In Savitri there is “a core of revealed truth that no extrinsic force has power to enlarge or diminish.”

In a letter dated 1934 Sri Aurobindo writes: “Savitri is a work by itself unlike all the others. I made some eight or ten recasts of it originally under the old insufficient inspiration.”[1] This remark was essentially concerned with the poem as it stood at that time, consisting of just a few portions of the first part. In 1947 he reveals to Amal Kiran: “… I have made successive so many drafts and continual alterations till I felt that I had got the thing intended by the higher inspiration in every line and passage.”[2] But even at this stage many Books had to be written, the Book of Yoga for instance was hardly there. About his earlier drafts, we get some idea from a letter written by him in 1936. The five Books of Part I of that time, he tells us, “will be, as I conceive them now, the Book of Birth, the Book of Quest, the Book of Love, the Book of Fate, the Book of Death. As for the second Part, I have not touched it yet. There was no climbing of planes there in the first version—rather Savitri moved through the worlds of Night, of Twilight, of Day—all of course in a spiritual sense—and ended by calling down the power of the Highest Worlds of Sachchidananda. I had no idea of what the supramental World could be like at that time, so it could not enter into the scheme. As for expressing the supramental inspiration, that is a matter of the future.”[3] In July 1948, in a letter to Dilip Kumar Roy, he avows: “Savitri is going slow, confined mainly to revision of what has already been written, and I am as yet unable to take up the completion of Part II and Part III which are not finally revised and for which a considerable amount of new matter has to be written.”[4]

 

Indeed, the composition of Savitri spans several years, almost fifty years interspersed with many long gaps in between. The significant periods could be 1916-18, the thirties now and then, and of course the last eight years of the forties. The first available draft follows pretty closely the description of the Pativratā Mahātmya as we have in the Mahabharata. At that time the poem was simply called Savithri: A Tale and a Vision. It perhaps belongs to the Baroda period when Sri Aurobindo had picked up several themes from Indian history and mythology for his poetic compositions. Of course, the 1940s was the period when he concentrated on it the most. In its golden spiritual fire, Yogagni, took the birth of the radiant daughter, kanyā tejasvinī that Savitri is. Sri Aurobindo had called it as his “main work”, undoubtedly more in its occult-spiritual rather than literary sense. Its poetry is in the power of the inspired and inevitable word which can be understood, to be more precise received, only in the depths of a luminous silence.

 

In 1936 Sri Aurobindo recalls in a letter that Savitri as a narrative poem in two parts was “originally written many years ago before the Mother came.”[5] This “many years ago” before 1914 could therefore correspond only to the Baroda period. In this group we have poems such as Urvasie (1896) and Love and Death (1899) where the style as well as the similarity of spellings of Indian names bears plausible confirmation of Savitri being a composition of that time, around 1900; we also have poems such as Baji Prabhou, Uloupie, Chitrangada, The Tale of Nala, Rishi. There is a reasonable corroboration for the Baroda period for the beginning of Savitri, corroboration from a Bengali litterateur Dinendra Kumar Roy who lived with Sri Aurobindo in Baroda to assist him in Bengali conversation.[6] In a letter written to Amal Kiran in 1931 Sri Aurobindo mentions that there was “a previous draft” which would have made Savitri just “a legend and not a symbol”.[7] One could as well say that it was about this time that the old Tale became a Legend and the Vision a Symbol. We have also a pertinent letter from Sri Aurobindo to Nirodbaran telling him that he began writing Savitri “on a certain mental level”[8] which of course became yogic afterwards. This “mental level” means that, about the beginning of the Savitri-composition, we have to definitely go to the period prior to the Arya which was launched on 15 August 1915. The suggestion that Sri Aurobindo did not possibly choose Savitri before August 1916 for writing as a poem is based on a certain question mark in the margin against “Baroda” (?) on some sheet of paper found among his papers.[9] Just so, but the fact that he did not strike it out later could also mean that, perhaps, he intended to add there something more apropos of it. In any case, the non-existence of any ‘Baroda’ draft today should not necessarily rule out the possibility of the first composition belonging to that period.[10] However, for the purposes of comparative studies we can now take only the available 1916-composition as the starting point. This implies that the work on Savitri could be considered to have spread over thirty-four years. But there was not much done on it till the thirties, thus compressing the span essentially to the last fifteen-twenty years, with the intensive effort really put in the forties.

