The mission of Savitri Bhavan

Savitri Bhavan’s mission is to help manifest the spiritual side of Auroville through education based on the vision and teachings of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. The complex, which has grown up over the last 20 years, includes two auditoriums, two large exhibition halls, a digital library, an ordinary library, a reading room, offices, a hostel, as well as a large garden and nursery. It welcomes all kinds of people who want to know more about the lives, work, vision and teachings of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. It hosts scholars who come for research or to give lectures and participates in the ‘welcome’ programmes for Newcomers. In recent years, teachers of Auroville and Outreach schools have been bringing groups of students to explore Savitri Bhavan and its activities. “We want the younger generations to feel that they are welcome here, and find that they enjoy their visits very much,” says Shraddhavan.

Since 1998 Savitri Bhavan has been organising programmes of weekly classes, courses and workshops to study the major works of Sri Aurobindo and those of The Mother. The Maison de l’Agenda de Mère – The House of Mother’s Agenda, is also housed in Savitri Bhavan, where the 13 volumes of The Mother’s Agenda, the record of her sadhana from 1956 to 1973 in the original French and translations into several other languages, are available and where people can come to listen to the Agenda recordings of the Mother’s voice. The activities of Savitri Bhavan cover all the four languages which the Mother recommended for study in Auroville: Tamil, French and Sanskrit as well as English. Invocation, the Bhavan’s twice-yearly journal in English, was launched in 1998, and was followed by a Tamil version, of which 34 issues have now appeared. Special classes are also held for Tamil-speaking newcomers and Aurovilians, and Savitri Bhavan has published a Tamil translation by Mahalingam of the booklet ‘Aims and Ideals of Auroville’, which was recently released to celebrate the beginning of Mahalingam’s centenary year.

Studying Savitri

The central focus of Savitri Bhavan is the study of Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem Savitri – A Legend and a Symbol, which has been called “sublime mystic poetry of the highest order” and “the greatest spiritual revelation given to man till now.” The Mother has said that “Savitri is a mantra for the transformation of the world” and called Savitri ‘the supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo’s vision’ “This made me feel the importance of Savitri for Auroville, which is supposed to manifest the vision of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother” says Shraddhavan.

Shraddhavan’s passion for Savitri was shared by others. But many were not native English speakers and had problems understanding Sri Aurobindo’s poetic language. “In the early 1980s, I was asked to help people understand English. I responded that I am not an English teacher but that we can read Savitri together and I can respond to questions. That became a regular weekly event, and went beyond explaining the meaning of words to explaining parts of the poem, as far as I was able to. In this way, covering about two pages of Savitri each session, we went through the whole book. These weekly sessions were videoed; then several people offered to make transcriptions in order to get a deeper understanding about Savitri.” 

The English of Savitri books came as a consequence: “A gentleman in Gujarat started translating our transcriptions into Gujarati and then published them – he has just brought out the 10th volume of The English of Savitri in Gujarati. That made me think, “Well, if he publishes the books, why don’t we?” That led to The English of Savitri series, the 6th volume of which has just appeared. 

Study sessions also took place on other major books of Sri Aurobindo, such as The Life Divine. “We found that The Life Divine and Savitri are complementary. They convey the same teaching, but address different types of people. Some are more responsive to the beauty, imagery and suggestiveness of the poetry, even if they don’t understand it intellectually, whereas the appeal of The Life Divine is more to intellectual understanding.” A recently-joined Aurovilian is now transcribing the weekly sessions of The Life Divine study covering the whole book, which started in December 2008 and continued until September 2017. 

The English of Savitri

The six volumes of The English of Savitri do not follow the book sequentially. “The order is haphazard, and I apologize for that, but I had no idea that it would be required of me to explain the whole of Savitri,” says Shraddhavan. Full explanations of six books have now been published, but the demand continues for more. Shraddhavan shudders. “I’ve always said, ‘Don’t expect me to do the whole thing!’ And I really thought that after publishing these six volumes and 52 issues of Invocation, I could wrap it up and that I would not be expected to do anything more. But it seems I cannot avoid it.” Book Two of the poem, the last nine cantos in particular, daunt her. “I am struggling with them. Some of these cantos are amongst the most difficult of the entire epic, even if they contain some of the absolute highlights of Savitri, such as the passage which describes how King Aswapati, after going down and down into the deepest subconscient and ‘suffering the ordeal of evil’s absolute reign’, discovers ‘the secret Key of Nature’s change’:

Then in Illusion’s occult factory

And in the Inconscient’s magic printing house

Torn were the formats of the primal Night

And shattered the stereotypes of Ignorance.

This experience projects him into The Paradise of the Life Gods. But his ultimate aim, which is to find the Power which can change this earthly life to the Life Divine, remains to be fulfilled by his daughter Savitri at the climax of Book Eleven. 

