Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 3

Letter ID: 826

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

September 1936

O yes Guru, I follow all that. And yet the little you write about the Hindu religion is illuminating.

I append a letter from the savant Professor Buddhadev Bhattacharya. He is quite right about yati: in Bengali we use the word yati as the pause tacit or otherwise of the foot – the foot-principle did not exist in sanskrita aksharvrtta [system of versification in which the number of letters and not the sounds in a line is taken into account] but in later jātichhanda [a class of metres] e.g. Jaydev’s:

lalita la/ bangala/ tā pan/ shīlana komala/ malaya sa/ mire

It is the exact counterpart of any English eight-foot line,

I paused/beside/the ca/bin door/and saw/the King/of Kings/ at play¹

(I am talking here not of stresses but of divisions and pauses) – so the word yati [pause] should be replaced by birati [full stop] or chhed [break] perhaps. But yati in Bengali is accepted already – so I adopted it as a new word that is not current creates new difficulties. In this sense sanskrita aka tot²

yamu/ nā+ a/ matat+ Chyuta/ kelika/ lā+ [The sportive art of Achyuta on the banks of Yamuna]

has a foot division in that there are stresses on every letter marked with +. I was talking of principles and laws of rhythm which the ear is guided by, not of conventions by which they are explained. I feel of yore they explained many things in a roundabout way – in Bengali metres too. But I am spinning out, forgive. I tell you this to stress that this Professor is a savant and has a keen acumen and as such I value his criticism. I will perhaps answer it in an article. It is interesting for me to trace the modern ways of explaining metres and contrasting these with the obsolescent ways of old. Anyhow his praise of Suryamukhi qua poetry – please note. I am very glad of it.

Yes, it is very welcome. But what a change in India. Once religious or spiritual poetry held the first place (Tukaram, Mirabai, Tulsidas, Surdas, the Tamil Alvars and Shaiva poets and a number of others)³ and now spiritual poetry is not poetry, altogether achal [static]! But luckily things are sachal [mobile] and this movability may bring back an older and sounder feeling.

P.S. This evening at 8.30 – the Dewas soiree. Please send me force as I can’t now wriggle out of it – nor want to in fact. Very curious to hear the Maharani. I will be casual to them of course after tonight. I will, that is, give up going to the Pier. That is easily done. Well.

¹ This is a line from AE’s poem “Krisna”.

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² sanskrita totaka: a poetical metre in Sanskrit.

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³ Tukaram: famous poet and saint of Maharashtra. He was a senior contemporary of Shivaji I on whom his poems and teaching had a great influence.

Mirabai (1498-1547) was the daughter of Raja Ratan Singh, married to Bhoj Raj Rana, ruler of Mewar. She became a mendicant in the name of Lord Krishna and went to Vrindavan to her Guru. She left her body at Dwarka. She composed songs which have become very popular and are sung everywhere in India.

Tulsidas (1532-1623): a Hindi poet and saint who lived in Benares. He wrote the famous Ramacharitamanasa which is a Hindi version of the Ramayana. Surdas (1478-1581): A medieval poet and singer who was born blind and whose descriptions of the life of the child Krishna are the highlights of his collection of poetry called the Sursagar.

Alvars: South Indian saints who in the 7th to 10th century wandered from temple to temple singing ecstatic hymns in adoration of Vishnu. The songs of the Alvars rank among the world’s greatest devotional literature. Shaiva poets composed hymns to Shiva.

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