 

We may trace briefly the development or the composition of Savitri during its final stages as follows: “In its first dozen or so drafts the work does not exceed fifty handwritten pages. During the thirties the first of this narrative poem’s ‘cantos’ was developed into three ‘books’ consisting each of many cantos. By 1944 a draft of the first ‘part’ of the poem consisting of three books (twenty-four cantos) had been completed. This draft, handwritten by Sri Aurobindo in two columns on standard-size bond paper, was then revised. Many of the extensive alterations were taken down by Nirodbaran. Some of the revision is on the double-column manuscript; longer passages were written on small sheets of a ‘chit-pad’, which were later pinned to the manuscript, or else written in separate notebooks. The work did not stop here. The entire first part was now hand-transcribed by Nirodbaran into a 393-page ledger. This transcription was then read out to Sri Aurobindo and revised at his dictation. After this a typed copy incorporating the new revision was made. This was revised in its turn; sometimes two stages (top and carbon copy) or even three stages of revision exist. At this point, in the year 1946, separate cantos began to be printed…. The proofs… were read out and corrected by him. He also heard and corrected the printed text of each of the cantos after it was published. Finally, in 1950, the whole of the first part was printed in book form by the Ashram press. The proofs of this first edition were read out to Sri Aurobindo and he made some changes and additions.”[11] It is unfortunate that the proofs do not exist now. Part I consisting of the first three Books was published in September 1950 just before Sri Aurobindo withdrew in December that year; the publication of Part II and Part III as the second volume of the epic can be taken, from the date available from the printer’s page, to be May 1951. Which means that while Sri Aurobindo was still giving final revision to certain portions, a major part of the manuscripts had also gone to the press. Some parts of the Book of Fate were the last to be revised and it is there that we see the “prophetic” statements made by him about the yogic nature of the work to be done and the danger involved in it.

 

A brief first-hand account of the manner in which work on Savitri proceeded during the forties is given by Nirodbaran in his Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo.[12] He presents a graphic picture of how Sri Aurobindo went on with the magnum opus. “He would be sitting in a small armchair with a straight back where now the present big armchair stands, and listen to my reading. The work proceeded very slowly to start with, and for a long time, either because he didn’t seem to be in a hurry or because there was not much time left after attending to the miscellaneous correspondence. Later on, the time was changed to the morning… He would dictate line after line, and ask me to add selected lines and passages in their proper places, but they were not always kept in their old order. I wonder how he could go on dictating lines of poetry in this way, as if a tap had been turned on and the water flowed, not in a jet of course, but slowly, very slowly indeed. Passages sometimes had to be re-read in order to get the link or sequence, but when the turn came of the Book of Yoga and the Book of Everlasting Day, line after line began to flow from his lips like a smooth and gentle stream and it was on the next day that a revision was done to get the link for further continuation.”[13] In this way the seal of “incomplete completion” was put on Savitri just before three weeks of Sri Aurobindo’s passing away. 5 December 1950 thus marks a doubly significant event.

 

Nirodbaran’s chapter on Savitri is invaluable in several respects. We begin to get an idea as how in the long arduous way the poet’s magnum opus proceeded for several years, almost up to the end of his physical presence upon the earth. It was without a doubt a “God’s Labour” which perhaps we would not have been able to discern in the absence of this narrative of Nirodbaran. Nirodbaran had the “unique good fortune to see Sri Aurobindo working on the epic on its entire revised version” and therefore the details bear the authenticity of a first-hand description. He begins the presentation as follows: “It is my task in this chapter to give a factual account of the long process that had led to Savitri in its final form. As the grand epic has captured many hearts all over the world by its supernal beauty I thought that they would be much interested in the history of its growth, development and final emergence—the birth of the Golden Child.” We should indeed be very appreciative of the manner in which the narrator presents the composition of the epic as it progressed during the 1940s. His “factual account”, howsoever sketchy or non-professional it might appear to us, is of importance in more than a few particulars. To say that Sri Aurobindo would have least bothered to write anything of a bibliographical nature regarding his Savitri’s arrival on the physical plane might not be altogether wrong, though we cannot assert it so. Yet there would have remained unfulfilled our natural curiosity about it. The picture drawn by Nirodbaran has now to some extent satisfied this understandable natural and gainful curiosity, this precious desire of ours. But what is more significant about this picture is its warmth and intimacy, its charming psychic feeling that takes us closer to its creator. Not that from the mass of manuscripts some idea of the composition could not have been formed, but that would have been a reconstruction of the former scene, loaded with all mental or scholarly notions about it. It is in that respect that Nirodbaran’s account, which is also well-drafted, stands uniquely apart from all compositional descriptions pertaining to Savitri.

