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The Mother on Corrections in Savitri
An interview with Amal Kiran on 8 June 1999
According to your book Our Light and Delight [p. 23], the Mother once told you, "I won’t allow you to change even a comma in Savitri." Is this true? AMAL: Yes, but she meant I could not change anything according to my own ideas. After that I made it clear to her that corrections would be only according to Sri Aurobindo’s latest version. Some words had been misread and I had suggested what might be the right reading. But we would not dare to change anything on our own. I told her this. And Mother quite understood the situation. "That’s a different matter," she said. So she approved of my making my suggestions, and many of them were found to be correct when the manuscripts were checked.
Have you written about this anywhere? AMAL: Part of it is there in Our Light and Delight. To any-one who reads it carefully, the Mother’s attitude towards the correction of copying mistakes and such things should be clear enough. But most of the conversation recorded there [Our Light and Delight, pp. 23-25] is not about such corrections at all. It is about a statement I wanted to include in the Publisher’s Note. I wanted to say that certain passages in Parts II and III had not received Sri Aurobindo’s final revision. The Mother’s strong reaction to this has been quoted as if it showed that she was against correcting copying mistakes or typographical errors in Savitri. But she never objected to corrections of that kind. Page-5 Naturally she wanted Sri Aurobindo’s own words to be printed in Savitri, not a version with words accidentally substituted by others. Later, the Mother even accepted the substance of what I had wanted to write in the Publisher’s Note. She agreed to have it included in the Note before the letters at the end of the 1954 edition. It was only something in my attitude that had provoked her reaction. This was her way of working. It brought about a great change in me. ————————
Extracts from Our Light and Delight by Amal Kiran
. .. when the second volume of the first edition of Savitri was under preparation, a sadhak had stressed to the Mother the danger of sending the proofs to me. The Mother seems even to have passed an order against sending them. But Prithwisingh and Nirod made urgent representations to her, saying that it would be a great mistake not to let me see the proofs, for I had made very appropriate suggestions in the past, which had been found correct when the typed copy had been compared with the original manuscript. So the Mother cancelled her order but left, of course, the final decision in the hands of Nolini and Nirod. [p.23]
"Mother," I said, "I am not wanting you to sanction the changing of commas and such things. All I want is that in some sort of Publisher’s Note we should say that certain passages in Parts II and III did not receive final revision: otherwise critics will think that they are what Sri Aurobindo intended them finally to be." [p.24]
Some time afterwards, when I was putting together the letters which Sri Aurobindo had written to me on Savitri to serve as a supplement in the last part of the volume, I spoke to the Mother of an introductory note to them. She consented to listen to what I had a mind to write. In that note most of the points which I had previously put to her but which she had rejected came in
Page-6 again, amidst some other matters. She approved of all of them unconditionally. And when I proposed that this note might go as a footnote in small print she expressed her wish that it should go as a real introduction in its own right, [p. 27]
I have related elsewhere some other incidents connected with my editorial work on Savitri. I may here mention the grand finale, as it were. After the last pages had been printed, the Mother calmly announced to me: "The Press is very displeased with you." I answered: "I know it, Mother, and I am sorry I have troubled the Press. But are you displeased with my work?" She gave a faint smile and said: "No." [p. 212]
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