[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. ~ RYD]
Let me recapitulate the epic retrospective recitals.
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.
But however opulent in their massed detail and
spiralling spiritual I significances, these retrospective surveys and
flash-backs comprising thirty-eight out of the total forty-nine cantos are
strictly no more than the needed lay-out and background scenery, the massed
stage furniture and the manifold scaffolding for the action yet to be played.
This main drama may be set as under:
Book I, Cantos 1 and 2:
Darkest night, followed by the Dawn over the forest
where Satyavan and Savitri live
Book VIII, Canto 1:
Death of Satyavan in the forest
Book IX, Cantos 1 and 2:
Eternal Night
Book X, Cantos 1 to 4:
Double Twilight
Book XI, Canto 1:
Everlasting Day
Book XII (Epilogue):
Return of Satyavan and Savitri—
night again—
Towards a Greater Dawn
The entire “action" takes less than a day, from
the hour before dawn to the retiring time of the night: say, less than eighteen
hours in all. The opening canto is called "The Symbol Dawn”—but the symbol
is inherent in the actual or physical dawn. It should be remembered, however,
that there is no single or continuous image or picture of the Dawn: what we
find is a rapid series of transitions, suggestions piled upon suggestions,
interlocking significances, all adding up to a vast and intricate and dynamic
projection of the Dawn. In the Savitri-Death dialectic, the worlds traversed—
Eternal Night, Double Twilight, Everlasting Day—are symbol worlds again, and the
whole issue between Life and Death is fought out in these occult kingdoms. It
may indeed be affirmed that symbol and the thing symbolised grow into one
another, and it is not always possible—and it will not be wise either—to try to
dissociate them.
The Exordium to the epic, which is an evocation of the
Symbol Dawn, is truly magnificent:
It was the hour before the Gods awake.
Across the path of the divine Event
The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone
In her unlit temple of eternity,
Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge.
Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,
In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse
The abysm of the unbodied Infinite;
A fathomless zero occupied the world...
This passage, and the opening canto as a whole,
received successive revisions at Sri Aurobindo's hands before the lines could
be charged with such mantric potency as in the present definitive recordation. But
the reader who comes to this passage for the first time may very well ask: "Magnificent,
of course. But what does it all mean?"
There is doubtless the tense expectancy of the coming
of the physical dawn. It is the twilight hour before the break of dawn: the leaping
to life of Ushas and her attendant or sequent divinities, which is part of the
cycle of dawn-day-noon-evening-night-dawn played over and over again. Earth now lies prone in the
dark—not a mouse stirring—till the prostrate soil receives the "awakening
ray” from the sun about to rise. But since the title itself refers to the
"symbol dawn", it may be that there is the intimation of the coming
dawn of New Consciousness that is to end the reign of Chaos and Old Night. And
there is a hint of this in the opening canto itself:
Then through the pallid rift that seemed at first r
Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns,
Outpoured the revelation and the flame...
Interpreting a recondite beauty and bliss
In colour's hieroglyphs of mystic sense,
It wrote the lines of a significant myth
Telling of a greatness of spiritual dawns.
A brilliant code penned with the sky for page.
Almost that day the epiphany was disclosed
Of which our thoughts and hopcs are signal flares…
Shall we say, then, that it was the "hour"
before the Divine Dawn? Explaining the opening pessage, the Mother of Sri
Aurobindo Ashram referred to the old tradition that the Transcendent released certain
forces, emanations, to make the phenomenal world; but these four forces- Light,
Truth, Bliss, Consciousness—underwent diminution and perversion in the course of
their involution; and turned respectively into Darkness, Falsehood, Sorrow and
Inconscience. A zero level has come about, and now a new force or new set of
forces or emanations must descend from the Transcendent to set things right or bring
them nearer the original intention. And the current hour of darkest night
before the dawn is also the hour before the arrival or the new gods to re-make
the world. On the other hand, obstructing this coming of the new gods, there
lies inert or immobile the mind of Night upon the margin of Silence or Brahman
Consciousness. This Mind of Night is huge, alone in her dark eternal abode,
foreboding or portending or decreeing the unending reign of Ignorance and Death.
The Mind of Night is the very genius of the Inconscient, trying forever to bar
the march of the liberating gods of the New Dawn. Confronting that grim solid darkness—the
symbol of total blindness—one experiences the abyss of the inconscient
Infinite: the dismal sovereignty of Zero.
