“Savitr(i)” is the main work of Sri Aurobindo, a prominent public figure of India, a great spiritual pioneer, a thinker, and a vision-poet.
Sri Aurobindo worked on the poem “Savitr(i)” for several decades, continuing to refine it up until the last days of his life.
The poem is based on an ancient legend narrated in the Indian epic Mahabharata about the devoted wife, Princess Savitri, who, through the power of her love and righteousness, defeats death and brings her husband, Prince Satyavan, back to life.
Sri Aurobindo reveals the symbolic essence of the characters and the plot of the ancient legend, using it to express his own spiritual insights and achievements.
In creating his epic, Sri Aurobindo set the task of expressing in words the highest levels of consciousness accessible to a human being, so as to help all spiritual seekers connect with those levels and rise to them. The result was a grand epic poem of about 24,000 lines— the fullest and most perfect expression of Sri Aurobindo’s unique synthetic worldview and spiritual experience, as well as the largest poetic work in English.