Savitri

The tale is told to Yudhishthira in the forest books, in answer to a question about whether any woman ever equalled Draupadi in devotion, and its whole force lies in the dialogue rather than in any miracle. Savitri prepares by keeping a fast of three nights before the appointed day, and on the day itself she goes with her husband to cut wood and holds him as he dies.

When Yama takes the soul and walks away, she follows. He tells her to turn back; she answers that walking seven steps beside someone makes them a friend, that the good are worth following, and that a wife's duty is where her husband is. He is pleased and grants her a boon, excluding her husband's life. She asks for the restoration of her blind father in law's sight, and follows again. He grants another; she asks for the return of his kingdom, and follows again. She asks for a hundred sons for her own father, and follows again. Each time she pays for the boon with a further short speech on righteousness that Yama cannot fault.

Then she asks for sons by Satyavan. Yama grants it, and the trap is shut: she has not asked for her husband's life, and he cannot give her children by a dead man without giving the man back. He returns the soul, and she carries it back to the body before dawn.

The story is therefore not about a woman softening death. It is about a woman conducting a legal argument in front of the judge of the dead and winning it on the terms he set.

The observance kept in Savitri's name is centred on a tree. Married women fast, gather at a banyan, wind unspun cotton thread around the trunk while circling it, and hear the story recited. The banyan is chosen because Satyavan died beneath one and because the tree, which drops roots from its branches and spreads without dying back, is the standing Indian image of a life that does not end.

The timing splits regionally, which is a useful reminder that a single festival name can sit on two calendars. In Maharashtra, Gujarat and parts of the south the observance falls on the full moon of the month Jyeshtha and is called Vat Purnima. In much of the north and east it is kept a fortnight earlier, on the new moon of the same month, as Vat Savitri Amavasya. The difference follows the two conventions for where a lunar month begins, and both communities are keeping the same day by their own reckoning.

The story has also had a substantial modern life. Sri Aurobindo worked for decades on a long blank verse poem, Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, published in full in 1951, which takes the episode as the frame for an account of consciousness descending into death and returning. It runs to some twenty four thousand lines and is the longest poem written in English by an Indian author. That a short forest tale about a wife who out argued Yama could carry that weight says something about how much the original leaves unexplained.