This first volume of two is a collection of articles on the epic Savitri by a wide variety of authors, many of whom came in direct contact with Sri Aurobindo and thus were able to provide an intimate personal feel to their writings. In the words of the editor, „While making a selection of articles from various authors in the present volume the working thumb-rule followed was to see that the compilation is sufficiently broad-based to cover in an over-all way the numerous aspects of the epic.“ Three letters by Sri Aurobindo and a talk by the Mother are included, as well as articles by Nolini Kanta Gupta, Nirodbaran, A. B. Purani, Dilip Kumar Roy, Amal Kiran and several others.

REVIEW

„All the rest, these are preparations, but Savitri, it is the message“1 , the Mother is reported to have said about Savitri. She is also quoted as having said, „To read Savitri is indeed to practice Yoga, spiritual concentration; one can find there all that is needed to realise the Divine.“2  Little wonder then that such a varied enterprise seems to be developing around this single work – a Center of study and display devoted to Savitri, a web-site not tardy in populating cyberspace with its growing exegetical and exhibitionary paraphernalia, several known and unknown aspirants to the identity of presenters of the epic as popular expression on celluloid, increasing numbers of musicians, artists, dramatists, choreographers, dancers, poets utilizing it as source of inspiration, many roving interpreters. Under these circumstances, it becomes not merely important, but imperative, to excavate the contexts of Savitri, its bases in tradition, spirituality, culture, biography, experience. This, not only to make the epic more accessible but to protect its integrity, resist its possible appropriation and circulation by traffickers of a miasmic new-age or worse still, as cult-object, concretized icon in a religion of rote. The lapse of meaning in the bazaars of social intention deflects the focus of the Mother‘s words, so that the material object Savitri becomes the metonymic substitute of its context – the one commodity possessing which our efforts can be put at rest, repeating whose lines can take the place of inner awareness and practice, opening whose Seiten at random can yield to us secret fortune cookie messages by which to succeed in the oneupmanship of the everyday.

Of course, Savitri itself resists such use, its sheer integrality standing in the way of misappropriation, but this only when we have tried sincerely to establish a relationship with it, to feel its life invade our lives. Such an attempt can unlock the self-revealing mantra and bring understanding and spiritual growth in spite of our ignorance. But for a fullness of its embrace, the injunction in A.B. Purani‘s words is worth heeding: „Savitri demands a certain minimum capacity of vision in addition to a broad cosmopolitan enlightened outlook familiar with the latest advances in several branches of human knowledge.“3  These would form what I have called the contexts of Savitri. And I would add - a firm grounding in the theoretical and practical aspects of Sri Aurobindo‘s spiritual darshan, his philosophy and yoga and a knowledge of the facts of Sri Aurobindo‘s and the Mother‘s lives, so as to detect the pointers to the inner events of those lives „not lived on the surface for men to see.“ In this respect, it is welcome indeed to come across a book such as Perspectives of Savitri - I, a substantial retrospective of interpretative writing on the epic by what the editor of the anthology, R.Y. Deshpande, calls „the first generation authors... many of [whom] came directly in contact with Sri Aurobindo and therefore in them is the glow of intimacy providing a rarer personal feeling. . ..“

The book is divided into six sections. Deshpande points to „internal affinity“5  as being the principle for the grouping of articles in these sections, but in his otherwise illuminating introduction, he fails to clarify the specifics of this affinity, which are not always obvious. Nor is there any introduction to the authors, which might, once more, have served contextual purposes. The one other complaint one is forced to express is the poor proofing, leading to serious and numerous typographical errors, marring the excellence of its contents. These apart, the work brings together such a wealth of material of unfailing literary and interpretative quality, that I feel its reading is a must to anyone who has any interest in Savitri.

The book opens with three of Sri Aurobindo‘s own letters written to K.D. Sethna, clarifying his intention in writing the epic and explaining some of the technicalities of the mantric overhead aesthesis which runs through it. This is followed by the Mother‘s conversation with Mona Sarkar, where she spells out the inner magnificence, spiritual efficacy and uniqueness of Savitri from among Sri Aurobindo‘s entire corpus. These two articles compose the first section of the book. Apart from these, and from Kapali Sastry‘s Sanskrit translation of Canto I of Savitri, it is Nirodbaran‘s historical account of the composition of the epic (in the last phase of which he played the crucial scribal role) that stands out by the singularity of its content.

