Earth, Love and Doom: Mythico-Symbolic Dimensions of Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri

Sri Aurobindo, the modern seer poet, enjoys a popular esteem that extends beyond academic and literary circle. His revolutionary worldwide culminating in supermind foregrounds a theoretical concept that evinces a breakthrough in the history of human thought. His spiritual epic, Savitri, the lonely epic in Indian English Literature, is a mythicised romance. In his prophetic vision and poetic scheme the all-encompassing love of the Divine Mother troped as Savitri puts an end to Earth’s Doom – the powers of Darkness, such as, evil, man’s imperfection, suffering and death. He recasts the character of Aswapathy as the forerunner of human beings to have fathomed the deepest mysteries of all the planes of consciousness. He gives to myth and legends a new dimension to focus on the theme of love, conquest of death, achievement of superhuman consciousness, self-transcendence and man’s quest for immortality. Within the mythic contexture of Savitri the poet interweaves multi-cultural values, symbolic and allegorical allusions, mystical experience, a sort of soul-seeing, to interpret profound spiritual experience.