Our biographer says that Savitri is a “fictional creation” [and not a “ficitious creation”]. You ask: “But now since this has become an issue does it automatically imply that the onus of proving that Savitri is not a fictitious creation falls on ones who perceive and believe it to be otherwise? … someone will have to go into what would constitute fictitious creation in the present context.” I think this “fictional” argument can be dismissed immediately. If the phrase “fictional creation” is interpretable in several ways, then the author has a responsibility right at the beginning to anticipate such possibilities and explicitly state what exactly he means by it. The adjective “fictional” has the following synonyms: imaginary, imagined, story bound, illusory (with the shades of deceptive, false, illusive, misleading, not real, erroneous,” unreal (dreamlike, weird, out of this world, incredible), fantastic (grotesque, whimsical, fanciful), made-up, invented, feigning invention, fiction conventionally accepted as falsehood, story-telling as a branch of literature; Webster: Fiction is a creation of imagination, and does not necessarily imply an intent to deceive, fiction is the opposite of fact, a term strictly applied to, in literature, to any form of story, whether in prose or verse, of which the characters and purely imaginary, or one in which historical events and persons are treated in an original and imaginative manner. In practice the term is used only for prose fiction. One thing one must remember is that, Savitri is a symbol based on a legendary story. We have a letter from Sri Aurobindo himself explaining its character, that it belongs to symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle. Yet in it “the characters are not personified qualities, but incarnations or emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch and they take human bodies…” It is this character of Savitri that lends itself for a possible mode of presentation as an autobiographical account. In the case of a Yogi every symbol is a reality, an experienced fact and a realized verity. When this is missed in any of his biographies, then one starts having misgivings about them. Which means, dismiss these biographies and go straight to Savitri which is only the authentic biography possible. If it—Savitri—is too much for one’s soul, let the soul get ready for it—get ready if there is a call. Otherwise just forget about the whole thing. ~ RYD