Love is a major theme in Indo - Anglian literature. In the field of Indo - English poetry alone, almost all the major Indo Anglian poets such as Manmohan Ghose, Tagore, Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu, Harindranath Chattopadhyaya and modern poets like Kamala Das and Pritish Nandy have written on love themes. Sri Aurobindo is also interested in the treatment of love and deals with both physical and spiritual love.
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| Aurobindo As A Poet of Love |
Young Aurobindo was the poet of love. He then sang of “passion, power and pulse”. But in Savitri, the romantic and youthful love of the earlier phases in replaced by Divine Love. Amor vincit omnia: Savitri is a narrative of the triumph of love over Time, Destiny and Death. The heroine of this epic is the symbol of immortal love:
“All might and greatness shall join in her;
Beauty shall walk celestial on the earth.
Delight shall sleep in the cloud - net of her hair
And in her body as on his homing tree
Immortal Love shall beat his glorious wings.”
Another major theme in Savitri is love, though pushed in the background and obscured by the poet's philosophical and mystical concerns. It shows the power of love, the grandeur and vastness it imparts to the human soul and also how it enables the human to overcome all obstacles in the way. In this epic, Love conquers death. Savitri's love is not for Satyavan alone, her fight is not for the life of her husband alone, but her personal story has been universalised and her personal trouble and struggle is shown to be but the sign and symbol of the travail of mankind. She is presented in the epic as the eternal feminine, the great World- Mother, her heart full of universal love, She is determined to change the fate of man, and bold and fearless she challenges Death himself:
I am stronger than death and greater than my fate:
My love shall outlast the world, doom falls from me
Helpless against my immorality,
Fate's law may change, but not my spirit's will.
It is not the physical love that she craves for, but the spiritual love. Her discovery of Satyavan is the discovery of Truth. She tells her father:
I have discovered my glad reality
Beyond my body in another being:
I have found the deep unchanging soul of love............
My spirit has glimpsed the glory for which it came.
Savitri struggled to make Satyavan- and all mankind - eternal, and her struggle has made her immortal. Can there ever be a greater lover poet than Sri Aurobindo who has written lines like the following:
Love must not cease to live upon earth,
For love is the bright link, ‘twixt earth and heaven
Love is the far Transcendent's angel here,
Love is man's lien on the Absolute.
When Savitri has finally gained her soul's desire, and her husband has been restored to life, a bewildered sage asked her to explain the miracle. To this she replies:
Awakened to the meaning of my heart
That to feel love and oneness is to live
And this the magic of our golden change
Is all the trust I know or seek, or say.
In Songs of Myritilla, we have a few poems of love such as “Night by the Sea.” “A Thing Seen”, “The Lover's Complaint” and “Love in Sorrow”, In them the poet appears favouring music and romance and is overpowered by grief, loneliness and dejection. “O Coil”, expresses a lover's pain in separation. In “Night by the Sea”, the poet finds love as an escape from the gloomy thoughts of death. A host of other poems in Songs of Myrtilla (1995) and More Poems deal with the moods of complaint, separation, agony, sorrow and yearning.
Love is a key motif in Urvasie, Love and Death and Chitrangada. They are all blank verse romances on love - episodes. In them, as Dr. Iyengar notes, “indomitable love is presented as beating against the gates of mortality and gaining a victory over death in one or another way.” Urvasie and Love and Death are sublime sages of love and its triumphs and tribulations.” Both the narratives are quarried from the ranges of deathless Romance, Pururavas and Ruru are great lovers. And Urvasie and Priyumvada are truly worthy of their love”. (Iyengar). The focus in these poems has changed towards the Divine.
In Urvasie, King Pururavas falls in love with a fairy named Urvasie, and later on is separated from his beloved nymph. A love-lorn king roams here and there through Indraloka and the earth in search of her, and the poet gets opportunity to depict the various moods of love - fancy at first sight, longing, union, separation, desertion, adulation, love-lorn wandering, agony and ecstasy. The poem is rich in sensuousness, voluptuousness and catchy - phrases. Just mark a few samples:
1. And she received him in her eyes, as earth
Received the rain.
2. He moved, he came towards her. She, a leaf
Before a gust among the nearing trees,
Cowered.......
…..All her wonderful hair
Loosened and the wind seized and bore it streaming
Over the shoulder of Pururavas
And on his cheek a softness. She o'erborne,
Panting, with inarticulate murmurs lay,
Like a slim tree half seen through driving hail,
Her naked arms clasping his neck, her cheek
And golden throat averted, and wide trouble
In her large eyes bewildered with their bliss
Amid her wind - blown hair their face met.
3. So slung they as two shipwrecked in a surge
Then strong Pururavas, with godlike eyes
Mastering hers, cried ‘remulous: O beloved,
O misery of thy rich and happy voice.
One word, one word to tell me that thou lovest,
And Urvasie, all broken on his bosom,
Her godhead in his passion lost, moaned out
From her imprisoned breasts, ‘My lord, my love’!
Love and Death is another blank verse romance which has love as its key motif and shows the triumph of love over death. While Pururavas makes a passage to Indra's kingdom and attains an immortal status to be for ever united with Urvasie, Ruru (in Love and Death) invades Patala (Hades) to reclaim dead Priyumvada and willingly barters away half his own life to live the other half with his restored wife. In this poem we have the moving lines:
O my sweet flower,
Art thou too whelmed in this fierce wailing flood?
Ah no! But I will haste and deeply plunge
Into its hopeless pools and either bring
Thy old warm beauty back beneath the stars,
Or find thee out and clasp thy tortured bosom
And kiss thy sweet wrung lips and hush thy cries.
Love shall draw half thy pain into my limbs:
Then we shall triumph glad of agony
“Immortal Love”, Chitrangada and The Tale of Nala also treat love, but here the treatment of love is not captivating as in Urvasie and Love and Death. Chitrangada describes the love relations between Chitrangada, the princess of Manipur- and Arjoon, the heroic Pandava. The Tale of Nala deals with the story of love between Nala, Nishadhas’ king and an apsara who tells Nala:
Because thou art bright and beautiful and bold,
So have I come to thee and thou hast seized
Whom if thou had set free, the joy were lost,
So in thy mind from some celestial space
A name and face have come, yet are on earth,
Which if thou had not held with yearning’s stays,
The mortal life would have been given in vain.
Forced by thy musing in the sapphire noon
Out of the mountain's breast to thee I flew.