The Story of Savitri and Yama

At a Glance

• Central figures: Savitri, princess of Madra and wife of extraordinary devotion; Satyavan, a prince living in forest exile; and Yama, the god of death.
• Setting: The kingdom of Madra and the forests of exile; drawn from the Mahabharata, the story of Savitri appears in the Vana Parva, the book of the forest.
• The turn: When Yama comes to claim Satyavan’s soul, Savitri follows him into the realm of the dead and refuses to turn back, engaging Yama in a negotiation of boons.
• The outcome: Savitri’s third boon - children with Satyavan - forces Yama to recognize that he must restore Satyavan’s life; Satyavan is revived, and Dyumatsena’s sight and kingdom are also returned.
• The legacy: Savitri became the lasting image of wifely devotion and moral courage in the Indian tradition, her name still invoked as the measure of a faithful wife.

Narada spoke plainly at the court of King Ashwapati. Satyavan was everything Savitri said he was - virtuous, strong, worthy of a princess. But Satyavan would be dead in a year. The sage had seen it. He did not soften the prediction. Savitri had heard it and had not flinched. She would marry him anyway.

Her father gave his blessing. They went to live in the forest, where Satyavan’s father Dyumatsena - a blind king stripped of his throne - kept a modest ashram. Savitri set aside the ornaments of a princess and put on bark cloth and simple dress, and she served her husband and her husband’s parents every day with the same care she had been raised to give a kingdom.

Savitri’s Birth and the Choice of Satyavan

Savitri had not been born easily. Her father had prayed for a child long before she appeared, and she came into the world as the answer to an act of devotion - which perhaps explains something about the woman she became. She grew up with a quality in her that kept suitors away: not coldness, but an intensity that made men hesitate. When Ashwapati finally grew worried and sent her out to find a husband herself, she traveled and looked, and she found Satyavan in a forest.

He was a prince with nothing left but his character. He lived with his blind father and cared for him without complaint. He chopped wood. He knew the forest. He was kind without weakness and honest without cruelty. Savitri looked at him and made up her mind.

She knew what Narada had said when she went back to her father’s court. She told her father she had chosen. Narada told her the prophecy again. She answered that she did not choose a man for the length of his life - she had chosen Satyavan, and she would not choose again. Ashwapati, moved, accepted her decision.

The Year in the Forest

They lived together in the ashram. Savitri performed her duties and more: she looked after Dyumatsena, gathered food, tended the fires. She prayed. She fasted at intervals, preparing herself without telling Satyavan what she was preparing for.

She counted the days. As the year closed in, she intensified her austerities. Three days before the prophecy’s date, she stopped sleeping and ate nothing, standing in sustained prayer. Satyavan watched her with puzzlement and concern. She would not explain beyond what was necessary.

On the morning of the day itself, she asked to go with him into the forest. He was going to cut wood. He thought it an odd request but did not refuse her. They walked out together through the trees.

Satyavan Falls

Midway through the morning, Satyavan set down his axe and pressed a hand to his head. He said he felt strange, that a pain was spreading through him. He sat, then lay down, resting his head in Savitri’s lap, and his breathing slowed. She held him and looked up.

Yama came. He arrived in his proper form - dark-bodied, carrying his noose, the size of a god. His yamadutas, his attendants, were not with him; he had come himself for this particular soul, which says something about Satyavan’s quality. He drew the soul out of the body - something small and thumb-sized, as the texts describe it - and turned south, toward his realm.

Savitri stood up and followed him.

Following Yama

Yama told her to stop. She kept walking. He told her that no living person could enter his kingdom, that she had performed the rites of mourning already by her years of prayer, that her duty now was to return, perform the funeral, and grieve. She walked beside him and spoke.

She praised him. Not flattery - she addressed him as what he was: the upholder of dharma, the one power in the cosmos that does not bend or play favorites, the god who more than any other holds the order of the world in place. She said she had found, walking beside him, a company worth following. Yama was moved. He told her to ask for anything except Satyavan’s life.

She asked that Dyumatsena - her father-in-law, the blind deposed king sitting back at the ashram - regain his sight and his physical strength. Yama granted it without hesitation and told her again to go home.

She kept walking.

The Three Boons

For her second boon, Savitri asked that Dyumatsena’s kingdom be restored to him - that he and his court return from exile and take back what had been taken. Yama found himself granting this too, and said so. He walked on. She stayed beside him.

She spoke again of dharma, of what it means to live rightly, of the bond between those who walk toward goodness. Yama was listening. He told her to ask for her third boon - anything, still, except Satyavan’s life.

Savitri asked for children. Specifically, she asked for sons - many of them - born of her own body, from her union with Satyavan.

Yama agreed.

The moment the word left him, he understood what had happened. A wife who had taken a vow of fidelity, born of an age when such vows were absolute, could have sons only with her husband. He had made it impossible to keep Satyavan’s soul. There was no way to honor the boon without returning what he had taken.

He stopped walking. He turned and looked at her.

Yama’s Decision

He said she had won. Not bested him through trickery exactly - he acknowledged it as a different kind of victory, rooted in a consistency of character that had held all the way from that day at her father’s court when she heard the prophecy and refused to step back. He released Satyavan’s soul.

She ran. Back through the forest, to the tree where Satyavan’s body lay. His eyes opened. He sat up. He said he had slept a long time and that they should start for home before the light failed.

They returned to the ashram. Dyumatsena was already standing outside in the last of the afternoon light, his hand shading his eyes - eyes that had been blind all the years of Satyavan’s life. The kingdom, in the days that followed, came back too, one boon working itself out alongside the other, the whole shape of the curse undone by one woman who had followed a god south and refused to be left behind.