In October 1972 KR Srinivasa Iyengar gave a series of six lectures on Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Simla. These could well form a first useful introduction to the poem which is the “most powerful artistic work in the world for expanding man’s mind towards the Absolute,” as Raymond Frank Piper put it. Iyengar covers the epic by developing the following themes: the Yogi and the Poet; the Savitri Legend; Aswapati the Forerunner; Savitri and Satyavan; Savitri’s Yoga; Dawn to greater Dawn. There is an easy smooth flow of narration and the panoramic details that come out do ample justice to the work in the nature of a quick broad-based survey presenting the preliminary aspects. In the context of the opening canto of Savitri, the Symbol Dawn, we have picked up relevant parts of the last chapter keeping in view also the concluding description, the prophetic description ushering in a new dawn carrying the prospects of the everlasting day.

The spate of retrospective narration—the half-dazzling half-bewildering series of cinematographic flash-backs covering the Yoga of Aswapati, his vision of the World Mother and her promise of descent to the earth; the birth and growth of flame-like Savitri; her quest, her finding of Satyavan in the forest, their love and mutual recognition and marriage; the ominous "word of fate" uttered half unwillingly by Narad, and his later prophetic qualifications; Savitri's return to Satyavan in his hermitage, and the brief year of holy wedded bliss; Savitri's gnawing inward anxieties, the mysterious call to her that she should shake off her spiritual lethargy; her occult adventuring on the quest of her true soul, the many encounters on the way, the culminating confrontation of the Real followed by the lightning sense of identity, the embrace of the Immaculate Atman and the incandescent fusion with It; the subsequent wrestle with thought-formations, and Savitri's firm rejection of all thoughts, and the immersion in Nirvanic calm and void; and, last of all, the experience of the omnipresent auspicious Divine and the perception of her own efflorescence as Rose of God, as the very stuff of all Space and Time, as the image of Eternity itself … it is a mighty spectrum of seeking, trial and splendorous fulfillment. When she has completed her Yoga, Savitri the woman and wife is also the Redeemer in readiness to face the universal enemy, Death, engage in a fight to a finish, and wrest victory for earth and men.

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