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Imagine if Savitri were to begin with the lines:
”In a huge forest where the listening Night
Heard lonely voices, and in the large hush
Was conscious of the sigh and tread of things
That have no sound for the rich heart of day.”
In fact, these are lines from the first version of Savitri that was started in Baroda, in the early years of this century. The lines are purely narrative and lack the depth of symbolism. In its simple and almost prosaic, style, the poem, consisted of two parts: I Earth, II Beyond. In part I, there where four Books, and in Part II, three Books and an epilogue. And the book was titled Savithri.
True, in the early versions of Savithri, the three main characters were spelt as Savithri, Uswapathy and Suthyavan. In the second version recast in Pondicherry – ’many years before the Mother came’, notes Sri Aurobindo in a letter to a disciple written in 1936,– there is added a subtitle: Savithri, A Tale And A Vision and the book opens with lines which are pretty close to the present version:
’The boundless spirit of Night dreamless, alone
In the unlit temple of immensity
Waiting upon the marge of silence sat
Mute with the expectation of her change.
The hour was near of the transfiguring gods.”
There is here a remarkable leap in the poetic consciousness; there is a distinct higher level of poetic inspiration and expression. Poetic
purity is heightened with spiritual experience. We recognise in the last line, the first line of the present version. In fact, in the third version, this important line is brought to the first position, and the new
lines are presented as:
”It was an hour of the transfiguring Gods.
The huge unbound spirit of Night, alone
In her unfit temple of immensity
Waited immobile upon Silence’ marge ...
Mute with expectation of her change.”
The fourth version hardly carries any change in the above lines, though, one important difference in spelling is brought in – we have now ’Savitri’
instead of ’Savithri’. The first line undergoes a change in the fifth version:
If Virgil spent ten years on "Aeneid", Dante sixteen on his "Divina Commedia" and Milton eight years on his "Paradise
Lost", Sri Aurobindo spent on "Savitri", like Goethe on his "Faust", almost fifty intermittent years of his life! Indeed a Herculean labour and a divine patience. As he himself submits:
”... at least I can claim a sufficient, if not an infinite capacity for painstaking; that l have sufficiently shown by my long labour on Savitri”
We should not, however, think that Sri Aurobindo took all these years to write the 23,837 lines and that he was wanting in poetic inspiration. The
reasons for this long period were two. One, Sri Aurobindo wrote Savitri not just as an epic for the sake of an epic giving an exhaustive exposition of his world-vision and world-interpretation. It was, on the
spiritual level, a means of his own ascension. So, as he went higher in his consciousness, his vision of things changed or often if became more comprehensive or again deeper and more. detailed. The second reason,
though a corollary of the first one, is as he puts it,
”I have enough respect for truth not to try to cover up an imperfection; my endeavour would be rather to cure the recognised imperfection... I may
describe it as an infinite capacity for waiting and listening for the true inspiration and rejecting all that fell short of it, however good it might seem from a lower standard until I got that which I felt
absolutely right.”
Thus, as he climbed level after level of higher consciousness, he could command higher levels of intuition and inspiration. And obviously,
from a higher level, he found the drafts of the lower level of inspiration inadequate or inferior and he changed entirely or to the extent needed. As he explained in his letter:
”In fact, Savitri has 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 from one’s own yogic consciousness and how that could be made creative.”
In the beginning, the level of his poetic writing, was ”a mixture of the inner mind, psychic, poetic intelligence, sublimised vital”. But
later the source of Savitri’s inspiration was ’the Higher Mind, often illumined and intuited’. And now, in its last version, ”there is a general overmind influence”.
We can now understand why Sri Aurobindo made so many drafts of Savitri: it was his incessant drive for perfect perfection. As he notes:
”... I have made so many successive drafts and continued alterations till I felt that I had got the thing intended by the higher inspiration in every
line and passage.”
That is how, time after time, Sri Aurobindo returned to his earlier drafts of Savitri and went on changing them until he received ’the
absolutely right inspiration and the right transcription of it’ and he was not satisfied ”with any à peu près or imperfect transcription even if that makes good poetry of one kind or another”. This is the reason why
he took almost 50 years to complete Savitri and no other.
Inspite of this satisfactory explanation, we may still wonder as to why Sri Aurobindo, with his supreme yogic capacities and his avataric
consciousness, had to undergo such ’a colossal labour’ when he could easily command the highest heights of inspiration? Or, as Nirodbaran asked: ”With his consciousness entirely silent, he had only to hitch to the
right source and words, images, ideas would tumble down in ’a Brahmaputra of inspiration” And Sri Aurobindo replied to him:
”The highest planes are not so accommodating as all that. If they were so, why should it be difficult to bring down and organise the supermind in the
physical consciousness. What happy-go-lucky fancy-web-spinning ignorances you all are. You speak of silence, consciousness, overmental, supramental, etc. as if they were so many electric buttons you have only to
press and there you are. It may be one day, but meanwhile I have to discover everything about the working of all possible modes of electricity, all the laws, possibilities, perils, etc., construct roads of
connection and communication, make the whole far-wiring system, try to find out how it can be made foolproof and all that in the course of’ a single life time.” (Nirodbaran – Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo, p.192-3)
Out of these recastings and redraftings, Savitri grew into the longest poem in English language with 23,837 lines. Amal Kiran observes that
Nicos Kazantzakis’ Odyssey "A Modern Sequel" runs into 33,333 lines! But it is in Greek and not in English! The one closest to Savitri in the English language is Browning’s "The Ring and the
Book" with its 21,116 lines.