 

It is hard to imagine the complexity of the process through which the immense Savitri opus had proceeded.[14] Draft after draft, and revision after revision, and handling of thousands of pages or sheets of various sizes have practically made the whole sequence intractable. The unfortunate result is, at times the loss of unusually wonderful passages which should have really come in some proper place in the final text. Thus the following lines

 

Voices that seemed to come from unseen worlds

Uttered the syllables of the Unmanifest

And clothed the body of the mystic Word[15]

 

charged with occult-spiritual power have unhappily remained unused.

 

Recently Richard Hartz of the Archives team has made an elaborate and painstaking study of the several drafts of Savitri and indicated the manner in which a reasonably faithful text of the epic could be edited. In his introduction to The Composition of Savitri he writes: “The story of the composition of Savitri is almost an epic in itself. Much work will have to be done before this story can be told in detail. Now only a broad overview can be given, tracing the development of a few passages as examples. But even this should enrich our understanding of the poem.”[16] True, and as it will enrich our understanding in another way, it is felt that the whole effort will bear happy meritorious fruits. There might be differences in approach but they should not stand in the way of researches that could be pursued in all openness in examining the texts of Savitri.

 

In this context we may look into some factual details, and these are indeed revealing in many contexts. The first available draft of Savitri, dated 8/9 August 1916, has only 1637 lines which became in the latest printed version 23,837 lines. Part I which was mostly written by Sri Aurobindo himself in his own hand had, in 1944, about 9000 lines; but as the revision by dictation proceeded, it grew to 11,683 lines in the printed text of 1950. This kept on happening in the fair copy made by Nirodbaran, in the typescripts, proofs, and the printed versions which had come out either in the Ashram journals or as fascicles. The very first line of the epic in the twenty-first version appears as follows:

 

It was the hour before the gods awake.

 

While it continued to be there in that form afterwards also, a change was made in a later draft in which “gods” became “Gods”. Was that another inspiration or was Sri Aurobindo simply taking care of details with a kind of focused attention? But perhaps elevation of “gods” to “Gods” has a transcendental dimension when the yogic elements that were entering into the scheme of things had started asserting themselves in a definite manner.

 

But then the fact that Savitri went back and forth through so many stages of composition entails, inevitably, what we might call a few possible slips or mistakes creeping into the printed version. There could be copying mistakes, typing, proofreading mistakes, or else mistakes due to wrong hearing of words, or using a wrong homophonic, or wrong positioning of newly dictated lines. Without a doubt the editorial task becomes very daunting, particularly at this late stage so far away in time, and so much in the physical absence of the poet himself. In that sense there is a certain justification also in the archival statement that “an author is not responsible for every point, indeed not even for every word that is printed as his.”[17] This assertion might look rather queer and principally objectionable. Too many hands had entered into the entire business each, quite unconsciously but always with a sense of devotion to the Master, contributing innocuously its share of departures from the original. This surely is a tricky situation.

 

It is stated that even at the advanced stage of proofreading Sri Aurobindo “made extensive alterations and added new lines and passages.”[18] This can be discerned from the differences “between the typescripts and the printed texts” as we have presently. But then we are also told[19] that the “only major gap… is the proofs of the early printed versions of a substantial portion of the poem” and that “Sri Aurobindo’s proof-revision was light.” As “revision was neither extensive nor complex” it may be said, “the consequences of not being able to see the proofs themselves are quite minimal”. Therefore the editorial discernment is: Absence of the final proofs need not be considered of much consequence. But if objectivity is the sole criterion then all this becomes pretty dubious and self-contradictory, especially when the claim is “we want an authentic edition of Savitri”. Just take an example pertaining to the 1948-fascicle with a revised passage which is as follows:

 

He is satisfied with his common average kind;

Tomorrow’s hopes are his, the old rounds of thought;

His old familiar interests and desires

He has made a hedge planned to defend his life…

 

“Sri Aurobindo further revised these lines in the proofs of the first edition. These proofs, unfortunately, were not preserved; so what was printed in that edition is the only evidence of his last revision of Part One. The passage was printed in 1950 as follows:

 

He is satisfied with his common average kind;

Tomorrow’s hopes and his old rounds of thought,

His old familiar interests and desires

He has made a thick and narrowing hedge

Defending his small life from the Invisible…[20]

 

