In the Hour of God
(A Play by Sri Aurobindo)

Dr. Arshia Sattar

On of the many versions of the story of Savitri and Satyavan is embedded in the Mahabharata, where the non-human operators include karma, dharma, the gods, boons, curses and vidhi (fate). As such, all the tales that surround the central story of internecine warfare display one or more of these operators at work.

In the traditional versions of the Savitri story, Satyavan is fated to die after one blissful year with Savitri. But Savitri follows Yama and begs and pleads and cajoles for her husband to be restored to life, that he be released from Yama’s fatal noose. Ultimately, Savitri tricks Yama into blessing her with a long life and many sons, a blessing that can only bear fruit if her beloved Satyavan is brought back to life. With this act of determination, Savitri joins other challenging women in the great epic Draupadi, Shakuntala and Amba, to name but a few.

“In The Hour of God” is a wonderfully satisfying departure from the sophistry involved in the traditional resolution of Savitri’s tragedy. In this play, Savitri herself is transformed into the divine feminine, the medium for the descent of Aurobindo’s supramental consciousness, the force that will liberate humankind from the fear and the finality of death.

Despite this radical shift in the central metaphor of the story, the play demonstrates a classical structure, falling within the framework determined by Bharata and then so powerfully exemplified by the works of Kalidasa. There is a nayika (heroine) of royal descent who happens upon her nayak (hero) in the forest. The heroine has her sakhi who acts as a go-between for the lovers and shares her friend’s secrets. The vidusaka carries the comedy that is both verbal as well as physical. The benign sage protects the heroine as much as he can from what the powers of the universe have in store for her.

The central events of the play are located in the forest, an Indian textual landscape where anything is possible: love hangs in the air like a fragrance (as does danger), magic abounds, things are not what they seem to be and the divine in all its forms walks with us on earth. It is here that Savitri recognizes her eternal mate in Satyavan, senses the presence of the elusive Tenka and resolves that she will battle Yama, the only inevitability of human life.

While the heroine remains unitary, combining, in Savitri all the attributes of the classical Sanskrit nayika, we find that the nayak, the hero, has actually splintered into three aspects and three male characters – Satyavan the righteous and rightful husband, his shadow, the brooding Tenka and then Tenka’s shadow, the looming Yama. This male triad can be seen as embodying the three gunas of Indian philosophy, sattva, rajas and tamas (best articulated by the Samkhya school but also expounded in the Bhagavad Gita). Satyavan is the light, bright, shining one moving upwards (sattva), Tenka, dynamic, restless and virile is red rajas and of course, Yama is dark, inert, inconscient tamas.

This triad of heroes also works within itself as doubled pairs. Satyavan and Tenka are friends and sparring partners, rivals even, for the love of the same woman. Satyavan is the exiled prince, Tenka his forest shadow, the mirror to his darker side. Tenka has foreknowledge, a sense of the future that Satyavan either lacks or is oblivious to. The doubling between Tenka and Yama manifests all that Tenka holds latent, everything that Tenka suggests by his presence in the forest. Finally, we have the doubling or the reflection of opposites in Yama and Satyavan: the structural and philosophical opposition of sattva and tamas, the ontological opposition between life and death and the narrative opposition between rightful and beloved husband and substituted, desiring lover.

Despite the splintered hero, the play revolves around the single, unified, feminine principle. It is precisely because Savitri provides as unwavering center, a steady axis, that she can be the literal and metaphorical vehicle for the descent of Aurobindo’s divine consciousness as well as symbolize humankind’s potential divinisation. To revert to another classical comparison, Savitri is the dancing prakriti, the elemental earthy feminine that animates an incomplete and unsure purusa, allowing him (reflected here in the male triad) to reach some sort of resolution.