|
Dilip Kumar Roy
'T'O be utterly sure of the evidence of Sri Aurobindo's greatness I have often of late cross-questioned myself: "What was the storm-sweep that uprooted you from your native soil of poetry and music, laughter and popularity, to be flung at his feet in eager self-surrender more than four decades ago ?" It is not a question easy to answer because, to quote Nive-dita, our deepest convictions often enough spring from data which can convince no one but ourselves. I can only say that in his presence I felt myself gripped by a silence, wonder and intense longing to lay my utter self at his feet and lie cradled in his indefinable Grace. As to why I came to have such a longing, I would humbly offer a simile, to wit, that as a planet is unable to fulfil itself directly by merging its restless star-dust in the sun, so, it sleeplessly revolves around its parent orb waiting its final hour of deliverance. To me, I often told myself, Sri Aurobindo was the Sun round whom my soul revolved, though in its own orbit traced by its distinct personality. This is not a mere metaphor or picturesque analogy stemming from a devotee's effusion, for the light in him was not only resplendent like the Sun's — whose fire called to the spark of my personality — but also a radiant call of love which weaned me irrevocably from my lesser loves. One may say that all this, boiled down, is little more than a sentimental enthusiasm, or shall I say a flood which bursts the banks of sober appraisement. The charge may well be valid. My only defence is that, do what I would, after having glimpsed what I had in him I could not possibly write with a critical restraint about him, not only because the Everestian height of his soul's attainments baffled me, but also because to marvel at the incredible outflowering of his intellectual and mystic personality was a rapture that silenced all my questionings. But although the poet's afflatus may be justified in the world of poetry, in prose it does often degenerate into rhetoric or gush. So I will essay to sum him up soberly as best I can in the limited space at my disposal. Why does Sri Aurobindo impress us moderns ? It is a question I have discussed with many a friend in the Ashram (with disciples as well as visitors), and I found that most people were impressed — even overawed
Page-69 — by his marvellous power of living a lonely life passed in a self-imposed solitude for an indefinite number of years. But many a time I wrote to him that his genius for immuring himself within the four walls of a room had appeared to me as a limitation to be got rid of rather than a feat to be panegyrised. Most of my solemn friends were shocked, but not Sri Aurobindo, because he had an infinite power of understanding, of entering into his appraiser's point of view. It was this great trait of his character that endeared him most to me — a trait that amounted almost to genius in tolerance arid imaginative insight. I have always been, personally, somewhat downright and impatient by nature without being, I hope, dogmatic and intolerant, so that I admired his charity and infinite patience all the more. I was moved when once he wrote to me dismissing my denunciation of a friend of mine who got drunk now and then. "Human beings are much less deliberate and responsible for their acts," he wrote, "than the moralists, novelists and dramatists make them." At the same time this is perhaps not on all fours with the Christ's admonition: "Judge not, and ye shall not be judged." One might, indeed, suspend one's judgment for a time and wait till sufficient evidence accrues to enable one to judge with justice: but judge one must of right and wrong, unless one is reconciled to not moving a step in life. The line which Sri Aurobindo took was expressed — or, rather, hinted at — in his next sentence: "I look rather to see what forces drove him than what the man himself may have seemed by inference to have intended or purposed. Our inferences are often wrong and even when they are right touch only the surface of the matter." Yes, that was Sri Aurobindo all over, for only he with his experiential knowledge of cosmic and extra-cosmic forces (overt and occult) could bring to bear the sum total of his knowledge of the goings-on behind the "surface" to get at the real Truth as against the apparent. In other words, it was because he had outgrown the commonly accepted criteria of judgment that he could rightly ask the common judge to pause and recognise his own intrinsically human limitations:
He was worthy of admiration because he could persevere, in face of seemingly insuperable obstacles, till he won the clue to the divine harmonies which subserved the "inscrutable work of cosmic agencies", as also because 1 Savitri, II. Page-70 his restless heart of love saw that
And, above all, because his indomitable spirit dared (as he once wrote to me),
The mighty seers in all climes have said with one voice that at the summit of consciousness, knowledge is seen to be indistinguishable from Love. The great Yogi, Sri Krishnaprem, once told me epigrammatically: "He who says that he loves but does not know, does not love, even as he who says that he knows but does not love, does not know." This may, indeed, be true at the summit: nevertheless it cannot be gainsaid that, on the lower plateaus of consciousness, Knowledge and Love manifest themselves in distinctly different lilts and rhythms. So we would be better advised to "suspend judgment" till we grow to love knowledge more and know more of Love. For then, our hearts tell us, we shall be able to achieve the great Vision which enabled Sri Aurobindo to see God not merely as Love but — as the Bhagavat also has put it — as a "Servant of Love":
Page-71 And the Vision that made him realise God as a vast Creator seeking humble birth in the lowest of the low is as moving as it is convincing:
Before I met Sri Aurobindo I had, indeed, admired him as a great sage, but I could never get rid of the irrepressible regret that he should be too remote to be sought as a practical guide or help except perhaps in the way a finger-post is — to be consulted rather than loved. In effect, he was — to such as we — more like a lighthouse than a boat. But when I came to know him better I envisioned in him a loving pilot who could address even me as "a friend and a son" and be intimately interested in my fulfilment and salvation. Yes, knowledge is all right but the heart hungers, first and last, for love and understanding sympathy. But then, slowly, I came to realise something more: I saw that to know him more was to love him more. That is why I thirsted to know him more as, indeed, I wanted to know Sri Ramana Maharshi more. I can recall how immensely relieved I was when the latter told me in reply to my pointed question as to whether he set as much store by Love as by Knowledge: "How could I pit the one against the other, Love being the Mother of Knowledge?" His exact words were, "bhakti jnanamata". I bowed to Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi for having paid this blessed tribute to Love, even as I bowed to Sri Aurobindo for having endeared God to us as the "Servant of Love". Although until our self-will is completely expunged we cannot possibly see Him, the Blessed Lord, coming down to serve us feckless creatures, by helping us to throw off the ego's shackles, we can well accept Him as a Being of Love and Compassion from the evidence of those whom our hearts can fully trust: to wit, those who have known Him and been empowered by Him to act on earth as His deputies. In the Vedas I read long ago: "Brahmavit brahmaiva bhavati — one who knows God becomes God." I freely confess that I do not know what this precisely means. For if it means that he becomes omnipotent or omniscient like God and transcends overnight his human limitations (as is claimed by some fanatics), then it is obviously unacceptable to such as we who cannot equate fanaticism with true faith and wisdom. But if it means that such a man acts from an exalted consciousness which fills us with an ineffable sweetness, lights our path in darkness and spurs us on to seek one-pointedly and to love selflessly the Page-72 God of Truth and Love, then surely there can be little objection, since we can testify from personal experience that they do carry us towards the beckoning God, even as wings carry us towards the purer heights. But the wings are not coeval with the sky — any more than the sages are with God. For God, to be the absolute, must be absolutely infallible and emancipated from human limitations, and no sage, however great of stature, can claim to be utterly beyond the pale of error or of human limitations. This is not to say that he is not to be worshipped. On the contrary, no sage can be truly appreciated for what he is till we have offered him our hearts' homage. For only then can he help us with his light in the fullest measure and thus make us grow in knowledge, tolerance and love, till we come to realise what we have got to realise. More explicitly, while we must of set purpose be loyal to his essential guidance, we must not — if we are to stay true to ourselves — follow him blindly, echoing whatever he says. We can — and, indeed, often should — suspend our judgement if and when our hearts cannot fully accept all that he says, but we should not, for that reason, feel obligated to subscribe to what we find unacceptable till we have experien-tially verified it. Apropos, Guru Nanak said something which, as an admonition, can hardly be improved upon. He said: "You may, indeed, say that such and such a statement you believe to be true because your Guru says it, but you have no right to assert that it is true unless and until you have seen or known it to be true." And what do we see or knowl — Merely that the Guru followed an ever-evolving Gleam in his heart in whose growing light he saw more and more into the heart of Reality and thus became more and more at one with its essential Truth and Bliss. So we, too, if we are to be true disciples of our Gurus, should never follow them sheepishly but only in the discriminating light of an ever-deepening realisation. At any rate that is how I myself have come to cherish them: as reliable pathfinders in life's pilgrimage to Truth, to be venerated sincerely but not idolised fanatically. And among such heroic spirits who are intermittently sent from on high to relieve our global gloom, Sri Aurobindo certainly stands in a class by himself, not only because of his profound knowledge of human nature and encyclopaedic grasp of racial cultures, but also because of his exquisite power of expression both in prose and verse. I stress these two aspects of his personality knowing full well that these, by themselves, do not mark out anybody as a spiritual personality. But about his spiritual greatness I need hardly add anything to the tribute I have paid him already and fairly exhaustively.1 So I will only say that he shone always for those who knew him a little intimately as one of the brightest beacons in the dark and stormy waters of life, a lighthouse that created faith in the shipwreck of
Page-73 rational hope. It is this faith which made him write to me once: "To me the ultimate value of a man is to be measured not by what he says, nor even by what he does, but by what he becomes." And he became a seer of seers who was thrilled by what he had seen, which in its turn made him into what he became: a prophet of the Supra-mental future that is waiting for Man in the next phase of his evolution:
Even those who have seen him only once have known something, were it even a fraction, of the rapture that impelled him to write:
But even those who have never seen or known him have been left the supreme legacy of his mighty message, the last fruit of a tapasya which counted no cost to attain what few even dare to contemplate:
I must pause here, even at the risk of ending on a note of anti-climax, to speculate a little about how Sri Aurobindo is likely to be estimated by posterity. It will be impressed, I feel, not merely because he was a great poet and a great Yogi. It will be impressed by him also and, by and large, as a paradox, an earthling who yet transcended the downpull of the earth while loving and blessing it as no earth-enamoured poet had ever loved and
Page-74 blest her.1 And in him the paradox was resolved — so will men feel — precisely because he fully believed in the ever-deepening significance of earth-life and what it connoted. This he explained to me in a brief but supremely suggestive letter in answer to my "realistic doubt" as to the possibility of such an inglorious, disharmonious and creaturely thing as our earth being redeemed overnight by a glorious supramental apocalypse. "All the non-evolutionary worlds," he wrote, "are worlds limited to their own harmony like the life heavens.2 The earth, on the other hand, is an evolutionary world — not at all glorious or harmonious even as a material world (except in certain appearances), but rather most sorrowful, disharmonious, imperfect." Nevertheless, though the realist in him admitted this, the idealist in him saw no cause for despair:
In other words, in Sri Aurobindo's Vision is harmonised and blended the last incompatibility, the apparently irreconcilable dichotomy of Matter and Spirit. Not that the ancient seers had missed the supreme clue: their deep intuition too had laughed at the maya of the phenomenal reality and posited: "Yadeveha tadamutra — whatever is here is there as well." But the trouble is that the tyranny of the physical-rational mind has come today to be so universally idolised that such a mystic vision, being beyond its comprehension, is scoffed at by the modern mind as too cryptic to be taken seriously, if not as too good to be true. That is why Sri Aurobindo is likely to be looked upon by posterity as the new Messiah of this post-scientific age — a true Messiah because, even when he met the challenge of reason with reason, he could asseverate with the authority of his vision which no mental reason could command:
Page-75
Which must warrant the faith that even death is not the tragedy it seems, because,
Looking at the world from below — from our plane of the mind and senses — we may be inclined to entertain doubts about our human failures culminating in divine victory, but Sri Aurobindo looked on cosmic evolution from above and so viewed something breath-taking because he saw God Himself, descended into the world, slowly but victoriously surmounting obstacles through the miracle manifestation of His Divine Power — "through Nature's contraries" — and limned what he had visioned with poetry that came down like a torrent of gleaming gold:
1 Savitri, VI. ii. 2 Ibid. Page-76
And the glorious denouement will come because the omnipotent leader of human destiny has been urging us onward sleeplessly to crown Man with the Supramental consciousness on the glorious heights where
To end with my own humble tribute to Sri Aurobindo's Superhuman greatness on the occasion of his centenary celebration:
1 Savitri, X. iii. 2 Savitri, XI. i. 3 Hark: His Flute, p. 74. Page-77
The Symbol of a new Renaissance* Murillo Nunes de Azevedo
IT is very difficult to say exactly the right moment when the night ends and the dawn starts. It depends on each one's sensibility, of one's ability to distinguish the first sun-rays trying to open a way through darkness. One should observe that before any visible manifestation, there is already the presence of "That". It is like a shadow, an archetype. Very few people are aware of this. Only the seers, the pure, can have the gift of prophesying. But it is difficult to talk about light in the midst of darkness, mixed with men that never felt the "taste" of light. Every pioneer has against himself all misunderstandings, criticism, etc. Sri Aurobindo follows this general rule. Sri Aurobindo's thought is like a landmark of a new world dawn, something like a herald of what will come. We don't intend either to make an analysis of his great work or to speak of his fight for Indian Independence. We prefer to talk about the prescient power of Sri Aurobindo, the seer of a new age. Savitri is more than a simple book. It is like a travel guide for tomorrow's world. It was written as an epic poem that shows the different phases of human awakening, starting with the first suffering stages until they reach a super-consciousness where formal traditional values are surpassed and we find the immensity where there is no more place for separated men and nations. These are the starting lines of Savitri:
Before the light, the darkness. Before consciousness there is only the unconscious. Before Super-consciousness of a Divine Plan, men are deeply immersed in Ignorance and Suffering. Human history is a constant pressure to find an equilibrium point where we can find real peace. Sri Aurobindo
Page-78 was born in the 19th century when science created tools and machines at the same time. These new machines have deeply changed human relationships. Mankind was fascinated like children by the new toys, and the general thought was that a new God was born full of power, and in the near future everything would be changed by Science. Economic power followed like a shadow the increasing power of machines. And the capacity of man to produce and consume things increased extraordinarily. This was Colonialism's glorious time. The two 20th century wars were immersed in the womb of the 19th century events. Sri Aurobindo, when seven years of age, went to study in England, where he was to stay for the next 14 years. The ideas, the air he breathed, everything was contaminated by the seeds of Colonial oppression. The main ideal was to convert by force the poor Eastern people by the interfusion of new Western values of life. Sri Aurobindo suffered, like many others in the same situation, this total impregnation of Western Philosophy but he was to free himself from it. Sri Aurobindo's thought is 200 years in advance in his universal vision of the world. We find in Book One, Canto Two, a general Plan of Evolution. He says:
The man who is not afraid to think by himself, to be himself, is alone. The world in general is against him, turns its back to him because it doesn't understand him. Communication for mechanical men is only established on the grounds they know. But for the people "touched" by creative solitude there is an inner power that renews everything. It is like the presence of a great power that is pushing us in order to merge with Divine Super-Consciousness. This consciousness is the sense of unity that permeates all the Universe. The egoistic sense of attachment is changed into a new sense of common participation. The material appearance of those men that only think about receiving is changed by the luminosity of those that give themselves in sacrifice. The modern age is like a New Renaissance where old traditional values are being transformed into a Global Civilisation where it is impossible to distinguish between the so-called West and East. Transportation revolution Page-79 is going on and the same happens in communication techniques. Men formerly closed in the limits of their small horizons are now growing conscious of the world unity. Tomorrow these same men will be world citizens. The accelerated utilization of world resources produces new common laws. Earth, air, water, sky, are common to all human beings. The same will happen with ideas. All frontiers, all traditional barriers that separated human beings in closed spaces, will collapse. The same happened in the old Renaissance. On that occasion, the navigators always tried to increase the limits of the world. We live this moment with the same spirit. In the past, India was a country that fascinated the Portuguese, Spanish and so many others. Now the increasing interest in Indian subjects has the same appeal to unite East and West. As in the past, East is now the main focus of the world. But there is an increasing interfusion of values going on at an accelerated rate. Sri Aurobindo has the same feeling when he said in Book One, Canto Five:
For many blind people, the age that we live in is a sign of approaching finality. It is the apocalyptic threshold. The so-called puritans only see the external form, but the world spirit is a closed territory. They don't have Sri Aurobindo's sensibility, which we need to feel the light in the midst of the night to feel happiness in suffering. This awakening is gradual. To have the power to see behind appearances is truly seeing. We can summarise everything we said in one word: sensibility. To have sensibility is to be alive. It is not to be crystallized. It is to think the unthinkable: to see what I have not seen before: to love what I have never loved before. It is to have intuitions behind concrete thinking, and which it is impossible to be reached by thought. We find again Sri Aurobindo, the seer, full of wisdom, saying in Book Two, Canto One:
It is possible to see in the growing expansion of the human conscious- Page-80 ness growing in Sri Aurobindo's works the real human greatness, the force that impels man to be like a star. The Power that gives us life is sleeping in our Unconsciousness, but it is the same power that is at this very moment transforming a bud into an open flower. When the human flower is open, the Super-Conscious is fully felt and all myths and human values are transmuted. But we have to transform ourselves. There is an Alchemy that changes our lives. Sri Aurobindo's philosophy has this transmuting power that is something like a magical "touch" that will awake many lights that are now asleep. We can feel light stirring behind our closed eyes! We feel all Sri Aurobindo's state of happiness when, in the last Canto of Savitri, he irradiates the presence of Dawn:
Here we find Sri Aurobindo, the mystic, who confirms his entry into Divine Consciousness. In the state of "being" there is an intense participation. There is no more separation of subject and object. To be is "being". An active participation. To consent is to let His will be done. There is a sense of total opening in order to let inner Power flow. In the same Canto, Sri Aurobindo sings:
Renaissance men are men of a global world. Sri Aurobindo is a messenger of this new age. He says:
Here we find Sri Aurobindo speaking as an intermediate channel connecting common men to perfect man. He is the herald of Perfection. He speaks on His Name. He transforms his words into a living prayer. Something like a Primordial Power. HERE and NOW. At this very moment, when men of different countries are assembled in order to pay respects to Sri Aurobindo's memory, we can unite ourselves in that silence that is behind the words and then we can feel the consciousness of that Page-81 PRESENCE that Sri Aurobindo the poet, Sri Aurobindo the mystic, announces in the last lines of Savitri:
We hope that man can see this. SEE ! Page-82
Prema Nandakumar