Repeated readings of the Exordium will suggest varied
layers of interlocked significance. The physical dawn is like the dawn of any
day. Dawn also means the awakening of life—of the gods of the earth and of
mankind. Besides, for average rnankind, the coming of dawn means, after a night
of oblivion, the resumption of the burden of life, the burden of fate. It means
really a sharp ascent of consciousness, from the somnolence or nightmare or
inconscience of sleep to the normal waking consciousness governed by the affections and by the faculty of reason. But this dawn also
means, for a realised Yogi like Savitri whose habitual stance of consciousness
is the supramental, for Savitri the physical dawn could mean the necessity for
a descent from a habitual poise in the spirit to meet the demands of day; and it
is therefore with a sharp jerk of remembrance, that she wakes up to her
destined role:
Awake she endured the moments' serried march
And looked on this green smiling dangerous world'
And heard the ignorant cry of living things'
Amid the trivial sounds, the unchanging scene
I Her soul arose confronting Time and Fate'
Immobile in herself, she gathered force.
This was the day when Satyavan must die.
The hour before the dawn is darkest, and consciousness
is at the nadir-level, a veritable zero. Yet the dawn—the physical dawn—as also
the Divine Dawn—is a thlng decreed and inevitable. The seeming autonomy of zero
is but a forbidding façade, for there is the decreed tunneling from the rule of
Inconscience through the progressive stir of awakening consciousness towards
the dawn of superconscience or Divine Consciousness. What bars the way to the Divine
Dawn is the all-negating power of the Dark God, Death, whose writ is the Mind
of Night. This Prince of Darkness and Lord of Zero has to be met and mastered
and finally transformed by the infinite Power of the Goddess of Light and Life
and Love. Savitri is nothing less than this infinite Power, the embodiment even
at birth of the Mind of Light:
A mind of light, a life of rhythmic force...
Prepared an image of the coming god...
What is immediately at stake on this fateful day is
Satyavan's life, but Satyavan is not merely Savitri's lord, he also symbolises
the "soul of the world". Thus not Satyavan alone, but the soul of the
world also, has to be rescued by Sun-Word Savitri from Death the lord of Night.
It may be said of the multiple evocation of "The
Symbol Dawn" that here Sri Aurobindo is fulfilling the true role of the
poet as visualised by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream:
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
A reference has been made already to the imminent dawn of
the New Consciousness, which Sri Aurobindo called the Supermind, or supramental
Truth-consciousness, or Gnostic Consciousness, and to the new gods who are to
restore the reign of Light, Truth, Bliss and Consciousness now obscured and perverted
into Darkness, Falsehood, Suffering and Inconscience. In the poem, Savitri is
the avatar who is to effect the restoration
of the divine order, and to give a push towards the supramental future or “Next
Future”.
Nay more:, the hour before the dawn" is, in fact,
all human history including the present when, notwithstanding the march of science
and the blessings of "civilisation", actually there is heavy
disillusion, a feeling of fatality, a cowering before the grim nuclear horror,
almost a benumbed readiness to be overwhelmed by the creeping catastrophe. All
history, especially current human history, is "the hour before the gods
awake”. The intellect that reared up so many edifices in the past, the intellect
whose operations double science and technology every eight years, is now
apparently at a loose end; the intellect's run of successes seems to look more
and more like a race towards successful suicide. Mind that was once the helper
now bars the way even to survival. In this dark night of the Mind's ultimate failure,
earth and man await the descent or emergence of a superior power; Supermind. In
Sri Aurobindo's epic, after the night of inconscience, dawn appears in the
east, and the world wakes up and with it Satyavan as well; Savitri wakes up too,
and the issue is soon joined; and at the end of the prolonged struggle between Savitri
and Death, the latter is worsted and forced to change and transform himself into
Light. But, then, this ancient legend is also current history. We are still
knotted in the "hour before the gods awake”. The darkness is real enough,
but will the gods wake up in time? "The hour before the gods awake"
is thus current history, the continuing present, and earth and man are now
caught in the night of the defeat of the intellect, and we await the coming
dawn, or watch hopefully for the faintest of the first streaks of the dawn, the
hardly perceptible first stirrings of life and hope and the needed redemptive
Grace:
An infant longing clutched the sombre Vast.
Insensibly somewhere a breach began…
An eye of deity pierced through the dumb deeps;
A scout in a, reconnaissance from the sun,
It seemed…
A thought was sown in the unsounded Void,
A sense was born within the darkness' depths,
A memory quivered in the heart of Time...
All can be done if the God-touch is there...
Leaving aside this tremendous contemporaneous relevance
of the "hour before the dawn" described in the poem, let us return to
Savitri and her human predicament and her avatar
role. Like others in the forest hermitages, Savitri has shaken of her slumber,
and in a second her whole human past passes in review before her—
From the bright country of her childhood's days
And the blue mountains of her soaring youth
And the paradise groves and peacock wings of Love
To joy clutched under the silent shadow of doom
In a last turn where heaven raced with hell.
