This line that describes in few words the background of Savitri’s birth, none other than the incarnation of the Divine Mother in far back times, applies equally to the birth of Savitri, her Word-body as the epic of epics. The story itself is first narrated in the Mahabharata when the Pandavas have lost their kingdom and their glory suffering great humiliation at the hands of their own cousins. The dice of fate seem to be heavily loaded against them as they wander through the forest having lost their kingdom in a deceitful game of dice and having witnessed the utter humiliation of their wife Draupadi in the blind king Dhritrashtra’s court in the royal assembly. While thus wandering and wondering at the ways of destiny they meet sage Markandeya, one of the five who was granted the boon of immortality by Shiva. Knowing no end to their misery pursuing them since childhood and stricken to grief by the utter humiliation of Draupadi, Yudhisthira, the eldest of the five Pandav brothers in exile, asks sage Markandeya if there is anyone who has suffered thus at the hands of fate. The sage answers by narrating the story of Savitri. Born as the result of a yajña undertaken by her father Ashwapati, a yogi and king, Savitri is struck with the adverse fate of losing her husband Satyavan within one year of their marriage. However, instead of despairing and lamenting, Savitri chose to take up the challenge of changing her fixed destiny. Gathering in herself the power born through Yoga she not only overcomes her grief but compels the god of Death to release Satyavan from his folds. She secures the additional boons of the restoration of sight and kingdom to Satyavan’s blind father Dyumatsena, once a king. It marks a happy ending to a tale where Death plays the spoilsport to the dream of eternal love that mankind always nurtures in its heart. Savitri not only snatches back Satyavan from the jaws of Death, apparently convincing him by her wisdom, but actually, very subtly restores the being of Death itself from Yamaraja (the Restrainer) to Dharmaraja (the upholder of Dharma) which he is supposed to be in his origin.
For Yama is the child of Surya, the Sun god. He is the offspring of Surya and Sanjana who, unable to bear the glory and splendour of the Creator God, send her shadow Chhaya or Sandhya. Yama is the resultant progeny but the Sun god realising that it was a shadow with which he had joined, casts Yama into the dark and fallen worlds to govern these worlds as a guardian of the Law until man is ready for the greater Truth untainted by any shadow. That greater Truth or the divine Law upheld by the Sun is revealed to man once he transcends the Law of Death.
This ancient Vedic legend gives us the key. The Sun of Truth is covered here by the Shadow and hence appears as Death. Until now mankind has found a way to escape from the shadow and the Law of Death through certain practices generally termed as Yoga. But in the legend of Savitri we see Satyavan not only escaping the law of Death into the Beyond and thereby freed from the clutch of the Shadow of Ignorance but returning back to earth with the assurance that one day mankind and earth itself shall be freed from ignorance and death. Earth, presently governed by Death and a field of ignorance and suffering, will be governed by the Law of Truth and thereby change from our present earthly life into the life divine. The Law of Death is not only transcended but transmuted.
The legend of Savitri and Satyavan thus turns deeply symbolic replete with profound significance. Sri Aurobindo in his Author’s Note at the start of the poem gives us the key to the significance of the ancient tale:
The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in the Mahabharata as a story of conjugal love conquering death. But this legend is, as shown by many features of the human tale, one of the many 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 supreme Truth who comes down and is born to save; Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse, her human father, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes; Dyumatsena, Lord of the Shining Hosts, father of Satyavan, is the Divine Mind here fallen blind, losing its celestial kingdom of vision, and through that loss its kingdom of glory. Still this is not a mere allegory, the characters are not personified qualities, but incarnations or emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch and they take human bodies in order to help man and show him the way from his mortal state to a divine consciousness and immortal life.
The poem is centred around Savitri, the main character of the epic. Symbolically, she is at once the consort as well as the daughter of the Sun god. She is his Shakti or Power that sheds light and energy upon the entire world, Shakti. But she is also his daughter who has emerged out of him and descends upon earth to become a bridge between the Sun and the Earth conducting its life and million processes. There (in the Sun) she is in all her splendour. Here (upon earth) she partly veils herself and labours and struggles and suffers so as to quicken the dark womb of the earth to give birth to the children of the Sun, the sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn. In the epic this dual aspect of Savitri is revealed as that Power of the Divine Mother who along with Satyavan have been sent forth to redeem earth and mankind. She becomes the evolutionary Energy upon earth and provides us the relentless urge for progress pushing us towards wisdom’s heights from behind through our soul. But at all critical moments she also takes a human form and leads mankind personally showing the ways of immortality. The whole epic reveals this secret of Savitri in all her splendour and glory and infinity of the Power of Truth.
