Life, Death, and Deathlessness in Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri

This chapter explores Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy of death and deathlessness through his epic poem Savitri. Aurobindo (1872-1950) was a philosopher, poet, translator, Yogi, guru, and political activist against British colonial rule in India. “An experiment in mystic poetry,” as Aurobindo explained, Savitri (1950-51) is one of the three main works that stand at the center of Aurobindo’s vast corpus. This long poem, almost 50 years in the making, is a “transcreation” of a famous episode from the Mahābhārata. This chapter unpacks the notion of deathlessness, as articulated by Aurobindo, vis-à-vis willfulness-personified by Savitri, his protagonist-as the heart of yogic transformation. Analyzing Savitri (“the supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo’s vision,” as it is depicted by the Mother, Mirra Alfassa, his spiritual collaborator), the chapter engages contemporary theorists, such as Krishnachandra Bhattacharyyya and Daya Krishna. Moreover, the chapter reveals a subtle proximity between photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’s notion of “the decisive moment” and “the decisive moment of yoga,” which the author extracts from Patañjali’s Yogasūtra. These two notions of moment, which transcend time and temporality, intersect in two series of rare photographs of Aurobindo, both from 1950, the former by Cartier-Bresson and the latter-postmortem photographs-by the Ashram photographers. Yoga, photography, and deathlessness are discussed in the final sections of the chapter.