”But surrender is not to be mistaken for submission.” (The Dialogue with Death, Rohit Mehta. 1972. p. 139) The critic is simply playing with words, it is quite apparent. “Surrender”, according to him, “is effortless and therefore is not an act of the conscious mind.” (Ibid. p. 140)

The surrender or submission Sri Aurobindo describes in this context, is not only a surrender of mind’s thoughts, of life’s dynamic parts, or the soul’s felicity but the offering of the entire personality, the man’s becoming, his being and everything. Hence the mind plays a very minor part–the statement is therefore totally erroneous.

Another false statement: “The Overmind is indeed the state of mind’s surrender, and this happens when the grace of the Supermind is received.” (Ibid)

We would only request Mr. Mehta to give us the reference to Sri Aurobindo’s work to substantiate this curious mis-statement.

The book is full of such inaccurate, sometimes total, falsities and if one read it as an introduction to the reading of or understanding Savitri, one would form quite a false idea of this great epic.

To quote all the mis-statements in the book would need a volume. In conclusion I would quote one last mis-statement: “It is this mother-consciousness which is the feminine touch so urgently needed by the masculine consciousness of humanity in its present day civilization. Without this feminine touch the mere masculine consciousness, whether in man or in woman, will tend to cause wars and dissensions in, human society.” (Ibid. p. 154)

There is no masculine and feminine or sexual differentiation in the Divine consciousness. The unitary Divine consciousness splits itself into dynamism and status for the sake of manifestation or global play. Savitri, as an incognito of this supreme dynamism came down, not to save society, or evade wars, but to raise the entire human consciousness plunged into inconscience, as an act of grace, to give another push to the spiritual evolution. This is the raison d’etre of Savitri.

Mrs. Prema Nandakumar on the contrary gives us a more sympathetic criticism in her “A Study of Savitri.” Although there are quite a number of misinterpretations in this book, the study attempts to be quite systematic and comprehensive.

The book was written as a thesis for her doctor’s degree and the author has taken great pains to go to both European and Indian authors to give us a broader ground to the study.

Major part of the book is occupied in giving an outline of the epic, canto by canto, for an aid to greater comprehension to those who are ignorant of Sri Aurobindo’s poetry. These outlines however are too brief or too sketchy and they would not aid to form a lucid idea of the work. For Savitriis replete with symbols, images, allusions which deal with spiritual experiences and truths and hence if one missed these, one would miss the true import of the epic. These symbols and images are both compact and varied and need a greater and more detailed treatment.

She avoids interpretations and profounder analysis. This is of course utilitarian; she has an eye on the examiners who themselves may have had not enough idea of Sri Aurobindo. For at that time, in early ’Sixties, Sri Aurobindo had not emerged as a major literary figure to the minds of Indian elite. Sri Aurobindo remained tomost a distant visionary, and we must thank Mrs. Prema Nandakumar for having brought Sri Aurobindo to a wider public.

In spite of all the shortcomings, the book is written with devotion and, open-mindedness. “Savitri”, she comments at the outset, “if it baffles us at first, it may be that it is a new kind of poem, demanding a new alertness of response.” (A Study of Savitri, Dr. Prema Nandakumar, p. 65.)

Further she says Savitri“spans the past, the present and the future, man, nature and God, and an enveloping general ground.” (Ibid. p. 66)

She comments on Book 11, the Book of Everlasting Day, one of the highlights of the epic thus, “Sri Aurobindo invades this invisible realm and in trying to snap its extravagance of paradisal beauty achieves one of the great fights of poetical imagination on record.” (Ibid. p. 262)

The above two comments reveal the critic’s awareness of the greatness. But one thing must be said that a poem of Savitri’sdimension, intricacy and many-sidedness and beauty, grandeur and richness would need a colossal work of criticism to do justice to it. She has attempted to be extensive instead of being intensive in her survey, thereby not doing full justice to it, in spite of all her sincerity.

At the end, we shall examine a few of Sri Aurobindo’s own comments on his own work, to elucidate Savitri’sposition as an epic. It is right that a poet’s own criticism of his own work tends to be partial and unfair, justifying all the faults and eulogising its merits. Sri Aurobindo did not possess this bias. He was above such self-love. If he wrote anything, it was to help his disciples to understand better his poem; that is all.

Sri Aurobindo has rewritten the entire or part of the epic several times, during thirty decades because he was not satisfied with his work–his aim was to embody the greatest beauty, felicity and richness the English language was capable ofexpressing and his own poetical genius was capable of creating.

Therefore, he says, “In fact Savitrihas not been regarded by me as a poem to be written and finished, but as a field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written...one’s own Yogic consciousness and how that could be made creative.” (Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Ed. Vol. 29. p. 728)

Further, the Master says, “Savitri is the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind and is often very far from the general mind sees or experiences.” (Ibid p. 149)

If we kept this touchstone of positive spiritual experience as our basis, then the last comment by Prema Nandakumar would be, I am afraid, invalid, for Sri Aurobindo has not written anything in Savitriwhich is not a transcription of his spiritual experience or realisation. In fact, he says, “I have not written anywhere in Savitrifor the sake of mere picturesqueness or merely to produce a rhetorical effect; what I am trying to do everywhere in the poem is to express exactly something seen, something felt or experienced.” (Ibid, p. 249)

This is about the treatment and basic concept. The theme of the poem is as follows, told by the poet himself: “The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in the Mahabharata as a story of conjugal love conquering death. But this is, as shown by many features of the human tale, one of the symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle. Satyavan is the soul carrying the Divine Truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance; Savitri is the Divine Word, daughter of the Sun, Goddess of the Sun, Goddess of Supreme Truth who comes down and is born to save; Ashwapaty, the Lord of Horse, her human father, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to immortal planes: Dyumatsena, Lord of the shining hosts, father of Satyavan, is the Divine mind here fallen blind, losing its celestial kingdom of glory. Still this is not personified qualities.” (Ibid. p. 265)

Thus, we see that Sri Aurobindo has not made a far-fetched symbol out of Savitri-Satyavan legend; the seed of the symbolism was already extant in the Vedic tradition, which Sri Aurobindo has brought out, exploited the full scope, extent and possibilities into a veritable drama epic of both human and spiritual significance.

But as a poet Sri Aurobindo is not attempting to philosophise in verse, like Wordsworth or Pope, rather he “tries to express a total and many-sided vision and experience of all planes of being and their action upon each other.” (Ibid. p. 738)

And his method is not to build up a single image, but “rapid transition from one image to another is a constant feature in Savitrias in most mystic poetry.” (Ibid. p. 733)

In this review we have limited ourselves to books on criticism of Savitri. But there is considerable amount of articles and tracts published in different journals by Nolini Kanta Gupta, Sisir Kumar Ghose, Srinivasa Iyengar, Prof. Seturaman, etc. The Mother herself has given illumined discourses on Savitribut these are concerned with Yogic and personal aspects, which, though extremely revelatory are beyond the present scope.

All those books examined here are only preludes to the criticism of Savitri. This epic is too vast and too many-sided and profound to do justice in a single book or a single essay.