Amal Kiran commented in 1954 on the fourth line: ‘Limping line—one foot missing. It is impossible to scan it as a pentameter as it stands: He has/ ‌ máde a/ ‌ thíck and/ ‌ nárrow/ ‌ ing hédge‌/. Three consecutive trochees in the middle are too jerky and inadmissible. The natural scanning is: He has made/ ‌ a thick/ ‌ and nár/ row wing hédge‌/. But this gives a four-foot line. Look up the original.’ We have seen Sri Aurobindo’s statement that a trochee, if it is not the first foot of a line, needs to be supported ‘by a strong syllable just preceding it’. But…this supposedly iambic line consists mainly of trochees, with only one iamb at the end…Did Sri Aurobindo, in the final revision in 1950, forget momentarily the subtle laws of metrical movement which he had expounded so lucidly in his prose writings and embodied with a spontaneous and unfailing mastery in so many thousands of lines of Savitri? If this irregularity had created a forceful effect of some kind, it might have been justified… But in the passage of our ‘common average kind’, nothing out of the ordinary seems called for… To avoid supposing an unaccountable lapse in Sri Aurobindo’s metrical skill, we may infer that he actually dictated:

 

He has made into a thick and narrowing hedge…

 

By making explicit the implied ‘into’, the line becomes readable as pentametric according to the natural rhythm of the words.”[21] Thanks heaven, here Sri Aurobindo is absolved from a metrical lapse, the blame going to the scribe or the typist or the printer!! The whole argument is plausible and is perfectly rational; it has a good point of cogency also, but it seems too perfect to be true, too ingenious. It is by a sort of tour de force that a case for editorial emendation has been made, something repugnant to the objective spirit with which such a work should be done. We shall in a while see Sri Aurobindo himself being apportioned of guilt for not taking care of his own philosophy! Indeed, what we witness here is sheer enthusiasm to make Sri Aurobindo match up with our notions of professional skill and perfection!

 

But, more importantly, the archival statement about an author not being responsible for every word that is printed needs to be seen more carefully; in fact it is a dangerous statement. It should have been worded differently. It casts aspersions on every text that comes out from a printing house. The archival intention is perhaps only to bring into discussion the contextual aspects of the composition of Savitri involving the scribe, the typist, the composer with the revisions taking place at every stage; it cannot have any other validity or acceptability in an absolute sense. Otherwise we shall simply prove ourselves to be like Newton’s famous contemporary Richard Bentley, the classical scholar. He was five when Paradise Lost was published in 1667. Later Bentley rewrote the poem entirely to his taste, thinking that it was the printer who had made all those hundred blunders in it. But, eventually, what he rewrote also carried in it an awkward “gawkishness”. As an example let us take his last two lines of the epic:

 

Then hand in hand, with social steps their way

Through Eden took, with Heav’nly Comfort cheer’d.

 

But the task of Savitri-editing is a serious task. It becomes treacherous also in view of the complexity of going through pages and pages of the provisional drafts, with revision and new dictation being carried out almost at every stage.

 

Based on careful studies and researches an attempt was made in the 1980s to bring out a Critical Edition of Savitri; but it proved abortive. By any reckoning this was enormous work, of going through the ‘manuscripts’, or what are called the copy-texts, and noting down with respect to them the departures present in the 1972 edition. Instead of the Critical Edition of Savitri we now have, established on these textual examinations and collations, a Revised Edition (1993). This revised edition is also accompanied by a supplement that lists several editorial details. These kind of provide the method of approach adopted while accepting the readings as given in the newly edited work. There are, however, certain issues which need another look in order to take care of the objections that could be raised in some particular contexts. The main or most important drawback is non-availability of the researched data which are absolutely essential for an alert reader to arrive at his own conclusions when interpretational differences arise.

 

Let us take an example from Canto Four Book Three, Savitri, p. 347, about Aswapati’s return to the mortal world after receiving an exceptional boon from the Divine Mother. The Centenary Edition reads the text as follows:

 

Once more he moved amid material scenes,

Lifted by intimations from the heights

And twixt the pauses of the building brain

Touched by the thoughts that skim the fathomless surge

Of Nature and wing back to hidden shores.