This is not just sublime poetry. This was the work of Sri Aurobindo himself.”

Mantric poetry

Savitri is by no means easy to understand. “Savitri is a new kind of spiritual poetry,” explains Shraddhavan. “Sri Aurobindo describes this kind of poetry as the mantra of the real, and he describes mantra as the poetic expression of the deepest spiritual reality. It cannot be understood intellectually. The outer mind, the outer consciousness has to settle down to a receptive silence for the mantra to be heard. Sri Aurobindo describes this beautifully:

As when the mantra sinks in Yoga’s ear,

Its message enters stirring the blind brain

And keeps in the dim ignorant cells its sound;

The hearer understands a form of words

And, musing on the index thought it holds,

He strives to read it with the labouring mind,

But finds bright hints, not the embodied truth:

Then, falling silent in himself to know

He meets the deeper listening of his soul.

“The prime thing is the ability to open oneself in an absolute mood of surrender and silence, receive it and let it work in yourself. And then, even if you don’t understand the passage, it will still work within you. And when you re-read the same passage later, you’ll discover that the lines begin to make sense to you. Mother said that reading Savitri is to practise yoga, spiritual concentration.”

Savitri around the World

Parallel with the publication of The English of Savitri volumes, Savitri Bhavan has published on YouTube video recordings of readings of the entire book in 325 sections by 325 people from all over the world. This is called Savitri around the World. “It linked people from around the world, even many people we did not know, such as a lady from Trinidad and Tobago who is reading Savitri every day alone there in the Caribbean,” says Shraddhavan. The initial recordings were done on the occasion of Auroville’s 50th anniversary, but had some shortcomings. A second version was launched on the centenary of Mother’s arrival in Pondicherry, and the entire reading is now permanently available on YouTube. (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DS\_0wk\_owWM).

The picture gallery

If Savitri expresses the Future Poetry, The Mother tried starting the Future Painting. Savitri Bhavan hosts the 472 Meditations on Savitri, oil paintings made by Ashram artist Huta between 1961 to 1966 under The Mother’s direct guidance, illustrating selected passages from Savitri. “Mother was aiming for a new kind of painting,” says Shraddhavan. “She told her student, ‘We are going towards a painting that will be able to express the supramental truth of things,’ and said ‘You must try to do the Future Painting in the New Light ... Do not try to adopt the technique either of modern art or of old classical art. But always try to express the true inner vision of her soul ... You must have the psychic touch to see and feel the vibrations, the sensations and the essence of the Truth in everything and that Truth is to be expressed in the Future Painting.’ These paintings must be experienced in inner silence.”

The Auroville response

Asked about Auroville’s response to the work of Savitri Bhavan, Shraddhavan answers that, initially, it was negative as people were afraid that teaching Sri Aurobindo’s and The Mother’s vision could become religious. “But this fear has subsided. We have gained a certain acceptance, but not with the whole community. For example, the golden jubilee photo book that Auroville published on the occasion of its 50th anniversary carries not a single photo of Savitri Bhavan, and we were quite hurt to discover this.” Is this a sign of a lack of interest of Aurovilians in the work done at Savitri Bhavan? Or does it show a lack of understanding of the spiritual purpose of Auroville?

“I hope not,” says Shraddhavan. “After all, The Mother made it abundantly clear that the first necessity for being a true Aurovilian is the inner discovery. Most people have no knowledge about who they truly are. They forget that their personality is a mask and that they are not their body, their mind, or their life energies. Mother wrote  ‘At our centre there is a being free, vast and knowing, who awaits our discovery and who ought to become the active centre of our being and our life in Auroville.’ Sri Aurobindo explained it in Savitri:

This bodily appearance is not all

The form deceives, the person is a mask;

Hid deep in man celestial powers can dwell.

His fragile ship conveys through the sea of  years

An incognito of the Imperishable.

A spirit that is a flame of God abides,

A fiery portion of the Wonderful,

Artist of his own beauty and delight,

Immortal in our mortal poverty.

This sculptor of the forms of the Infinite,

This screened unrecognised Inhabitant,

Initiate of his own veiled mysteries,

Hides in a small dumb seed his cosmic thought.

In the mute strength of the occult Idea,

Determining predestined shape and act, 

Passenger from life to life, from scale to scale,

Changing his imaged self from form to form,

He regards the icon growing by his gaze

And in the worm foresees the coming god.

“And what better help to make that inner discovery than studying Their works? Mother said that for the opening of the psychic, it is good to read one or two pages of Savitri each day and added: Savitri alone is sufficient to make you climb to the highest peaks. If truly one knows how to meditate on Savitri, one will receive all the help one needs....’.

For more information on Savitri Bhavan, its architecture and its publications and activities, visit http://savitribhavan.org/