Date: March 3, 2025
Venue: Sharanam, Sri Aurobindo Society
Pondicherry Poets and The Brown Critique, the founders-organisers of Pondicherry/Auroville Poetry Festival, invited Dr. Beloo Mehra, Director, BhāratShakti, to deliver a talk for the eighth edition of the Poetry Festival, which was held from 1 to 3 March 2025.
Dr. Mehra’s talk titled ‘Art and Poetry with Insights from Sri Aurobindo’ was scheduled for the morning of March 3, at Sharanam campus of Sri Aurobindo Society where the poets and other guests participating at the festival were staying. Dr. Mehra opened her talk that we all know of Sri Aurobindo as the poet and politician – the fiery revolutionary and the mahayogi, the critic and the interpreter, translator and linguist, the Rishi and the Avatar of the Future. But the best way to speak of Sri Aurobindo is through his lines from Savitri where he writes:
His was a spirit that stooped from larger spheres
Into our province of ephemeral sight,
A colonist from immortality.
….
His soul lived as eternity’s delegate,
His mind was like a fire assailing heaven,
His will a hunter in the trails of light.
An ocean impulse lifted every breath;
Each action left the footprints of a god,
Each moment was a beat of puissant wings.
Dr. Mehra informed the group that since September 2024, through her work at Renaissance journal and other programmes at BhāratShakti she has been exploring a vast topic “The Spirit and Forms of Indian Art”. And during the months of November and December 2024, the focus of her inquiry was on two related topics – The Way of the Indian Artist and Art as Yoga. In connection with that she also organised a webinar on the theme – Sri Aurobindo, the Seer-poet. This gave her an opportunity to spend some concentrated time contemplating on Sri Aurobindo’s poetic work, his yogic artistry if you will, and deepen her understanding of how in India all artistic and creative pursuit, indeed all knowledge traditions themselves, are essentially and intimately connected with the discipline of yoga – a going within and a seeing within.
Ever since the Veda, we have had an ideal of “the sacred poet, a mind visited by some highest light and its forms of idea and word, a seer and hearer of the Truth, kavayaḥ satyaśrutaḥ.”, writes Sri Aurobindo. A poet-seer not only reveals to man his present or reinterprets for him his past, but can also point him to his future and in all three reveals to him the face of the Eternal.
Dr. Mehra highlighted following words of Sri Aurobindo:
“Poetry, like the kindred arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, appeals to the spirit of man through significant images, and it makes no essential difference that in this case the image is mental and verbal and not material. The essential power of the poetic word is to make us see, not to make us think or feel; thought and feeling must arise out of the sight or be included in it, but sight is the primary consequence and power of poetic speech. For the poet has to make us live in the soul and in the inner mind and heart what is ordinarily lived in the outer mind and the senses, and for that he must first make us see by the soul, in its light and with its deeper vision, what we ordinarily see in a more limited and halting fashion by the senses and the intelligence.” (Sri Aurobindo, CWSA 26: 25-26)
She then went on to elaborate on the essential point about the poetic vision through some samples of Sri Aurobindo’s own poetry. She read out Divine Sight, Divine Hearing, Self and some lines from Reflections of Srinath Paul, Raj Bahadoor, on the Present Discontents (The Address of a Perspiring Chairman Rendered Faithfully into the Ordinary English Vernacular) to illustrate the varied ways in which the ‘seeing’ by the seer-poet has been expressed regardless of the content of the poem.
Dr. Mehra also spoke briefly on how Sri Aurobindo speaks of Beauty in two aspects – Essential Beauty and the Form that it takes. He explains that a rasika who seeks Beauty is essentially seeking the Eternal Beauty, but through the form. When contemplating on a work of art, the question to reflect upon is whether the artist or the poet been able to transcribe the eternal beauty in the specific form? On that depends the rasik’s reception. Also, what is also important to explore is how sensitive is the rasik himself or herself? Is he or she seeking beauty or merely a vital pleasure?
She also highlighted Sri Aurobindo’s seminal essay ‘National Value of Art’ to bring to light that in the mahayogi’s vision of humanity’s future, art, poetry, and a healthy aesthetic appreciation play an important role in the integral human development.