 

Aswapati by his long and intense yoga-tapasya climbs the summits of spirituality and reaches the top of the creation where he meets the supreme Goddess who alone, he knows, could change the circumstance of our transience and suffering, of our mortality, of our life in ignorance that has bound us to death, and bring to it the transforming felicity of immortality. The course of the evolutionary Fate could be altered only if she would incarnate herself here and deal with the one who stands as an antagonist against bright and happy manifestation in countless possibilities of the superconscient. A unique boon has now been granted to him. He gets the Word, that things shall be fulfilled in Time; this shall be so,—because she herself shall be taking birth as his radiant daughter. Aswapati returns to the earth, now with a splendid certitude, and attends to his kingly office of governance. Presently, he is no more an apprentice Yogi, no more a “seeker” to tread the hazardous path of a hesitant beginner with its slow and arduous climb; he is a Master, an accomplished Master, a fulfilled Siddha with the forces of Life under his full command—he who has become Aswapati. All his actions flow in the dynamism of the spirit and the higher intimations that he gets are received not only in a quiescent state, of withdrawal from activity, but also when he is preoccupied with the thousand problems that afflict us here in our daily transactions. Incontingent is his spiritual poise and he remains in it even in these harsh and hectic secular matters. The poetic expression Sri Aurobindo has given to this significant aspect of the greatness of the Yogi is precise in its connotation and we have to be pretty alert to its implications.

 

But from the editors who examined the Savitri-manuscripts in various details we have rather an unfortunate statement about the third line of this passage. While proposing the replacement of “twixt” by “in”, this is what they say: “The last emendation of a handwritten line was necessitated by what the editors consider to be a slip made by the author while revising. All handwritten versions, except the last, of line 491 [p. 347] of Book Three, Canto 4, run as follows:

 

And in the pauses of the building brain.

 

When he copied this line in the ‘final version’, Sri Aurobindo wrote ‘twixt’ instead of ‘in’. This word, although somewhat archaic, is perfectly legitimate, and in fact of fairly frequent occurrence in Savitri. But here it does not make sense. The ‘pauses’ of the brain are what come between, or twixt, its ordinary activities. Sri Aurobindo’s intention surely was that it is in these pauses that, as the sequel says, ‘thoughts’ from hidden shores come in and touch the seeker. Perhaps he meant to alter ‘pauses’ when he substituted ‘twixt’ for ‘in’. At any rate,” the note further says, “the unrevised version of the line, as given above, seems to represent Sri Aurobindo’s intentions better than the revised one, and it has therefore been restored to the text.”[22] The editors seem to be too confident to say that “twixt” for “in” was a slip on the part of Sri Aurobindo himself, too sure that it does not make any sense. They also boldly speak of Sri Aurobindo’s intentions, that what is suggested meets them in a better way. The least we can say is, we do not know.

 

But this “twixt” must have been read out to Sri Aurobindo at least on three or four occasions later. The typescript, the proofs of the canto when it was published in the Advent in 1947, the fascicle that had come out again in 1947, and finally when the proofs of the 1950-edition of Part I of Savitri were read out to Sri Aurobindo. We cannot say that the same slip kept on occurring at every stage in the whole sequence. Further, in the last version that is in Sri Aurobindo’s own hand, the copy-text, as well as in the ledger in which Nirodbaran copied the text what we have is “twixt”; it is also noticed that this word has been underlined in the ledger and that there is a tick mark in the margin, both in dark ink. From this we can be absolutely certain that a reference about “twixt” was made to Sri Aurobindo and that he very consciously retained it as the correct expression. In other words, this was not an accidental departure from the earlier drafts, though these had “in” at least on thirteen occasions. Nor can we say that Sri Aurobindo was comatose or oblivious while he made this change, or when he heard it a number of times subsequently. It will be appalling atrocious to say so; anyhow, it will be a terribly faulty editorial way of doing things.

 