Twelve passionate months led in a day of fate…
Her personal problem is also the earth's problem and
the cosmic problem, and Savitri knows she has to turn the levers of destiny by bringing
into play her own vast secret strength:
A work she had to do, a word to speak;
Writing the unfinished story of her soul
In thoughts and actions graved in Nature's book...
She matched with the iron law her sovereign right:
Her single will opposed the cosmic rule...
Savitri is "awake" indeed, and seeks the
permission of her mother-in-law to accompany Satyavan to the forest. "Do
as thy mind desires", says Dyumatsena?s Queen, and adds:
I hold thee for a strong goddess who has come
Pitying our barren days...
Now as Satyavan and Savitri walk to the forest with
"linked hands”, unconscious of his danger he speaks to her of his
favourites among the denizens of the forest, and although Savitri’s mind is
withdrawn in expectation of the dreaded eventuality, outwardly she listens with
attention. Reaching the destined spot in the forest, Satyavan starts wielding
his axe to gather fuel for the day:
He sang high snatches of a sage’s chant
That pealed of conquered death…
[The grand colloquy of Savitri and Death follows.
Eventually Savitri vanquishes the God of Darkness who had covered up the Divine
from the world of his own creation. The narration concludes with the return of
the triumphant couple to the hermitage where the elders were awaiting anxiously
for their arrival. Savitri narrates the details of what had transpired in the
forest during the day.]
Whence hast thou brought me captive back; love-chained;
To thee and sunlight's walls...
For surely I have travelled in strange worlds
By thee companioned, a pursuing spirit,
Together we have disdained the gates of night;
I have turned away from the celestial's joy
And heaven's insufficient without thee...
He dimly remembers the "formidable shape"
that had earlier risen between them, he even recalls some of Death's monumental
negations! Or—was it all only a dream, a nightmare? Savitri answers simply:
"Our parting was the dream”. They are back now amidst familiar
surroundings, the evening sky, the cry of birds, the whisper of leaves:
Only our souls have left Death's night behind
Changed by a mighty dream's reality,
Illumined by the light of symbol worlds
And the stupendous summit self of things...
Notwithstanding this soothing assurance, Satyavan can
notice a high and significant change in Savitri, a new spiritual glow, a sweep of
radiance, a rapture supreme. Once again she speaks as if to soothe and assure
him, and gently opens out the vistas of the future. All is changed indeed, yet
all is the same:
Lo, we have looked upon the face of God,
Our life, has opened with divinity.
We have borne identity with the Supreme
And known his meaning in our mortal lives...
To lead man's soul towards Truth and God we are born,
To draw the chequered scheme of' mortal life
Into some semblance of the Immortal’s plan,
To shape it closer to an image of God,
A little nearer to the Idea divine...
As the two now slowly walk back towards their
hermitage, they hear cries and movements, and they are soon met by King Dyumatsena
and his train, and with him is his anxious Queen. They have come looking for
Satyavan and Savitri, for they have never before been absent till so late in
the day. Lay it all on her", says Satyavan pointing to Savitri, and
everybody looks at her, and finds her touched with a hitherto undreamt of
incandescence of spiritual beauty. Who is this "gleaming marvel",
they ask themselves; .surely she will be the mother of many more miracles to
come! Dyumatsena has already regained his eyesight and his kingdom as promised
by Death in his first boon to Savitri, and there is a general sense of deep joy
and fulfilment. The return home is thus a deeply satisfying experience:
Drawn by white manes upon a high-roofed car
In flare of the unsteady torches went
With linked hands Satyavan and Savitri,
Hearing a marriage march and nuptial hymn,
Where waited them the many-voiced human world...
There is joy of reunion, there is the universal
ambience of new hope, and one more evening softens into twilight and soon night
comes on again:
Night, splendid with the moon dreaming in heaven
In silver peace, possessed her luminous reign.
She brooded through her stillness on a thought
Deep-guarded by her mystic folds of light,
And in her bosom nursed a greater dawn...
From the "Symbol Dawn" of the opening canto
and the vision of Savitri "the daughter of infinity" with "a
body like a parable of dawn" to the last line of the last canto of the
epic with its promise of "a greater dawn", it is verily a cosmic
sweep of comprehension, a mandala, a
full circle. Like Satyavan, have we not too "wandered in far-off eternities",
yet have not we too remained, like him, "a captive in her golden
hands?"