SRI Aurobindo is widely known and admired as the poet of love and death and life abiding, as the evangelist of patriotism and nationalism, as the Father of Indian Revolution, as the inspired interpreter of Veda, Upanishad and the Gita, as the metaphysician and spiritual philosopher of The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga, as the social and political thinker of The Human Cycle and The Ideal of Human Unity, as the engineer of Supramental Yoga, and as the mahakavi of the futuristic-symbolistic epic, Savitri. Sri Aurobindo the Dramatist is yet another facet of this Diamond, this scintillating power and marvel of many-sided achievement. As a classical scholar in England, Sri Aurobindo was doubtless intimate with the Greek and Latin dramatists, but he had also come under the fascination of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans. During his early years at Baroda, Sri Aurobindo mastered Sanskrit and established rapport with the dramatic work of Bhasa, Kalidasa, Bhavabhuti and the rest. He translated Kalidasa's Vikramorvasie into English blank verse as The Hero and the Nymph, turning it almost into an Elizabethan romantic comedy. In defence of this, Sri Aurobindo once said: "But Kalidasa's play is From translation to original creation was a natural, perhaps even an inevitable, development. But given the choice between the Classical and the Shakespearian-Kalidasian models, Sri Aurobindo clearly preferred the latter. While in poetry, classical metres (including the Hexameter) irresistibly attracted him, in drama however he sought the larger freedom, the variegated richness, the manifold play of life and the dynamic characterisation in Kalidasa and Shakespeare. Nor was Sri Aurobindo unaware of the pitfalls in trying to imitate Shakespeare. As he later wrote in The Future Poetry:
Page-83
The reason why these many, poets all of them, nevertheless failed to make dramatic poetry out of the Elizabethan model was that they had no new or creative Agni to charge the model with and set it aflame and alive. Structure, language, metre are but the external vehicle of communication. The essential thing is still the "interpretative vision... an explicit or implicit idea of life and the human being". Action, too, while it is certainly important, needn't necessarily be outer action:
Something is brewing surely in the occult kingdoms of the world-stair, in the very heart of the cosmos as it were; and this incipient stir of movement is also reflected in the world of phenomena, in the very lives of human beings. Drama is an attempt to wrest the secret and project this mystery of inner striving and change, at one or another level of intensity or apprehension. Unless Drama could be so charged with revelatory intention, it must fail in its primary purpose, although it may still entertain or edify in other ways. For his dramatic material, Sri Aurobindo — like Shakespeare himself — readily turned to history, legend, myth or earlier epic and dramatic literature. In defence of such borrowing, Sri Aurobindo put these words into the mouth of one of the characters in his unfinished play, The Maid in the Mill: Page-84
If like Shakespeare, Sri Aurobindo borrowed his plots, like Shakespeare too he transmuted borrowed material into significant dramatic form. Sri Aurobindo made no attempt to achieve historical accuracy or close fidelity to the original, for he believed, as he once wrote to Dilip Kumar Roy, that poetry, fiction, drama couldn't develop successfully unless they dealt freely with the material they had on hand; "one can be faithful to history if one likes, but even then one has to expand and deal creatively with characters and events, otherwise the work will come to nothing or little". Although only one of his five full-length plays, Perseus the Deliverer, was published in Sri Aurobindo's life-time — first in the columns of the Bande Mataram sixty-five years ago and later, in 1942, in a final form — he had written earlier The Viziers of Bassora, Vasavadutta, Rodogune and Eric, besides the unfinished plays and dramatic fragments, The Witch of Ilni, The Prince of Mathura, The Maid in the Mill, Prince of Edur and The House of Brut. Greek mythology, the Arabian Knights, Katha-sarit-sagara, Appian and Corneille and Syrian history, early Scandinavian and British history, these and other sources were as grist to the creative mill, but at no time Sri Aurobindo's dramatic art would be in shackles to the original. Writing of his own Perseus the Deliverer, Sri Aurobindo has remarked:
Page-85
While Sri Aurobindo certainly preferred the Shakespearian to the Greek or Latin model of drama, and while he opted for the large freedoms of the Kalidasian romance, with him it is never any abject adhesion to any particular dramatic mode. The Viziers of Bassora unfolds a story of love and intrigue that takes the mind back to Latin comedy, and Rodogune recalls in some respects Greek tragedy. There is in Rodogune an eerie sense of fatality and the play of hubris. At the very outset, the dying King tells Cleopatra his Queen:
Much later, Antiochus the elder brother says:
The play of irony too is typically Greek, as when Cleopatra remarks: "Call me not mother! I have no children." Or as in this passage:
They know presently that Antiochus is dead indeed, and the darkness of grief engulfs them as a shroud. # Vasavadutta, as befits its theme, is nearer Bhasa and Kalidasa than Page-86 Sophocles or Shakespeare. As for Eric and Perseus, albeit their cast is Elizabethan and their theme old Norwegian or legendary Greek, they have a more distinctively Aurobindonian orientation, Eric perhaps even more than Perseus, for Eric avoids the intrusion of the supernatural. There is a definite movement of consciousness in both, almost a revolution, but whereas in Perseus the change from the Age of Poseidon to the Age of Pallas Athene is brought about by the semi-divine Perseus, in Eric the triumph of Freya over Thor is realised on earth by the human characters, Aslaug and Eric. Perhaps, it might also be said that it is Andromeda's definitive act of compassion that starts the chain-reaction which brings about the change, even as it is Aslaug's acceptance of love in place of hate that likewise engineers the change in Eric. Taking the plays as a whole, then, it may be remarked that, while their five-act structure is Elizabethan, the blank verse and interspersed prose Shakespearian, and the general tone romantic in the Kalidasian and late Shakespearian manner, Sri Aurobindo is nevertheless no tamely derivative