The most surprising aspect of this whole episode, however, is that Amal Kiran himself should have gone completely out of his way to justify the ways of Man to God. He calls this “in”-“twixt” as the biggest puzzle in Savitri and sets himself to plead for “in” in place of Sri Aurobindo’s latest “twixt”. The immediate cause that provoked him to offer a solution to the “biggest puzzle in the text of Savitri” is the comment as follows: “Sri Aurobindo as an imager of thought-birds and as an artist of an exceptional merit making these heavenly visitors slip between the pauses of the building brain—when the brain is in the phase of an intense activity symbolic of the duties of the ruler with a concern for his kingdom—is just superb. There is something remarkable here from the point of view of poetic expression achieving through its roundabout-ness a very unusual result. Complex in structure but metrically well-poised, the third line in the above passage depicts exactly the whole process by which Aswapati the Yogi is presently seen engrossed in affairs of public life, a typical Aurobindonian integration of the secular and the esoteric.”[23] The roundabout-ness mentioned here is not a weakness in any sense but it has a certain charm and shows the alertness with which the author achieved it; the “in” of the earlier thirteen drafts was simply changed to “twixt”, finally bringing out the line “And twixt the pauses of the building brain” with a pyrrhic in the middle balancing two iambs on either side. The complexity of the structure has also a felicitous density, even while the thought-birds skim the fathomless surge of Nature and wing back to hidden shores. Amal Kiran considers “twixt” as “a strange oversight” on part of the author himself and for that reason goes forth to justify the editorial emendation. The puzzle for him is: How did Sri Aurobindo write it at all, contradicting his own experiences? And then how did he allow it to stand when the text was read out to him on several occasions? Before offering his solution, he first writes: “A highly intelligent friend [AB] well conversant with both Sri Aurobindo’s poetry and his yogic teaching, accounts for the fact that none of us reacted against ‘twixt’ for years and years, by remarking: ‘on a first reading (even for many more casual ones) we read the meaning and not quite the words, and so “twixt” was just taken for “in”. Now that it is pointed out one notices it.’ The background of Sri Aurobindo’s uniform teaching would suffice to render us uncritical. The same explanation may hold for Sri Aurobindo’s own attitude on hearing the passage read out, even if more than once… [Among other alternatives to have a heavier syllable than ‘in’ in the line concerned] Sri Aurobindo may have loosely opted for ‘twixt’… We should be aware of allowing currency to a text which, on a natural interpretation, is out of accord with Sri Aurobindo’s known spiritual teaching no less than with his own poetic choice in an overwhelming majority of versions…” While concluding his analysis and making a recommendation, Amal Kiran states the following: “The editors of Savitri must certainly not succumb to the temptation to choose readings from earlier versions merely out of personal preference. But neither can a purely mechanical approach to editing be the ideal for a poem which covered many years and took shape in such a complex manner. Among the diverse possibilities of corruptions creeping into the text, slips and oversights by Sri Aurobindo himself form an extremely small category consisting primarily of omitted punctuation. But rare verbal slips are a possibility the editors must accept when there is very clear evidence for it, particularly from the standpoint of Sri Aurobindo’s consistent yogic teaching.”[24]

 

This is another strange piece of logic, we “…read the meaning and not quite the words…”, that so much saturated in the teachings of Sri Aurobindo we become “uncritical”, that it also applies to Sri Aurobindo he doing things “loosely”.   So the upshot is: Sri Aurobindo’s eyesight had become weak, he had to depend upon a scribe who was not alert enough, he was assisted by a typist who remained mute and quiet, his printer didn’t always remain faithful to the manuscripts sent to him for printing and publication. Well, if such is the background then, all this must entail on our part not to have just a critical but an independent look at the entire composition of the poem, notwithstanding the Mother’s firm retort to Amal Kiran: “Do you think there is anybody in the world who can judge Sri Aurobindo? And how do you know what Sri Aurobindo intended or did not intend? He may have wanted just what he has left behind.”[25] That is logic also.

 

Indeed, to quote a line from Savitri,

 

A greater Mind may see a greater Truth.[26]

 

In the present context, of Amal Kiran speaking of “slips and oversights by Sri Aurobindo himself”, we can well understand why the Mother should have exploded long ago the way she did, in 1954, like “a veritable Mahakali”. It seems that we are not really dealing with the “biggest puzzle in the text of Savitri”, but with something else—ardent disciples become wiser than the teacher, not only pointing out his slips but also correcting them. But who can solve this puzzle? Or is it in this way we justify ourselves as a “disparate enigma of God’s make?”

 

But let us move on; let us take another example, that of the Book of Death. Basically this is the earliest draft, a 1916-18 version very lightly revised during the forties. The first fair copy has just 133 lines of which 108 are identical to what they are now in the print. What we have now are 177 lines with 25 lines altered and 44 added by dictation.[27] On a page belonging to this manuscript, Sri Aurobindo also dictated “Book of Death / III / Death in the Forest”. (See ref. 29, p. 625) Regarding this nomenclature of “III” some doubt has arisen, whether it can be taken as Canto III of the present Book of Death with the first two cantos having remained unwritten, or that it was simply a third part of the earlier version of the epic that belongs to the Arya-period, when the poem was just a Tale and a Vision. When the Tale and the Vision got transformed into a Legend and a Symbol, the relevance of “III”, arguably, could become suspect. Here the seeds of doubt have started sprouting. But let us see some more details about it.

