Dear Mr. Mohapatra,
Pl. post without displaying my e-mail address. Thanks! Dr. Raghu
Falsehood Comes Braying With Claims of Truth!
A memorable line in Aurobindo's Savitri suggests that falsehood comes laughing with the (apparent) eyes of truth. I suppose that it sometimes also comes braying with claims of truth!
Here are Peter's remarks on Savitri in his Lives of Sri Aurobindo:
"Savitri...would become his most extensive literary creation." (p. 299)
"The brief narrative based upon the Satyavan-Savitri story became, through successive revisions, a vast symbolic account of his yoga. But the poem was not just a record of his experiences; it was also a ladder that helped him reach higher levels of poetic expression." (p. 377-378)
"...the epic Savitri which he considered his most important literary project." (p. 389)
One would have to take leave of one's precious Buddhi, on the precarious assumption that one possessed it to start with, to set up a false opposition between the literary and the spiritual.
Savitri is both a literary and a spiritual project or creation. That was Aurobindo's view of it. And Peter's book faithfully reflects Aurobindo's view of Savitri.
20 September 2010 14:46 re: Pl. Post
Although Peter does acknowledge that Savitri is a "vast symbolic account" of Aurobindo's yoga and "a record of his experiences", I will add that he ought to have emphasized and discussed at some length Aurobindo's view that Savitri was an attempt to express, in the medium of poetry, occult and spiritual truths.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that the indubitable status of Savitri as a literary work should not occlude or eclipse its equally important status as a work of "mystic poetry" in Aurobindo's specific conception of that type of poetry.