Savitri's single-minded quest
has now brought her almost to the threshold of her inmost, her secret soul. She
is met, one by one, by the soul's triple forces, each embodied as a mother
spirit, as a Madonna. First the Madonna of suffering, Mother of sorrows and grief
divine; next, the Madonna of might, Mother of works and force; and last, the
Madonna of light, Mother of joy and peace. Each claims to be Savitri's soul,
and each is partly right; but Savitri cannot, she will not, accept these
partial identifications. She will not stop till the full splendour of
self-discovery overwhelms her.
First to meet Savitri during the
"passion of the first ascent" is a woman in "a pale lustrous
robe", seated on "a rugged and ragged soil", with "a sharp
and wounding stone" pressed against her feet. She is as it were the
incarnation of the world's pain. From the anxious moment of birth to the
"dolorous end of life", it is a tale of striving and failure, sorrow
and pain; and the Mother's compassion goes out to man as he thus lies stretched
on the cross:
Accepting the universe as her body of
woe,
The Mother of the seven sorrows bore
The seven stabs that pierced her bleeding
heart:
The beauty of sadness lingered on her
face,
Her eyes were dim with the ancient stain
of tears.
"I am thy secret
soul", she tells Savitri, "I am woman, nurse and slave and beaten
beast/.. .I am the spirit in a world of pain".285 In the course of her
long sad impassioned speech, she gives an account of her unique preoccupation
with human suffering and her round of painstaking works to tend the lowly, the
miserable, the nearly lost. However seemingly hopeless the human lot, however
apparently unavailing the appeals to Heaven, she has neither denied nor lost
hope of deliverance. When she concludes her speech, however, there explodes a
cry from below, the voice of the Man of Sorrows, breathing exasperation and
despair, a job in his burning passion of defeat:
I am he
Who is nailed on the wide cross of the
universe;
To enjoy my agony God built the earth,
My passion he has made his drama's theme.
He has sent me naked into his bitter
world
And beaten me with his rods of grief and
pain
And so on, a mixture of defiance
and impatience, assertion and negation, Titan and man. Savitri, having heard
both the Madonna and the Man of Sorrows, answers with serene understanding; the
Madonna is indeed a "portion" that Savitri's soul has put forth
"to bear the unbearable sorrow of the world"; because of her, the
wretched can somehow bear their wretchedness and hope against hope for a dawn
of deliverance. Savitri promises to return to the Madonna with an accession of
strength that will enable them to abolish cruelty and misery forever from the
earth. But, in the meantime, Savitri must continue her quest.
Next to meet Savitri on her upward route
is a woman in "gold and purple sheen, /Armed with the trident and the
thunderbolt"; her feet on a lion's back, her eyes emitting fire, her head
ringed with a halo of lightnings; it is the Mother of Might, and she tells
Savitri:
I am Durga, goddess of the proud
and strong,
And Lakshmi, queen of the fair
and fortunate;
I wear the face of Kali when I
kill,
I trample the corpses of the
demon hordes...
I rend man's narrow and
successful life
And force his sorrowful eyes to
gaze at the sun
That he may die to earth and
live in his soul.
While Durga-Lakshmi claims that
she alone is Savitri's secret soul, there comes a "warped echo" from
below, from "the dwarf Titan, the deformed chained god"that is man
the master of knowledge and power, the asuric man; he is the man that has
mastered Nature and would one day supersede God; he would smash the atom,
canalise cosmic energy, "expunge a nation or abolish a race".
Savitri, having heard them both,
admits that while knowledge and power are necessary, without wisdom they cannot
achieve much. Savitri promises to return to the Madonna of might with an
accession of light that will enable them together to abolish fear and weakness
and hatred forever from the heart of man. In the meantime, Savitri will continue
her quest.
Savitri meets last the Mother of joy and
peace. The Madonna of light stands revealed on a piece of clear and crystalline
ground; sun-bright her face, moon-bright her feet, nectarean her smile; she too
claims in captivating musical speech to be Savitri's secret soul:
I have come down to the wounded desolate earth
To heal her pangs and lull her
heart to rest
And lay her head upon the
Mother's lap
That she may dream of God and
know his peace
And draw the harmony of higher
spheres
Into the rhythm of earth's rude
troubled days.
She buoys up man with dreams and
visions, with ideals and aspirations; freedom, valour, justice, resignation,
thought, wisdom, beauty, truth, good, all are but godheads of the human soul;
against the pressure of the ignorance, man struggles to raise himself to the
level of the gods, and the Madonna arms him with the necessary faith and
perseverance:
I bring meanwhile the gods upon the
earth;
I bring back hope to the despairing
heart;
I give peace to the humble and the great,
And shed my grace on the foolish and the
wise.
I shall save earth, if earth consents to
be saved.
Once again, as the Madonna's
voice ceases, there comes up another cry, "a warped echo naked and
shuddering" from the mental Man, man the apologist and would-be
practitioner of pure reason:
The finite he has made his central field,
Its plan dissects, masters its
processes,...
His knowledge scans bright pebbles on the
shore
Of the huge ocean of his ignorance.
Hasn't the sum of the giant
endeavours of mere mental man petered out into nothing? No wonder "a
cosmic pathos" trembles through the moan of the "all-discovering
Thought of man", man the natural scientist and philosopher.
(An excerpt from “Sri
Aurobindo’s Savitri – A study of the cosmic epic”, Dr. Premanandakumar, Sri
Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Puducherry)