And who is Satyavan? He is, as the name suggests, a vehicle of Truth. He too carries the truth and is a seedling of the Sun, but has been cast or sent forth to develop under the conditions of ignorance. His life is therefore a battle, a wrestle between his innate tendency to bring out the truth it contains and to develop into the fullness of the Sun god upon earth and thereby fulfil the dreams of the Creator through the marriage between Heaven and Earth. Savitri is also the daughter of the Sun but unlike Satyavan, she is a conscious birth, the descent of God’s Creatrix Power in a human mould. She has come to save Satyavan, who represents all souls trapped in the mud of ignorance as seedlings of the Sun but made ready through a long evolutionary journey to bring out the divine possibility within them. His father Dyumatsena is the mind of man that also owes its origin to the Creator Sun but it has fallen blind here due to the effect of ignorance. When the soul of man awakens and starts to replace the ignorant mind as the true leader of the human march, the priest of the sacrifice, then it not only opens doors to its divine possibilities but also, through the action of the Divine Grace embodied by Savitri, redeems the mind by transforming it from a mind of ignorance into a mind of light.
The birth of Savitri herself is the result of the King Yogi Aswapati’s tapasya. Aswapati is the Divine representative who refuses to abandon the earthly life or escape permanently into personal extinction of Nirvana. Like the Buddha, he too is moved by the plight of humanity but instead of showing the exit door or the way out of it, he wants to open an entry door for the Divine Power to descend upon earth and transform it. Of course, even now the Divine Power is there but it is working slowly from behind the many veils of ignorance. Each of these veils not only obscures but deflects and distorts the divine working. The world therefore is not an illusion in the sense of being a non-existent existence which would be an impossible paradox, like being something that is nothing. Even a reflection is not nothing since it does reflect or represent something seen through the mirror of the mind. It is rather a distortion, an illusion in the sense that it is not a true reflection or representation of the Reality hidden behind or within it. Aswapati seeks to rectify this distortion and it is for this that he undertakes the arduous tapasya through many worlds in search of the supreme original Power that can set right the distortion, the Supreme’s alchemist Energy that can transmute the raw base of earthly substance into the divine gold. Aswapati engages in an unprecedented tapasya to bring down the supreme original Power. But the world is not ready to receive this tremendous Power. Hence Aswapati asks for the one boon that the Divine Mother herself come down and prepare the earth and embody the transforming Power of Love and thereby change this earthly life into the life divine.
This is the background of Savitri’s birth.
But Savitri and Satyavan (and we may say Aswapati as well) are not one-time earthly characters from whose life we may draw inspiration or whose influence continues to act upon the centuries and millennia. They are conscious beings and forces that take birth from age to age to help mankind emerge out of the mud of ignorance and help in the blossoming of the divine possibility in us. It is these powers, especially the power of Savitri, that Sri Aurobindo has brought to earth through the book. In this sense the epic serves a similar purpose as the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. These epics bring the character of Rama and Krishna respectively close to our being. The books become a bridge or a door for us to come into contact with the Divine Avatars and thereby experience the same effect as would our physical contact with the physical persona. In fact, they bring us in a certain sense even closer since physical contact is typically through the physical senses and the physical mind which have their own limitations. A revelatory poem of the calibre as Savitri, — and there are hardly a few of this kind, in essence, not considering their quality or degree, in which Savitri surely surpasses all — bypasses the physical mind and the senses and touches the inner being directly. It evokes a mental image and if we are open enough, brings us into contact with that aspect of the divine Presence which the characters represent. This in a way is a great advantage of touching the Divine through such an epic. No wonder Sri Aurobindo worked on the poem for nearly 34 years (if we take 1916 as the starting point), revised it almost 12 times, shaping and reshaping it until her word-body became a perfect representative of the being and persona and power of Savitri. Born in extremely tumultuous times, Savitri the book brings light and hope and strength even while humanity, and especially those who are supposed to uphold the dharma, are passing through the darkest night. Savitri the book embodies the force that incarnated as Savitri. But by containing within itself the experiences and realisations of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Savitri the book embodies the transforming force and power of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in this present incarnation. Hence Savitri alone is sufficient to take us through the transformation, not only as a dynamic guide but as a conscious power that can transform us without any other aid. It is the mantra of transformation as the Mother revealed to us and if we can open to this mantra and its transformative power then nothing more is needed; Savitri alone is sufficient. It is the ship of the supreme Knowledge impelled by the supreme Power that can transport and transmute us from our present mortal state into a divine and immortal existence.
Before the Beginning
A world’s desire compelled her mortal birth.