or imitative dramatist, but has something of his own to impart to the dramatic intention and force of articulation. He is experimenting, he is moving forward; his dramatic art is evolving, it also projects his own theory of evolution. And this becomes very clear indeed in Eric, and an explicit statement is made by the hero at the end of Perseus the Deliverer, at once summing up the play's intention and hinting at the secret designing at the heart of creative evolution. In Greek tragedy, the stress is on human pride and divine retribution. In Shakespearian tragedy, the stress is often on the inflation of the human ego or the play of a particular obsession that brings about its own discomfiture and defeat. In Sri Aurobindo's dramatic aesthesis, there is a clear shift of emphasis. No doubt there is conflict in Sri Aurobindo's dramas as there must be in all dramas, but it has here an occult, a cosmic, impulsion and intention. The conflict is really a dialectic, preparing a lurch or movement forward, a further step in the evolutionary advance. Beyond violence, peace: beyond vengeance, compassionate understanding: beyond justice, benevolence: beyond hate or sordid calculation, the unpredictable efflorescence of love: beyond Poseidon, Pallas Athene: beyond Baal, Mithra, and beyond Odin or Thor, Freya the auspicious. In other words, the dramas too have an integral relation to Sri Aurobindo's philosophy of evolution, the dynamic of man's transformation and earth-transformation, the passage from the life flawed and fractured to the blissful Life Divine. To turn now to the plays themselves, the dramatic fragment, The Witch of Ilni, is dated October 1891, when Sri Aurobindo was barely Page-87 nineteen. The action takes place in the woodlands of Ilni where Menander the poet and Alaciel enact a pastoral romance. Sri Aurobindo is evidently trying to learn his paces from the Bard of Avon:
Another fragment is a piece of dialogue between Achab and Esarhaddon, probably a first sketch of the dialectic between Chief Priest and King, foreshadowing the struggle between Polydaon and Cepheus in Perseus the Deliverer. Esarhaddon would like to give up the established cult of Baal, now overgrown with superstitious harshnesses, and inaugurate a religion of humanity and grace. The tone of the argument suggests that the conflict is about to conclude. To Esarhaddon's passionate plea —
Achab replies, "You have conquered, king, I yield." In fact, the issue ultimately is not between two absolute powers, Baal and Mithra; rather is it a self-growth of Baal into Mithra:
The Maid in the Mill is nearly pure Shakespeare, though only the Shakespeare of the Comedies. However, there are not wanting echoes from the tragedies: "Is all quiet?" Brigida asks, and Basil answers, "Not a mouse stirring!" (as in Hamlet). But essentially The Maid in the Mill is drenched Page-88 in the spirit of the early Shakespeare, and there is too the buoyancy of Love's Labour's Lost and the verbal sword-play of Much Ado About Nothing. On the other hand, the play has its links with Perseus the Deliverer also. Just as Poseidon and Pallas figure there as the protagonists behind the action, in The Maid in the Mill the behind-the-scenes powers are Ate and Cupid. Aside from the romance and the scintillating wit and sparkle, there is the suggested movement of change from man to greater man, since man is no mere static thing but a creature with varied aptitudes and irresistible stirrings, verily an evolving power spiralling towards the beckoning heights. City and country have their respective attractions and limitations; and intellectual and labourer have their respective merits too, though both will be exceeded by the new integral man. The future is thus with those great souls who can effect a marriage of matter and spirit, "widen to the void and heighten to the sky", and so strive to make earth the kin-soil of heaven. Of the unfinished The House of Brut, we have now only Act II, Scene 1. Sri Aurobindo had doubtless taken his story from Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace and Layamon, in Latin, French and English respectively, and all belonging to the 12th century. Two elements in the Brutus story must have attracted Sri Aurobindo to it: firstly, Brutus delivered the Trojans from captivity, and secondly, himself descended from a famous Trojan hero (Aeneas), Brutus established a new Troy in a far off island (Britain). Brutus was thus the deliverer (like Perseus), he was the fulfiller, he was the founder of a new dispensation. The House of Brut, however, is about Brutus' hapless descendants and the tyranny of Humber the invading King of Norway. Humber is the scourge, he feels himself irresistible, he at last thinks he is greater than Thor himself:
The culminating sacrilege! And the working out of the nemesis for Humber and the deliverance of Britain from this incubus must be the theme of The House of Brut. The longest of the unfinished plays, Prince of Edur was probably written during the political period; if Brutus was the deliverer of his people from captivity, Bappa the Prince of Edur is to be the deliverer of his land from the rule of the usurper, Rana Curran. Bappa among the Bheels (Bhils) is really the Gehlote Prince of Edur, a historical figure famed in Page-89 Rajasthan. Read in the context of the nationalist movement in India, the play has a pronounced political accent as well. Bappa is the image of the true patriot and deliverer-to-be, poised for action and ready to issue forth from the 'Bhavani Mandir' cell on the hills whenever the call should come. It was also the age when Rajput maidens preferred a sword-blade or a draught of poison to dishonour at alien hands, and words such as Visal-deo's exhortation to Bappa would certainly have inspired the generations that were engaged in the freedom struggle:
