Today ,the conjunction of two Tamil months masi and Panguni is being celebrated as 'Kaaradayaan Nonbu'in tamilnady by certain commnities.On the day, women pray for the longevity of husbands.Is siad that Savitri got back the life of her husband on this auspicious hour. The function is more known by the neivedyam than by the savitri vratam.Savitri is stated to have made tikkas or adais out of clay, spread some seeds here and there and kept it on hay and placed it in a pot of boiling water and just covered it.She added some honey to taste and gave it to Yama.The muddy tikka turned out to be a tasty dish - adai ,thanks to the sincerity and devotion of Savitri. Even today while steaming Kara Adai people used to place hay or grass inside the pressure cooker.Earlier, my mother said that they were preparing only sweet adai and later to satiate the taste buds they started preparing savoury adai also . When I think of Savitri ,more than the karadayan nonbu, my mind goes to the epic poem 'savitri' written by Aurobindo. Savitri is the masterpiece of Sri Aurobindo published in two parts in 1950 and 1951. He revised the book eighteen times before publishing it and it took nearly fifty years for completion. "The tale of Sathyavan 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 or 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." We have to read and re read even the introduction many times to understand this. Savitri cannot be treated as an ordinary wife longing to have the company of her husband to beget children and retain her sumangali padvi. Aurobindo's Savitri depicts not the mere mental agony of a wife losing her husband, but is a beautiful admixture of mysticism,occultism, philosophy and the history of evolution, of the gods and nature as a whole. It recounts the saga of human victory over ignorance and conquest of death. An interesting perspective was shared at Madras Management Associations's Women's Day Convention on March 8 where we were told that Savithri is the Positivity within us, Yama is the Negativity and Satyavan is the spark of Divinity embedded within everyone. It is that divinity that helps positivity to triumph over negativity. Is that why our wise ancestors said that : 'Kanavane Kann Kanda Deivam'?!( Husband is God to wife) The empowered women will not agree to this concept though they might husbands to live long. This story is a big blow to astrologers who predicted the horoscope of satyavan. However Bhaskaracharya's daughter Leelavathi's husband, who was predicted to die a day after marriage, met with his death, not withstanding Bhaskaracharya,the renouned mathematician and astrologer conducted the marriage on an auspicious day noted by him. It was savitri's destiny that her husband should live long and it was Lilavathi's fate that she attained widowhood, the day after marriage. Jayasala 42
