“Sricharan Singh” has repeated that old old lie about the Ashram lawyer
saying at the Krishnanagore court that the Mother did not understand Savitri!
The lawyer said nothing of that kind. He has also given a statement challenging
this allegation against him. Still the drum-beaters of that lie do not stop.
Years ago when two small groups of people distributed leaflets against me on
this issue, I was surprised that while these people believed somebody from far
who transmitted that blatant lie as a gift for them, they did not have the
patience or a bit of respect for truth to ask me about it though I was amidst
them, an inmate of the Ashram like them. They even sent a lawyer’s notice to
the Trust to expel me from the Ashram on this account.
By and by it became clear to me that all they wanted was to create an
atmosphere of hatred against me. But what for? It remains inexplicable to him.
I was for a while representing the Ashram in the courts where several cases
were filed against the Trust because it brought out a revised version of the
Master’s epic, Savitri. It was
‘revised’ in the sense that errors (typographical, punctuation, omission, words
not properly deciphered in corrected proofs, etc) were removed through years of
study and scrutiny. When, as a purely academic exercise a booklet was published
by the Ashram Archives listing the changes, it suddenly struck a gentleman to
drag the Trust to the court alleging that it had tampered with Sri Aurobindo’s
writing. (What may sound incredible to many, he even discovered an unknown
nephew of Sri Aurobindo and made him go to court and suggest by insinuation
that he was the copyright-owner of all the works of Sri Aurobindo, not the
Ashram. By implication, all the earnings from the works of the Master over the
past years were his!)
I was convinced that the
Revised Edition of the epic is the most authentic one. Once again it is a
matter of common sense that the Ashram had no reason to alter a single word of
Sri Aurobindo. On the other hand it had a responsibility to see that error-free
versions of His works were available before the copyright period expired. That
is what Ashram did despite the illogical and superfluous commotion made by some
people. (Manoj Das)
Things always
seem inexplicable to Manoj Das whenever he courts a controversy, as if the
people who are against him are inexplicably bad and he himself is inexplicably
good! The Savitri revision
controversy has rocked the Ashram for a decade or two, and even now there are
senior scholars of the Ashram who are not satisfied at all with the way it has
been handled by the Trustees. R.Y. Deshpande was part of the team that
finalised the Savitri revisions and
he says that even Nirodbaran (on whom the final decisions depended) expressed
his unhappiness over some of the revisions. Deshpande himself was extremely
unhappy over some of the revisions suggested by the Archives editors. The late
Jugal Kishore Mukherji, former head of the Higher Course of the Ashram School,
wrote a fifty page letter to Amal Kiran on these revisions and some of his
suggestions were accepted by Amal Kiran! Why was Jugal Kishore Mukherji disgusted
with the whole affair? If after all this discontentment, Manoj Das still finds things
inexplicable, then I will simply call him a hypocrite! Even here, I will throw
him a challenge which R.Y. Deshpande has long been insisting upon: Make all the
Savitri manuscripts public. Put them
up on the Net for all to see and judge for themselves the legitimacy of the
revisions of the Archives editors. Moreover, after the Peter Heehs controversy,
who is going to trust the Archives editors?
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