The story of Savitri – a video

For Indians, adults and children alike, the Amar Chitra Katha represents one of the closest connections to their heritage. Like a modern-day Vyasa, Anant Pai, the creator of the series, has evoked and made intimate the legends and accounts that ferry the essential truths of India’s Gnostic civilization across both time and space, bringing them within easy reach of a whole new generation in a new world.

In doing so the series has itself taken it’s place as something “Amar”, eternal in value as much as life-span. The following is a video based on the lavishly illustrated Amar Chitra Katha rendering of the story of Savitri as narrated in the Mahabharata.

The inner significance of the legend has been explained by Sri Aurobindo in the following revelatory words:

“The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in the Mahabharata as a story of conjugal love conquering death. But this legend is, as shown by many features of the human tale, one of the many symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle. Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance; Savitri is the Divine Word, daughter of the Sun, goddess of the supreme Truth who comes down and is born to save; Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse, her human father, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes; Dyumatsena, Lord of the Shining Hosts, father of Satyavan, is the Divine Mind here fallen blind, losing its celestial kingdom of vision, and through that loss its kingdom of glory. Still this is not a mere allegory, the characters are not personified qualities, but incarnations and emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch and they take human bodies in order to help man and show him the way from his mortal state to a divine consciousness and immortal life.”