Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol

Sri Aurobindo composed his poem over a long period of time. At first he worked on the narrative of Savitri as such, with the first manuscript dating back to 1916. Around 1930 he began turning it into an epic with a larger scope and deeper meaning. It now became his major literary work and he continued to expand and perfect it until his last days. In 1946 some Cantos started to appear in print in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and in 1950 the First Part of the first edition was published. The remaining parts were brought out the next year, after Sri Aurobindo’s passing. [2] Sri Aurobindo’s disciple and secretary, the physician Nirodbaran, gives a detailed account on the genesis of Savitri in his title Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo. He describes his master’s indefatigable work on the epic and reports that there were “many versions, plenty of revisions, additions, subtractions, emendations from which the final version was made.” Referring to a letter from Sri Aurobindo, Nirodbaran also mentions that he used Savitri as “a means of ascension” by recording his personal experiences which went on developing and resulted in all those revisions.[3]

The underlying legend of Savitri and Satyavan is told in the Mahabharata where it has a length of 300 verses. Taking up this relatively short episode, Sri Aurobindo develops it into an epic poem of nearly 24000 lines with 12 Books and 49 Cantos. Thus, the original story of conjugal fidelity is changed into a saga of human liberation from Ignorance, Unconsciousness and Death through the divine grace descending on Earth in the form of Savitri. Essentially, Sri Aurobindo is describing here his own spiritual odyssey and his efforts to reach a new supramental stage of evolution.

In the process he refers to a large number of subjects from the fields of history, geography, science, poetry and philosophy or treats the origin of the universe and humans. Moreover, he treats all kinds of yogic practices and especially the path of integral yoga. While the First Part (Books I-III) mainly focusses on the Yoga of King Aswapati (Savitri’s father), the Second and Third Parts especially deal with the meeting of Savitri and Satyavan, their deep psychic love and Savitri’s battle with Yama, the God of Death, when he comes to take Satyavan’s soul and faces her indomitable resistance.[4]

Sri Aurobindo has written his epic poem in blank verse, which is a very flexible metre allowing manifold variations of cadence and rhythm. But K.D. Sethna, a poet and disciple of Sri Aurobindo, notes that the freedom of this metre “does not cut any modernistic zigzag of irregularity”. Sri Aurobindo would reject any kind of free verse without underlying and unifying rhythm. He further explains that Savitri adopts, with some adaptations, the iambic five-foot line of English blank verse as the most apt and plastic medium for this specific type of inspiration. He adds that independent text blocks with a kind of self-sufficient structure are characteristic of Sri Aurobindo’s style, and his verses get their special sound and mantric force, because he is writing from the so-called “Overhead-planes”, that is to say planes beyond the mind.[5]

• Official online text
• The Mother on Savitri
• Information on Sri Aurobindo and his writings