And the line that draws the curtain on this magnificent obsession with the Divine manifestation is the one that was received only in the seventh
version of Book 1, Canto 1:
”It was the hour’ before the Gods awake”.
This opening line stays unchanged in the rest of the five versions, for, apparently, Sri Aurobindo had received the line that telescoped into itself
several layers of symbolism which brilliantly establish Savitri on a cosmic dimension. If Savitri is, as the Mother says, ”the Truth Sri Aurobindo has brought down on the earth”, then this first line is the grand
announcer of this Truth! This line throws out at once and simultaneously four different levels of interpretation which in fact can he seer interwoven through out the epic. Sometimes one meaning is predominant and at
other times another. But all alone these four are there:
a) Physical
b) Contextual
c) Symbolic
d) Metaphysical
a) Physical Level
The action of Savitri begins in ’the hour before the Gods awake.’ ’What is that hour? It is the darkest hour the Brahmamuhurat, when the gods in the temple are awakened. Once they are awake, their Puja done, they are ready to give darshan to their devotees. And then the day begins with all its various activities - Physical, emotional and mental. One does not know what the day has in store, but with a prayer of the day offered to the Gods, the devotees launch upon the day’s adventures.
So it happened among the tribes with whom Savitri lived. The tribesfolk –
”...hastened to join the brilliant summoner’s chant
And, lured by the beauty of the apparent ways,
Acclaimed their portion of ephemeral joy.”
Amongst these tribes, Savitri too woke up, but she took no part in the ’small happiness’. She felt like ’a mighty stranger in the human field’, for
deep in her heart there was ’the anguish of the gods’. She was all indrawn and quiet on that day because she was ’Awaiting her ordeal’s hour’ – and that hour was the hour of Satyavan’s predetermined death.
b) Contextual Level
The dawn in which the gods are awakened is the last dawn in Satyavan’s life. It is the dawn of that particular ’day when Satyavan must die’.
As the story goes, Narad had predicted that 12 months after his marriage, Satyavan would die. And the twelve quick months went by and this was the day of his death. And beside him was Savitri, ’remote from grief,
unsawn by care’. She was ’obtuse and tranquil like the stone and star’ for she knew the significance of the day and she was gathering her inner force in order to face the foretold consequences of the day:
”Amid the trivial sounds, the unchanging scene,
Her soul arose confronting Time and Fate.
c) Symbolic Level
Indeed, When the gods are awake, then only can light appear and take away the darkness from earth. Before they are awake, there is the ’huge
foreboding mind of Night’, ’opaque and impenetrable’. As Nolinikanta Gupta interprets. ”When the Gods are asleep, it is the non-existence tama asit tamasa gudhamagne – ’in the beginning darkness was engulfed in darkness’. This is the asat, non-being, this is the acit, the inconscience, this is the blackest night. The Bible also speaks of a similar darkness – Job’s terrible vision: ”A land of darkness, as darkness itself; and the shadow of death, without any order and where the light is as darkness” (Book of job, 10.21) The lamp of consciousness is not yet lit. The dark vacancy stretches across the path of creation to be, the light that is to come. This shadow is the negation of the light behind, it is the original of the creation. It is presented as the mere material universe apparently dead and dry, the utter inconscience with no sign of consciousness anywhere. And earth seems to be there part of it, a shadow within the shadow, a dark spot wheeling in ”a dark mass”. (Nolinikanta Gupta: The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo p. 305)
So, on the symbolic level, ’the hour’ of ’Gods awake’ represents the zero-hour when the whole universe is waking up from the swoon of Inconscience. It
is that moment when evolution itself began, that moment when ’something that wished but knew not how to be’, when a ’blank prescience yearned towards distant change’, when ’Insensibly somewhere a breach began’, when
something ’Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance’. The hour is indeed momentous in the universal manifestation and evolution.
The story of Savitri is therefore not just the story of Satyavan and Savitri as given in Mahabharata. As it is a legend and a symbol, it is the story of the entire creation itself, as it were. Sri Aurobindo thus begins his epic not only at the critical point of the legend, on the hour and day of Satyavan’s death, but he starts at the critical moment when Involution has taken place, the Supreme Absolute, has come down into the Inconscience and there is the beginning of Evolution. Half the journey is done – the journey of the Descent - and now the return journey is about to begin – the Ascent. And Savitri opens, at this junction-hour, at this hour of transition from Involution of Evolution.
The opening line, therefore, promises us the unravelling of the cosmic as well as individual evolution. And, indeed, starting with this
’symbol Dawn’, the book, Savitri, ends with the line:
”And in her bosom nursed a greater dawn”.
Thus, Savitri is on the symbolic level the scenario between two symbolic dawns – one is the beginning of Evolution and the other the end of earthly evolution. And, on the level of the legend, it is the story of 24 hours – of the awakening of Savitri on that fatal day, and of the death of Satyavan on that day of destiny. It is indeed the Day of Destiny. for not only does Satyavan die and return to life, but Death itself is transfigured and humanity enters into an evolution beyond Mind – an evolution from Ignorance into Knowledge.
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