Redolent of the romance and heroism enshrined in Tod's Annals of Rajasthan, Bappa is structured as a redeemer of his motherland; and it is clear the play was intended to have a happy ending, Bappa achieving his father's crown and also marrying the usurper's daughter, Comol Cumary. Of the completed plays, The Viziers of Bassora was probably the earliest. In manuscript form it had been seized and numbered as an exhibit during the Alipur Bomb Case, and for several decades it lay lost in the oblivion of Court files. Rescued at last by the Record-Keeper of the Court from the fate of being sold as waste paper, the manuscript (along with others) was handed over to Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1951 and was published eight years later. Based on the tale of the beautiful Sweet-Friend in the Arabian Nights, The Viziers of Bassora is sheer delight. Less poetic perhaps than Rodogune, less fierily pointed with purpose than Perseus, and less taut with dramatic intensity than Vasavadutta, the Viziers has a well-constructed plot and a gallery of interesting characters. There is a good Vizier and a junior bad Vizier; the former's son, Nureddene, loves the Persian slave-girl Anice-al-jalice, but the bad Vizier creates difficulties. The lovers are obliged to flee to Baghdad, where the great Caliph, Haroun-al-Rasheed (the Charlemagne of the Orient), conceives an instant liking for them and contrives to set Nureddene on the throne of Bassora. "Romance" the play is called, and romance it is. The Shakespearian echoes are manifold, and there are quite a few parallelisms with Timon of Athens, and the Caliph has his filiations with the Duke in Measure for Measure. While it is not necessary to distil a moral philosophy out of so light a comedy as the Viziers, the Caliph's concluding speech does seem to light up the meaning of the play: Page-90
Which simply means, Grace is more glorious than mere justice. We forget all our yesterdays of unhappiness and uncertainty; we forget the devious ways of commerce that tie us up into knots of misery; and we race beyond jealousy and greed and spite, and feel one with the Caliph looking with contentment on the triumph of love and the return of sanity. Vasavadutta has survived in several versions, the last being dated 1916. Like Rodogune and Eric, as also the revised version of Perseus, Vasavadutta may thus be assigned to the Pondicherry period. The sources are clearly Somadeva and Bhasa, and Sri Aurobindo conceives the action of the play as taking place in the century after the Mahabharata war. King Vuthsa Udayan is taken prisoner by his rival, King Mahasegn, and Princess Vasavadutta is made the jailor! The inevitable happens, the jailor loses her heart to the prisoner, and Mahasegn's cold calculations are foiled. As against Mahasegn's design that she should bend Vuthsa to her father's will, her mother's advice is categorical: "Thou shalt obey thy sovereign heart." In the course of their early parleys, Vuthsa too tells Vasavadutta:
What scores in the end is the heart not the head, the empire of the spirit not the kingdom of sordid calculation, the Grace of Love not the lure of Power. The play centres round Vuthsa and Vasavadutta, and at first it is a clash of intuition and mind. Apart from his deep-seated wisdom and spontaneous bravery, Vuthsa prefers to obey the intuitions of his heart because, he believes, that is the true way of life where you enjoy a divine freedom; and, ultimately, Vasavadutta too is willing to be ruled by the heart. Of Sri Aurobindo's dramatic heroines, Vasavadutta alone comes to us trailing clouds of glory from classical Sanskrit literature. She is not actively rajasic like Aslaug of Eric, nor is she a creature of myth, sublime and solitary, like Andromeda; nor is she an ineffectual angel like Rodogune. She is human, and she is strong, and she is the blessed feminine Page-91 who can ever rise to meet any occasion's challenge. Vasavadutta comes, perhaps, nearer to us than any of the other four completed plays; it is a page from our epic India, the India that has somehow endured. Its poetry too has a compelling significance for us, and while reading the play we almost feel like Vuthsa:
Like Vasavadutta, Rodogune too is good romance and good drama, but unlike it, a tragedy. The sources are Appian's The Syrian Wars and Corneille's play of the same name, but the changes made by Sri Aurobindo give it dimensions altogether new. Rodogune is the darling of romance, in whom beauty and fatality meet to encompass tragedy. She can dream of happiness, radiate love, not attain earthly felicity. She is a fragile and fragrant flower crushed to death by the insane rivalry of the brothers, Antiochus and Timocles. Their mother, Cleopatra, the Chancellor, Phayl-lus, and Cleone his sister are a trio of evil-generators. Antiochus fails by his own excess as much as through the perfidy of others, and Rodogune i
With the Greek sense of fatality wedded to the Aurobindonian concept of evolution, the Shakespearian largeness of canvas gave manoeuverability to the action and dynamism to the characterisation. And at its best, the poetry too is unquestionably Shakespearian, as for example this passage which takes us almost to the world of Hamlet: Page-92
This is the very iridescence of dramatic poetry emanating from the royalty of the sovereign intuitive mind of Sri Aurobindo. From Syria in Rodogune, the scene shifts in Eric to Norway. Described as a "dramatic romance", Eric projects the struggle for power between Eric the elected King of Norway and Swegn the Earl of Trondhjem. At another level it is also a dialogue between love and hate. While the tale is a page apparently torn from Norway's legendary history, the dramatic conception is Greek with Fate as a dominant power. At the very beginning, the disguised Aslaug refers to Fate:
