M V Nadkarni: Invitation to Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri

On the title page of Savitri you will find description which calls it ‘A Legend and a Symbol’. The legend of course is the story of Satyavan and Savitri, which is known to all of us in its’ Puranic and popular version. The original story goes back to Mahabharata, where the Pandavas are spending a lot of time in the forest...

"The legend of Savitri and Satyavan can be traced back to the Mahabharata, where the sage Markandeya narrates the story of Savitri to Yudhishthira. Sri Aurobindo has taken up this legend almost in its entirety without adding any upakhyanas, any sub-plots or stories to it, but he has made some significant alterations..."

"The 20th century has been a century when ... anything sublime necessarily sounds bombastic. ..... for Sri Aurobindo to write an epic remains to many people something of a mystery. Now you can write a haiku, you can write little poems... where do people have time for 720 pages of poetry?"

‘Vain is the sage’s light’ — avatars have come and gone, but basically the human nature hasn’t changed..... We worship the sons of god after we have buried them. We raise great temples, we raise big statues - finished, they are all gone, we have made statues of them"

"... there are the subtle physical worlds, vital worlds, worlds of Darkness, mental worlds, and there are Overmental worlds. All these Aswapati explores... but does not find the power that is needed to solve the problem that confronts mankind. For that he has to go to the Supreme Divine Mother, the Transcendental Force."

"... the Vedic ideology was to realise the world is imperfect and the Vedic prayers were for the gods to descend in us so that with these powers we can exert ourselves and make this world perfect. The rishi is one who lives in the world, who exerts for the world and who wants to bring perfection to the world, who wants to make this world a heaven. That is the rishi ideal, and that was the Vedic ideal."

"Many people find it difficult to understand what Sri Aurobindo was in fact trying to do here. After all, for moksha, nirvana, life’s fulfillment, there are many schools, many yogis; there is no dearth of it. What was he trying to do? I have tried to look at it from different points of view. Let me try to explain this once again..."

"Democracy is a great ideal, socialism is a wonderful ideal. What was wrong was that the human spirit which implements these ideals makes a mockery of these things, because there is this basic inadequacy in the human consciousness. So the remedy, therefore, is not to write a foolproof constitution. Is there a way out? This was the question that Sri Aurobindo was occupied with..."

With the beginning of Part Two, we have a different kind of poetic enterprise. Books 4 and 5 together cover ground which you don’t find in Vyasa’s ‘Savitri’. Sri Aurobindo takes great delight in describing Savitri’s childhood and youth.

In this poem Savitri is described in four or five different places—once Savitri as seen by Aswapati, once as seen by Narad, once as seen by Satyavan, various descriptions. Here you have a description of Savitri as seen by her own father.

Sri Aurobindo has written beautifully on meditation, on mantra and various other things. He has also written a beautiful lyric on falling in love [...] nowhere else do we find love treated with such tender hands, with such purity. Now you have a little poem on love, why and how do people fall in love.

"It’s difficult to write love poetry where you talk about fulfilled love. When the poet finds that the beloved is gone, then his highest poetry comes out. Love fulfilled for most people is sheer domesticity, there is no poetry left. But here you see how he lifts the whole thing. He’s made an adoration of the body, an adoration of the heart, an adoration of the mind. "