 

Added to the Book of Death there is a footnote in the 1954-edition of Savitri which runs as follows: “This Book was not completed. This Canto which the author named Canto III was compiled by him from an earlier version and rewritten at places.” A further clarification was presented in the footnote of the 1972-edition: “This Canto was compiled by the poet from an early version of Savitri in which it had been called Canto Three. It was the third Canto of that poem, not the third canto of any particular Book. When, after being rewritten at places, it was included in the present version, its number remained unchanged.” But this statement seems to be misrepresentative of the available facts. As we have seen, “Book of Death / III / Death in the Forest” was dictated in 1946. The 1993-edition has a more explicit statement: “The Book of Death was taken from Canto Three of an early version of Savitri which had only six cantos and an epilogue. It was slightly revised at a later stage and a number of new lines were added, but it was never fully worked into the final version of the poem. Its original designation, ‘Canto Three’, has been retained as a reminder of this.” [28] Here again the “original designation, Canto Three” does not belong to the Arya-period draft.

 

But the facts are as follows. While attending to the Book of Death in 1946 Sri Aurobindo dictated “Book of Death / III / Death in the Forest” which is of course in Nirodbaran’s hand, all in three rows; this was done on a page of the earlier draft that was taken for revising. There is also a double tick mark at this place. To reiterate: from the facsimile of this page (ref. 29, p. 625) it is clear that all this forms a revised draft prepared on the original manuscript page. Seeing the abruptness of III at this place, in the absence of I and II anywhere, perhaps a doubt had arisen in the mind of the typist, Nolini Kanta Gupta, which means, he must have sought clarification from Sri Aurobindo. The double tick mark is undoubtedly a confirmation of what Sri Aurobindo had originally dictated to Nirodbaran, that it is meant to be the third canto of the present Book and not something belonging to the earlier version. Being a provisional revision of the draft we should take the existing Book of Death as incomplete.

 

Apropos of this situation Richard Hartz writes: “At the place in the manuscript where the present Book Eight begins, a roman numeral III was written by the scribe under the heading Book of Death, as if Death in the Forest was meant to be the third canto of that Book. It is possible that when Sri Aurobindo revised this manuscript, he had begun to envisage a description of the Yoga of Savitri, but had not yet conceived of the Book of Yoga as a separate Book. The Book of Death would then have become an expanded version of the whole of the old canto entitled ‘Death’, and would have been numbered Book Seven. Its first canto might have been similar to the present Book Seven, Canto One. The second canto could have been an account of Savitri’s Yoga much shorter than what was eventually written, while Death in the Forest would have been the third canto. But this explanation is purely speculative.”[29] The cautious approach in this footnote is commendable indeed—and we should be appreciative of it.

 

But we should also remember what Sri Aurobindo had told Nirodbaran when the final revision to the Book of Fate was completed. This was during the last session of his work on Savitri, in November 1950. Sri Aurobindo had asked Nirodbaran if there was still something to be revised. When told about the Book of Death and Epilogue, he said: “We shall see about that later on.”[30] That perhaps adds quite a bit of significance to the abruptness of number three of the canto; it definitely shows that this Book as it stood then was only provisional, would have had considerable additional matter which Sri Aurobindo, had he attended to it, would have incorporated at the time of taking it up again: we can be reasonably certain that he intended to expand the 1916-18 draft later. This may even imply that he would indeed disclose in the epic some other occult aspects connected with the role of death in this creation. These aspects could possibly indicate the difficulties of transformation of the physical nature governed by decay-disintegration-death, difficulties at the cellular level itself.[31] From the point of view of the composition, we need not therefore necessarily tie this “III / Death in the Forest” with the Book of Yoga which was practically not present in any earlier drafts, a fact which is clear from Sri Aurobindo’s letters also.

 

In a letter written to Amal Kiran in 1946 Sri Aurobindo summarises the position of the two Books concerned as follows: “The Book of Yoga and the Book of Death have still to be written, though a part needs only a thorough recasting.”[32] Here he speaks of two separate Books though at this point of time the Book of Yoga, as we have seen, did not exist and as there was an early draft of the Book of Death. This means, the phrase “thorough recasting” only indicates the latter which Sri Aurobindo wanted to take up again at a suitable stage afterwards. But this didn’t happen. Perhaps that disclosure would have been too early for us to understand as a spiritual fact in life.

