Invocation 08 - Auroville

Savitri, Books Eight and Nine
Talk by Dr. M.V. Nadkarni
at Savitri Bhavan on March 5, 2000
This talk was the concluding session of the Savitri Study Camp held in the Beach
Office Hall of the Sri Aurobindo Society from February 23 onwards. As has now
become customary, the final session of the camp was held under the trees in the
Savitri Bhavan garden - a very joyous meeting of many Savitri lovers. Dr. Nadkarni
gave a summary of the themes studied during the camp, covering Books Eight and
Nine of the epic.
Last year when we met here, we read the concluding part of Book Seven,
Canto Seven. Now it looks to me as if those magic lines have created a
vibration which has brought here many more people than were here last
time. Those magic lines were about the cosmic consciousness which Savitri
attains. And once she attains the cosmic consciousness, as we have seen in
this study camp when we began the study of Book Eight, then begins Savitri's
yoga with death.
I don't call it a confrontation with death. You and I confront death, but
Savitri doesn't. She does the yoga of death. And she undertook this yoga not
for her own sake, but to free us from the hold of death. She does that to
make a spiritual community possible, she did that to make Auroville possible,
and we are very very happy that when we read about Savitri dealing with
Death in Books Eight and Nine, we are once again here in this wonderful
atmosphere of Savitri Bhavan.
There are several peculiarities about Book Eight: one of them is that it is the
shortest book in the poem; another is that it consists of only one canto,
which is not called Canto One: it is called Canto Three for various reasons.
And the most important and interesting thing about it is that this book has
177 lines, of which 108 remain exactly what they were in the very first draft
of Savitri made by Sri Aurobindo in October 1916. The poem as a whole
underwent expansion many, many times. Some cantos were revised and
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