Periodical | Sri Aurobindo, the Literary Artist – October 2026, Renaissance

Release of Renaissance, Vol. VII, Issue 10
Date: October 21, 2026

The October 2026 issue of Renaissance, the online journal edited and curated by Dr. Beloo Mehra, Director, BhāratShakti is now available.

She writes in the Editorial titled “God’s long nights are justified by dawn”:

Any attempt to go deep into the elevating charm and beauty of Sri Aurobindo’s literary writings must begin and end with Savitri, his epic mantric poem. Sri Aurobindo, the Rishi, like a precisely perfect scientist used writing of Savitri, in his own words, as a field of experimentation. A most perfect example of how all life and work can truly be Yoga.

I used Savitri as a means of ascension. I began with it on a certain mental level, each time I could reach a higher level I rewrote from that level. . . In fact, Savitri has not been regarded by me as a poem to be written and finished, but as a field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written from one’s own Yogic consciousness and how that could be made creative.

~ Sri Aurobindo, CWSA, Vol. 27, p. 272

In its deepest sense, Savitri is a record of Sri Aurobindo’s and the Mother’s Yoga, and that is why K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar once wrote that the very act of concentrated reading of the poem becomes a kind of participation in its spiritual action. One such spiritual action that Savitri performs for an aspirant who connects with the Light and Force of its mantric words is that it fills the soul, heart and mind with an unshakeable faith and optimism and hope for a new future that is dawning. It removes the cobwebs of despair and doubt and shines light on all dark corners hiding within.

One of the ways Savitri, the Veda of the Future, does this is by invoking the Divine Dawn who represents the inner awakening of human consciousness, the coming of divine light into the human mind.

The Night is the symbol of the Ignorance or Avidya in which men live just as Light is the symbol of Truth and Knowledge.

Dawn always means an opening of some kind—the coming of something that is not yet fully there.

~ Sri Aurobindo, CWSA 30: 149

In the Veda the coming of the Dawn or Goddess Usha symbolises the Truth won out of the Night of darkness. “She is the light of the Truth and the Felicity pouring on us from the Lord of Wisdom and Bliss” (CWSA 15: 298).

In this issue we briefly take up the theme of Dawn in Sri Aurobindo’s literature and present it in two ways. One is a video rendition of Sri Aurobindo’s Usha Stotra (Hymn to Usha). Written in Bengali in the manner of the Suktas of the Rigveda, Sri Aurobindo composed it in Pondicherry. We use the translation done by Shri Nolini Kanta Gupta for the video.

The other offering is a meditation on the first few lines from Sri Aurobindo’s Ilion which opens with the The Dawn of the Last Day, the day Troy will fall.