 

There seems to be another kind of hieratic logic behind the sudden appearance of canto three in the Book of Death. If we consider that the poem is specifically a spiritual tale of Savitri,—and we know it is so,—then we have at the end of the first canto—the Symbol Dawn—an announcement about the inevitability of her husband Satyavan’s death. The second canto—the Issue—speaks of the awakening of the great World-Mother in Savitri, an awakening which is to happen on the fated day as foretold by Narad. The central theme of the narrative has thus already been introduced by now. The long intervening description in the next thirty-eight cantos, from page 22 to page 557 consisting of 535 pages, or about 19,000 lines, then forms a kind of necessary interlude in the story; it is a sort of desirable digression. With that the announced death occurs in the third canto of the Book of Death. From this point onward the story, of death, runs in direct relationship with the theme. There is thus an inner consistency in the entire scheme, making it very appealing to the aesthetic sense of superior poetry, its logic. If someone has proposed such an argument then surely there is a certain merit in his line of thinking; but despite its charm and the plausibility of an occult occurrence or coincidence it sounds rather far-fetched.

 

How was the Savitri-work completed? An offprint of Book Six’s Canto Two, which was published in the Sri Aurobindo Path Mandir Annual 1948, was read out to Sri Aurobindo and the changes he dictated were incorporated in a retyped copy. The painstaking revision of this second typescript was reportedly the last work he did on Savitri. A short paragraph before the concluding description of Narad’s departure was the final passage to receive detailed attention in November 1950. In fact he dictated three passages in the canto. The first passage in the context of the dread mysterious sacrifice offered by God’s martyred body has three lines and is as follows:

 

He who has found his identity with God

Pays with the body’s death his soul’s vast light.

His knowledge immortal triumphs by his death.

 

The decision Sri Aurobindo had taken to withdraw for a sublime cause is clearly indicated here in an unambiguous way. This happened just three weeks later. The third line discloses the occult truth behind the decision. Then there were seven lines in the second passage, with “Death is the spirit’s opportunity” added, and seventy-two in the third hinting the difficult work Savitri will have to do. Here she is a star in the darkness of the night travelling infinity by its own light. This was in the context of the work of physical transformation the Mother will be engaged in. Absolutely the last line he dictated was:

 

…leave her to her mighty self and Fate.

 

So the last word spoken by Sri Aurobindo in the context of his creative writings was “Fate”. There are in all 253 occurrences of the fate-related words in Savitri and it being the last word has its own mighty significance in the avataric work he had come to do. The way Sri Aurobindo had drafted his epic with utmost care and precision is what is to be noted here, and therefore to try to read with our mental faculty his “intentions” while editing it will only be foolhardy, imprudent, rash. If we think that there are defects in Savitri the wise thing to do is to leave them as they are. What is it that we can judge about it? Nothing, really nothing.

 

However, in the context of editorial revisions of Savitri the overall picture as emerges is that of conflicting viewpoints in certain cases. Either at times it hurts insensitively the sentiments of devotees or else brings frustration to genuine researchers of the poem who are not given the relevant details. It is necessary that we take due care of the complexities and the many possible dimensions that are present in the entire work. In this regard perhaps the best procedure for the editors of the Savitri-text could be to take the first complete version that appeared in two volumes in 1950-51 as the basic reference. Part One of the epic was published in September 1950, before Sri Aurobindo’s passing away in early December of that year, and Part II and Part III as the second volume within months of that day, in May 1951. To take care of the “slips and oversights” that might have occurred in this edition, extensive research notes and references can be provided in a supplementary archival document; these might include several readings as we have in different drafts. Presentation of data should be the main concern in any objective editing. It is well appreciated that carrying out such an exhaustive job can never be an easy archival task; but then, possibly that is the only kind of an undertaking which would do some justice to the poem as well as to the poet—if at all we can talk of justice. This entails an enormous amount of labour but the gain is a certain scientific documentation that can stand permanently as reference material for generations to come who may have another approach towards the epic. For an alert or perceptive reader of tomorrow this archival data will prove to be a help of immense value. When followed, it will also have the advantage of avoiding the charge of introducing in the edited text one’s own likings and dislikings, one’s natural subjective notions regarding matters poetic or spiritual or metaphysical. By presenting such “factual” details of research on the Savitri-drafts a new chapter of study can open out to enter into its spirit in another way. It is believed that this procedure will be in tune with the spirit in which the Savitri-chapter appears in Nirodbaran’s Twelve Years. But in the truest sense these are perhaps issues of a minor kind and generally might have relevance only in their academic contexts. What is significant is the authenticity as well as the validity of the Word of Savitri in its pristine glory and the power that can give expression to the Real-Idea in our life. That is the true value of its poetry and that will always remain faultless and free,—because behind it is the yogic force of its creator.

 

 

RY Deshpande