LECTURE I Savitri is an epic of more than 23,000 lines. It won't be easy to do justice to it in three days. What will be attempted is only an outline and some kind of foretaste by which you might be induced to get into the body of the book; that's all we can attempt. I consider the appearance of Savitri as the first ray of the new age that is coming in the realm of culture. It begins with the symbol of dawn, and I think symbolically it is itself a dawn of the new age that is coming to mankind. Poetry very often sums up an age and inaugurates a new age and Savitri seems to be an expression which presages; it shows us the coming of a new age. It may take hundreds of years, it i

LECTURES ON S A V I TRI Contents Pre-Content Publishers' Note Lecture I Lecture II Lecture III

LECTURE II Well, yesterday we tried to cover some rough ground about poetry, the possibility of an epic in this age and the idea of an epic being more and more subjective. It is not the size of the event which gives inspiration for an epic, but the significance of the event which is seen and felt by the poet. We saw Aswapathy's history yesterday, and found that Aswapathy is not the childless king that he is in the legend of the Mahabharata, the Indian epic, but he is here a representative of the human race, engaged in the cultural activity of humanity trying to evolve higher and higher values of life. That is Aswapathy. He is a representative, he is a symbol of the human rac

LECTURE III We are trying to follow the epic Savitri, though we are not making a study of the whole epic. We will now pursue an aspect which is less serious in the sense that it doesn't deal with any problem of life - because Savitri does deal, as we saw before, with questions such as whether the world is a mechanical determination which is irresistible and which must now have its way, the consciousness of man having no say in it. That was one problem as we saw. The epic also concerns itself with the evolution of man from his natural self to his true being or his spirit./Aswapathy gets this realization of the spirit, leading to a widening of his true being, equating him with t

-003_Publisher's Note.htm Publisher's Note This book contains three lectures on Sri Aurobindo's epic Savitri, delivered in August 1962 by the late A. B. Purani during his visit to the United States. The lectures have been edited to make them more readable, but an effort has been made to retain the lecturer's "voice" - his characteristic directness, drive and enthusiasm. It is hoped that the book will provide a brief but helpful introduction to Sri Aurobindo's poem. Ambalal Balkrishna Purani was born in Surat, Gujarat, in 1894. Inspired as a young man by Sri Aurobindo, then a leader of the Indian National Movement, Purani helped to launch a youth movement which gained widespread p

LECTURES ON S A V I TRI Lectures delivered in the United States by A. B. PURANI SRI AUROBINDO SOCIETY PONDICHERRY First Edition 1967 Second Edition 1989 ISBN 81-7060-036-7 © Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1989 Published by Sri Aurobindo Society Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry PRINTED IN INDIA