Savitri
This line that describes in few words the background of Savitri’s birth, none other than the incarnation of the Divine Mother in far back times, applies equally to the birth of Savitri, her Word-body as the epic of epics. The story itself is first narrated in the Mahabharata when the Pandavas have lost their kingdom and their glory suffering great humiliation at the hands of their own cousins. The dice of fate seem to be heavily loaded against them as they wander through the forest having lost their kingdom in a deceitful game of dice and having witnessed the utter humiliation of their wife Draupadi in the blind king Dhritrashtra’s court in the royal assembly. While thus wandering and wondering at the ways of destiny they meet sage Markandeya, one of the five who was granted the boon of immortality by Shiva. Knowing no end to their misery pursuing them since childhood and stricken to grief by the utter humiliation of Draupadi, Yudhisthira, the eldest of the five Pandav brothers in exile, asks sage Markandeya if there is anyone who has suffered thus at the hands of fate. The sage answers by narrating the story of Savitri. Born as the result of a yajña undertaken by her father Ashwapati, a yogi and king, Savitri is struck with the adverse fate of losing her husband Satyavan within one year of their marriage. However, instead of despairing and lamenting, Savitri chose to take up the challenge of changing her fixed destiny. Gathering in herself the power born through Yoga she not only overcomes her grief but compels the god of Death to release Satyavan from his folds. She secures the additional boons of the restoration of sight and kingdom to Satyavan’s blind father Dyumatsena, once a king. It marks a happy ending to a tale where Death plays the spoilsport to the dream of eternal love that mankind always nurtures in its heart. Savitri not only snatches back Satyavan from the jaws of Death, apparently convincing him by her wisdom, but actually, very subtly restores the being of Death itself from Yamaraja (the Restrainer) to Dharmaraja (the upholder of Dharma) which he is supposed to be in his origin.
For Yama is the child of Surya, the Sun god. He is the offspring of Surya and Sanjana who, unable to bear the glory and splendour of the Creator God, send her shadow Chhaya or Sandhya. Yama is the resultant progeny but the Sun god realising that it was a shadow with which he had joined, casts Yama into the dark and fallen worlds to govern these worlds as a guardian of the Law until man is ready for the greater Truth untainted by any shadow. That greater Truth or the divine Law upheld by the Sun is revealed to man once he transcends the Law of Death.
This ancient Vedic legend gives us the key. The Sun of Truth is covered here by the Shadow and hence appears as Death. Until now mankind has found a way to escape from the shadow and the Law of Death through certain practices generally termed as Yoga. But in the legend of Savitri we see Satyavan not only escaping the law of Death into the Beyond and thereby freed from the clutch of the Shadow of Ignorance but returning back to earth with the assurance that one day mankind and earth itself shall be freed from ignorance and death. Earth, presently governed by Death and a field of ignorance and suffering, will be governed by the Law of Truth and thereby change from our present earthly life into the life divine. The Law of Death is not only transcended but transmuted.
The legend of Savitri and Satyavan thus turns deeply symbolic replete with profound significance. Sri Aurobindo in his Author’s Note at the start of the poem gives us the key to the significance of the ancient tale:
The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in the Mahabharata as a story of conjugal love conquering death. But this legend is, as shown by many features of the human tale, one of the many 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 supreme Truth who comes down and is born to save; Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse, her human father, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes; Dyumatsena, Lord of the Shining Hosts, father of Satyavan, is the Divine Mind here fallen blind, losing its celestial kingdom of vision, and through that loss its kingdom of glory. Still this is not a mere allegory, the characters are not personified qualities, but incarnations or emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch and they take human bodies in order to help man and show him the way from his mortal state to a divine consciousness and immortal life.
The poem is centred around Savitri, the main character of the epic. Symbolically, she is at once the consort as well as the daughter of the Sun god. She is his Shakti or Power that sheds light and energy upon the entire world, Shakti. But she is also his daughter who has emerged out of him and descends upon earth to become a bridge between the Sun and the Earth conducting its life and million processes. There (in the Sun) she is in all her splendour. Here (upon earth) she partly veils herself and labours and struggles and suffers so as to quicken the dark womb of the earth to give birth to the children of the Sun, the sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn. In the epic this dual aspect of Savitri is revealed as that Power of the Divine Mother who along with Satyavan have been sent forth to redeem earth and mankind. She becomes the evolutionary Energy upon earth and provides us the relentless urge for progress pushing us towards wisdom’s heights from behind through our soul. But at all critical moments she also takes a human form and leads mankind personally showing the ways of immortality. The whole epic reveals this secret of Savitri in all her splendour and glory and infinity of the Power of Truth.