Most other articles revolve around one or both of two concerns: the spiritual content of Savitri and its literary contribution. Not that these are mutually exclusive, its mantric aesthesis an inseparable part of its spiritual „message“, and several writers (Purani, Dilip Roy, Srinivasa Iyengar, Deshpande, Jyotipriya, Sisirkumar Ghosh) have been sensitive to the centrality of poetic valence to its overall meaning. A predominant number of articles provide the very valuable function of outlining the fundamental narrative structure of the story, bringing out thereby the broad lines of its „drama of integral self-realisation“6  through judicious and eloquent quotes. The question of the original content of Vyasa‘s story in the Mahabharata and Sri Aurobindo‘s modifications thereof is dealt with in several of these approaches, but most completely in Deshpande‘s essay. The biographical context, equating Savitri with the Mother and Sri Aurobindo with Ashwapathy and in places, with Satyavan, is also addressed in several of these essays, but as Srinivasa Iyengar points out, these „parallels should not be taken all the way“. Sri Aurobindo takes an ancient story as the motif of a recurrent symbol, its temporal and spatial specificity always present, yet always hazed with echoes from other spaces and times. Ashwapathy, Savitri, Satyavan, like the Symbol Dawn, repeat in history and prefigure the future brought by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother; yet this is an earlier cycle of the spirallic progression, „when the whole thing had to be opened up for man“, and the resulting play of past, present and future contributes to its overarching spiritual sense. A few articles focus on the content of specific movements in the poem: Nolini‘s Upanishadic sensibility and Madhav Pandit‘s exhaustive approach offering mystic insights into the first canto; while Madhusudan Reddy outlines masterfully the sequences of Savitri‘s own yoga and Rohit Mehta draws out the passionate spiritual drama and rich significance of Savitri‘s dialogue with Death. Relative to Prof. Reddy‘s exposition, the yoga of Savitri, though containing in itself invaluable esoteric knowledge for the inner processes in any individual‘s yogic journey, is seen as metaphysically far more than this, the rare inner record of an avatar‘s process of self-revelation. Indeed, Ashwapathy‘s yoga can be seen in a similar light, and a specific discussion of this would have been a most valuable addition to Perspectives of Savitri. But perhaps, such a revelation waits in Perspectives II.

However, several authors have taken a formalist and technical approach to the text as an epic poem and these articles are mostly grouped in Section II. Producing very interesting analyses of its imagery, similes, diction, symbolism, Overmind stylistics or epic qualities, these essays point to a new poetry and poetics established by Sri Aurobindo in the English language, what he himself has called „the future poetry“. Indeed, Savitri appears as an enigma in the field of contemporary poetry and its critical norms, paralleling naturally the enigma represented by Sri Aurobindo himself as a modern personality. Several articles dwell on the place of Savitri as an epic in world literature and in doing so, address the supposition that epics are no longer possible in modern poetry. The modern sensibility is receptive only to the short passionate or reflective intensities of the lyric; moreover the dwarfing of modern humanity by a global technological, economic and political apparatus distances the grandeurs and totalisms of the epic to a remote and early age of human leisure and expectation. The responses in these essays to this charge of anachronism are various, but the root of the phenomenon is left untouched in all of these - i.e. the challenge represented by the author of Savitri himself to the social psychology of the modern. Purani‘s comparative discussion of epical form stands out for its analytical insight: he marks a difference between the early epic of Homer, Valmiki or Vyasa, where a vast and complex outward action is the subject; and the departure towards subjectivism introduced by Dante and strengthened in Milton. Savitri could be seen as a modern efflorescence of this trend, an inner epic of spiritual integrality and vastness. Romen‘s comparative study of Savitri and Milton‘s Paradise Lost is another outstanding work in this genre, noteworthy for its elucidation by contrast of the special qualities expressed by spiritual consciousness.

V. K. Gokak‘s exposition of Savitri‘s diction begins in response to P. Lal‘s modernist incomprehensions of the poem‘s spiritual synonyms - vast, infinite, eternal, illimitable.... The defense is somewhat futile, since as Sri Aurobindo himself points out in a letter to Sethna, these epithets or nouns refer to things real and concrete to the spiritual sense and experience, but seem like dated romantic poetisms to those unvisited by the touch of the Spirit. Gokak concludes his essay with a very illuminating analysis of stylistic variety in Savitri - with examples of a high watermark in narrative, dramatic, reflective (antithetical/metaphysical/intuitive/allegorical) and expository passages. He also relates these to Sri Aurobindo‘s own stylistic classification in The Future Poetry – the adequate, the dynamically effective/rhetorical, the metaphorical/illuminative, the intuitive/revelatory/inspired/inevitable. Of Sethna‘s two articles, the most outstanding feature to my mind was his detailed technical exploration of the Overmind aesthesis - particularly the elaborate discussion of that mantric window into nuclear fission:
„The riven invisible atom‘s omnipotent force.“7  Ruud Lohman‘s lapidary insight into the detailed architectural perfection of the poem and its cosmicity even in this aspect (brought out through an astrological symbolism), though grouped in Section III of the book, belongs in reality to the genre of poetical technique (Section II).

All in all, as mentioned earlier, this book (and its upcoming companion volume) is indispensable to all students of Savitri - both for the loving fullness of the relationship and as a necessary corrective to misinformed appropriations and cultist practice. — Debashish Banerji