A Sample from the Manuscripts The opening passage of Book One Canto One, The Symbol Dawn, has the following text of 115 lines in the Savitri that was published in 1950. The 1942-draft which had only 58 lines in Sri Aurobindo’s hand is reproduced as a facsimile. It was the hour before the Gods awake. Across the path of the divine Event The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone In her unlit temple of eternity, Lay stretched immobile upon Silence’ marge. Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable, In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse The abysm of the unbodied Infinite; A fathomless zero occupied the world. A power of fallen boundless self aw

-11_Extracts from Jugal Kishore Mukherjee^s Letters.htm Extracts from Jugal Kishore Mukherjee’s Letters [Let us take one specific example from Jugal Mukherjee’s several letters pertaining to Savitri-corrections.His letter dated 24 April-1 May 1988is a 50-page single-spaced typescript running into several sections, and is titled Some Final Observations on the Table of Corrections. We shall takehere one of itsparts just by way of illustration to get an idea of his objections and concerns regarding the new Savitri-editing.] In justification of what I have been doing during the last 7 or 8 months in connection with Savitri, once Manoj [Das Gupta] very kindly remarked to one of the editors of the critical

A Question of a Comma A world unseen, unknown by outward mind Appeared in the silent spaces of the soul. He sat in secret chambers looking out Into the luminous countries of the unborn Where all things dreamed by the mind are seen and true And all that the life longs for is drawn close. He saw the Perfect in their starry homes Wearing the glory of a deathless form Lain in the arms of the Eternal’s peace, Rapt in the heart-beats of God-ecstasy. He lived in the mystic space where thought is born And will is nursed by an ethereal Power And fed on the white milk of the Eternal’s strengths Till it grows into the likeness of a god. In the Witness’s occ

Does the Revised Edition make Savitri more Mantric? The nature of Savitri’s poetry Before asking the question "Does the Revised Edition make Savitri more mantric? does it remove the dullness present in the earlier editions because of mistakes in them?", let us quickly look into the nature of Savitri’s poetry. In a letter dated 27 April 1999 addressed to Karan Singh, Manoj Das writes: If people desire to continue with the earlier editions of Savitri, who is stopping them from doing so? In a few years the copyright of the work will cease to be with the Ashram. We cannot stop anybody from bringing out a new print of any of the old editions.

Some Statistics A false impression has been promoted by the Archives Team by stating that 99.75% of Savitri is unaltered. It is said: “Savitri contained more than 1, 80, 000 words and 99.75% of these are the same in all Editions Between 1951 and 1993 Edition, there are about 1974 differences of which 476 are verbal. The others are punctuation, capitalisation, hyphenation, spelling and others.” To the scientifically and statistically minded people it would mean that 0.25% change is negligible and for practical purposes we may consider it to be zero. But the devil is in the false perspective of taking poetry as a linear form with words as the linear unit. It would be here exposed a

Should “freak” come back? There is a definite freaky history behind “freak”, it undergoing unusual changes from script to script and finally coming back to itself with the suspecting faithfulness of the word in Sri Aurobindo’s own hand. The lines of concern in the Revised Edition are as follows: (p. 455) Eternal Consciousness became a freak Of some unsouled almighty Inconscient And, breathed no more as spirit’s native air, Bliss was an incident of a mortal hour, A stranger in the insentient universe. The history belongs not only to “freak” in the first line, but also to the entire passage which must be seen in the totality of the context. This passage is from

Of “has left” and “had left” In February 2004 issue of Mother India Richard Hartz writes: Here is an instance, "has left" was emended in 1970 to "had left" in lines in Book Three, Canto Three, which were printed in the following form in The Advent, the 1947 fascicle and the 1950 and 1954 editions: Although the afflicted Nature he has left Maintained beneath him her broad numberless fields, ... When the 1954 edition was being prepared, Amal Kiran observed with regard to the first line: The natural and correct grammatical form would be "had left" and not "has left", since everything afterwards as well as before is in the past tense. In fact, Sri Aurobindo

A Matter of Judgement: About Path/Faith One may have faith in the script but see not the path; also one may know the path but follow it not with faith. Which one to accept? to go by the path or by the faith? The best is to have both together. However, that seems to be the conundrum in regard to an entry in the context of editing Savitri. The entry appears in a passage on page 146, The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds, The Kingdoms of the Little Life, Book Two Canto Four, Section 41 in the series of 159 sections making up the epic. In the earlier drafts, in Sri Aurobindo’s own hand, the word in a line is distinctly “path”; but in the draft in which the re

-05_Is Sri Aurobindo^s Savitri a Fictional Creation.htm Is Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri a Fictional Creation? How weird to call Savitri a fictional creation! But what did the elderly Hoopoe tell? “The spiritual way is not for those who are wrapped up in supercilious life.” [The Conference of the Birds ~ Farid al-Din Attar] The Lives of Sri Aurobindo authored by Peter Heehs and published in 2008 by the Columbia University Press dismisses Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri by calling it a “fictional creation”. In the biographer’s view it cannot be a possible source for getting any idea or material about the life of Sri Aurobindo who was essentially a Yogi, and which is what should possibly be seen. Here is