And who is Satyavan? He is, as the name suggests, a vehicle of Truth. He too carries the truth and is a seedling of the Sun, but has been cast or sent forth to develop under the conditions of ignorance. His life is therefore a battle, a wrestle between his innate tendency to bring out the truth it contains and to develop into the fullness of the Sun god upon earth and thereby fulfil the dreams of the Creator through the marriage between Heaven and Earth. Savitri is also the daughter of the Sun but unlike Satyavan, she is a conscious birth, the descent of God’s Creatrix Power in a human mould. She has come to save Satyavan, who represents all souls trapped in the mud of ignorance as seedlings of the Sun but made ready through a long evolutionary journey to bring out the divine possibility within them. His father Dyumatsena is the mind of man that also owes its origin to the Creator Sun but it has fallen blind here due to the effect of ignorance. When the soul of man awakens and starts to replace the ignorant mind as the true leader of the human march, the priest of the sacrifice, then it not only opens doors to its divine possibilities but also, through the action of the Divine Grace embodied by Savitri, redeems the mind by transforming it from a mind of ignorance into a mind of light.
The birth of Savitri herself is the result of the King Yogi Aswapati’s tapasya. Aswapati is the Divine representative who refuses to abandon the earthly life or escape permanently into personal extinction of Nirvana. Like the Buddha, he too is moved by the plight of humanity but instead of showing the exit door or the way out of it, he wants to open an entry door for the Divine Power to descend upon earth and transform it. Of course, even now the Divine Power is there but it is working slowly from behind the many veils of ignorance. Each of these veils not only obscures but deflects and distorts the divine working. The world therefore is not an illusion in the sense of being a non-existent existence which would be an impossible paradox, like being something that is nothing. Even a reflection is not nothing since it does reflect or represent something seen through the mirror of the mind. It is rather a distortion, an illusion in the sense that it is not a true reflection or representation of the Reality hidden behind or within it. Aswapati seeks to rectify this distortion and it is for this that he undertakes the arduous tapasya through many worlds in search of the supreme original Power that can set right the distortion, the Supreme’s alchemist Energy that can transmute the raw base of earthly substance into the divine gold. Aswapati engages in an unprecedented tapasya to bring down the supreme original Power. But the world is not ready to receive this tremendous Power. Hence Aswapati asks for the one boon that the Divine Mother herself come down and prepare the earth and embody the transforming Power of Love and thereby change this earthly life into the life divine.
This is the background of Savitri’s birth.
But Savitri and Satyavan (and we may say Aswapati as well) are not one-time earthly characters from whose life we may draw inspiration or whose influence continues to act upon the centuries and millennia. They are conscious beings and forces that take birth from age to age to help mankind emerge out of the mud of ignorance and help in the blossoming of the divine possibility in us. It is these powers, especially the power of Savitri, that Sri Aurobindo has brought to earth through the book. In this sense the epic serves a similar purpose as the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. These epics bring the character of Rama and Krishna respectively close to our being. The books become a bridge or a door for us to come into contact with the Divine Avatars and thereby experience the same effect as would our physical contact with the physical persona. In fact, they bring us in a certain sense even closer since physical contact is typically through the physical senses and the physical mind which have their own limitations. A revelatory poem of the calibre as Savitri, — and there are hardly a few of this kind, in essence, not considering their quality or degree, in which Savitri surely surpasses all — bypasses the physical mind and the senses and touches the inner being directly. It evokes a mental image and if we are open enough, brings us into contact with that aspect of the divine Presence which the characters represent. This in a way is a great advantage of touching the Divine through such an epic. No wonder Sri Aurobindo worked on the poem for nearly 34 years (if we take 1916 as the starting point), revised it almost 12 times, shaping and reshaping it until her word-body became a perfect representative of the being and persona and power of Savitri. Born in extremely tumultuous times, Savitri the book brings light and hope and strength even while humanity, and especially those who are supposed to uphold the dharma, are passing through the darkest night. Savitri the book embodies the force that incarnated as Savitri. But by containing within itself the experiences and realisations of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Savitri the book embodies the transforming force and power of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in this present incarnation. Hence Savitri alone is sufficient to take us through the transformation, not only as a dynamic guide but as a conscious power that can transform us without any other aid. It is the mantra of transformation as the Mother revealed to us and if we can open to this mantra and its transformative power then nothing more is needed; Savitri alone is sufficient. It is the ship of the supreme Knowledge impelled by the supreme Power that can transport and transmute us from our present mortal state into a divine and immortal existence.