methods of contemporary linguistics.”9 These approaches tell us how text and its word system become important for those critics who have their focus on the text. Text then becomes a subject of study for linguistic system, cultural structures or other co-existing structures in it.
Let us see what Sri Aurobindo has to say about language and its importance:
For the reason why sound came to express fixed ideas lies not in any natural and inherent equivalence between the sound and its intellectual sense, for there is none — intellectually any sound might express any sense, if men were agreed on a conventional equivalence between them; it started from an indefinable quality or property in the sound to raise certain vibrations in the life-soul of the human creature, in his sensational; his emotional, his crude mental being. An example may indicate more clearly what I mean. The word wolf, the origin of which is no longer present to our minds, denotes to our intelligence a certain living object and that is all, the rest, we have to do for ourselves: the Sanskrit word vrka, “tearer”, came in the end to do the same thing, but originally it expressed the sensational relation between the wolf and man which most affected the man’s life, and it did so by a certain quality in the sound which readily associated it with the sensation of tearing. This must have given early language powerful life, a concrete vigour, in one direction a natural poetic force which it has lost, however greatly it has gained in precision, clarity, utility.10
Thus we infer that language at some point in time had its own life and vitality. A word or an utterance has power. Sri Aurobindo tells us how the power of the word and that of the inspired word acts upon the author and the reader both.
The word has power, even the ordinary written word has a power. If it is an inspired word it has still more power. What kind of power or power for what depends on the nature of the inspiration and the theme and the part of the being it touches. If it is the Word of the great Scriptures, Veda, Upanishads, Gita, it may well have the power to awaken a spiritual and uplifting impulse, even certain kinds of realisations …
The Vedic poets regarded their poetry as Mantras, they were the vehicles of realisation for other ... Anything that carries the Word, the Light in it, spoken or written, can light this fire within, open a sky, as it were, bring the effective vision of which the Word is the body.11
Here comes the importance of mantras, for mantras are the carriers of higher truths. Mantras are created when the inspiration comes from the Overmind level of consciousness. For this indeed the poet has to prepare himself and evolve his consciousness to a level where he can hold, receive and transliterate the word received from above. As clear from the quote above, mantras have great power which can help one in spiritual opening. This is how the role of the author or poet as a perfect recipient of the inspiration from above becomes important. It is not by the biographical detail that we ought to relate text and the author, but by the consciousness the text embodies. Any creation embodies the consciousness of the creator. This is how the author and the text are related. Sri Aurobindo describes how Vedas and Upanishads embodied the consciousness of the author, although no or very little biographical details are available about the authors of these scriptures:
The hymn was to the Rishi who composed it a means of spiritual progress for himself and for others. It rose out of his soul, it became a power of his mind, it was the vehicle of his self-expression in some important or even critical moment of his life’s inner history.12