But this is not the whole truth of the matter. Fate is nothing quite so adamantine, but is itself subject to a power-shift at the heart of the cosmos. Hate has brought Aslaug to Eric's Court, for she would kill him if she could. But there starts an inner conflict within the heart and soul of Aslaug. Page-93 She has suddenly fallen in love with the man she should hate, and she feels unnerved, and also accepts her defeat:
What is a mild struggle within Vasavadutta's heart becomes a terribly agonising ordeal in Aslaug, and she needs must succumb to the invasion of love. Likewise, there is an inner change in Eric as well. Strength is not enough, nor wisdom itself:
Without love, the rest are nothing. Parallel to the Aslaug-Eric encounter, in the realm of the gods there is a struggle between Thor the ruthless and Freya the auspicious. Love at last triumphs, Thor's reign is ended, and Freya's empire begins. Swegn is captured and pardoned, Aslaug marries Eric, and the people of Norway are assured of an era of peace and prosperity. The kernel of the drama is the inner transformation of Aslaug; changed and transformed herself, she effects a like revolution in Eric, who now realises that power and statecraft are not enough. Love is the ultimate secret, for Love transcends everything else. Twice Aslaug lifts her dagger to kill the sleeping Eric, but she cannot do it; it is the climactic moment in the play. This "leap of love across the abyss of fate" is presented by the poetry of the play as a lightning flash, as a blaze of revelation. Although an early play, Perseus alone received final revision at Sri Aurobindo's hands and was published in 1942. The title seems to suggest that deliverance from captivity is the theme of the play. The central action of the play is an act of pure compassion. A prisoner chained in the temple of Poseidon is released by Princess Andromeda. This brings upon her head the wrath of Poseidon and more particularly of his priest, Poly-daon. After an initial setback, Polydaon has Andromeda chained on a rock and exposed to the sea-monster. Trapped in her despair yet not wholly bereft of hope, Andromeda gives vent to her racing thoughts and conflicting emotions:
Page-94
At the nick of time, Perseus appears and kills the sea-monster and rescues Andromeda. The closing speech is given to him, and he forcefully brings out the evolutionary message of the play. When Cassiopea asks, "How can the immortal gods and Nature change?", Perseus answers: "All alters in a world that is the same." Could man too rise to greater heights, asks Cepheus; could man draw his being nearer to the gods? In answer Perseus says:
What we witness in the play is the decisive movement from the cruel and vengeful order of Poseidon and Polydaon to the wise and just order of Pallas and Perseus. And it is Andromeda's daring and definitive act of compassion, her tremendous affirmation of the sanctity of human life, that releases the whole unpredictable chain of events and encompasses the revolution in human thought and behaviour. And the marriage of Perseus and Andromeda betokens the union of Power and Grace, and the commencement of a humane and enlightened age. The corpus of Sri Aurobindo's dramatic writing, taken as a whole, gives us the feeling that we are in the presence of significant achievement. Except for Perseus, the rest of the plays didn't receive final revision, or he left them incomplete. It is thus all the more astonishing that they should make such an impact upon us. He borrowed, as we saw, much of his mate- Page-95 rial, but he could also invent situations fancy-free and a variety of characters. But whether the material be old or new, Sri Aurobindo weaves adroitly plotting and characterisation, and uses language always to high creative purpose. The poet, the scop, the maker, the creator — the dramatist is all these, and his creations are more than "sweet shadows". A legend from Greece or from India, leaves from the annals of the West or the East, a flight of fancy, a spiral of thought — yet these become dramas, seized by the intelligence and bathed in the light of poesy. And the dramatic world of Sri Aurobindo is a world of heroism and romance, of tears and smiles, of insights and epiphanies. And the affirmation the plays blazon forth is unambiguous. Love is the supreme reality, although it may assume, now the form of compassion, now of adoration, now of love of mother, or woman, or country. Be it Andromeda, Vasavadutta, Rodogune, Anice-al-jalice, Aslaug, Comol Cumary, Woman is Love, and Love has its divers impulsions and potencies. It is this Love that always sets the pace of the action, and Love is redeeming power, and poetry is the language of Love. And Grace or Divine Love is the ultimate secret and the sole reality.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sri Aurobindo The Viziers of Bassora, A Dramatic Romance (1959) Vasavadutta, A Dramatic Romance (1957) Rodogune (1958) Eric, A Dramatic Romance (1960) Perseus the Deliverer (1942, 1955) Collected Plays (Vols. 6 and 7 of Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, 1972) The Future Poetry (1953) K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar Sri Aurobindo: A Biography and a History, Vols. 1 and 2 (1972) 'Andromeda' (Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual, 1948) Prema Nandakumar A Study of 'Savitri' (1962) Sri Aurobindo: A Brief Biography (1972) 'Sri Aurobindo's Unfinished Plays' (Sri Aurobindo Circle, 19th Number, 1963, pp. 31-50) ' The Viziers of Bassora: A Study' (Sri Aurobindo Circle, 23rd Number, 1967, pp. 40-58) ' Vasavadutta: A Study' (Sri Aurobindo Circle, 21st Number, 1965, pp. 48-81) 'Rodogune: A Study' (Sri Aurobindo Circle, 22nd Number, 1966, pp. 38-93) 'The Captivity Theme in Sri Aurobindo's Plays' (The Banasthali Patrika, January 1969, pp. 162-173) 'Sri Aurobindo's Dramatic Heroines' (First Anniversary Number of Sri Aurobindo Society, Chakradharpur, 1965) 'Sri Aurobindo's Dramatic Aesthesis' (The Banasthali Patrika, July 1971, pp. 65-78) Page-96 |