Glimpses of Auroville History

Beginnings

When he was young, Alain always thought he would be a priest. However, after some years of scholastic training and preparing for the priesthood, he began to feel unwell and found it difficult to concentrate. An old doctor told him he thought he was temperamentally unsuited to be a priest. “Immediately I felt he was right,” remembers Alain. However, his interest in spirituality remained. Then he met Catherine, who later took the name Supriya. “She didn’t know about Mother but she kept telling me, ‘ I know that in the world right now there is a person who represents the Truth, and I think that person is in India’.”

A little later, they met someone who had visited the Ashram in Pondicherry, and who talked about The Mother. “As soon as Supriya heard this she said, ‘This is it. I am going.’

Supriya began sending Alain aerogrammes from India, telling him he must come. She felt Alain would like Auroville. He arrived for a short visit in late July, 1972.

“At one point, we went to see The Mother. At first glance, she was an old lady, but I can still remember those eyes, so remarkable, looking at me as if to say, ‘So you think I am old?’ Then She gave me quite a big tap on the head.”

Alain was accepted for a probationary year in Auroville, and went back to France to settle some things. Soon afterwards, he was walking in Paris on a beautiful August day and wondered why he was planning to leave all this behind. ”Then I felt as if I was hearing a voice, ‘Yes, it is decided, you are going there,’ and all my doubts and hesitations disappeared and never returned.”

On his return in 1973, Roger Anger, the architect The Mother had appointed to design Auroville, told Alain he wanted him to “help reorganize Auroville”. The first big meeting of Aurovilians took place in the Amphitheatre in September, 1973. One of the topics was a new organizational proposal. “At one point, Prem Malik asked if they could discuss this proposal which had been prepared by Alain Bernard. And then I heard a rather acid voice, that of Alain Grandcolas I was later told, asking, ‘But WHO is Alain Bernard’!”

The proposal was not taken up, but the main message that emerged from that meeting was that henceforth the Aurovilians would have to look after themselves as now there was no money to support the work.

Early economic experiments

It was the beginning of the financial problems that would beset the community during the 1970s. Alain was in the very thick of it. He remembers, for example, Jocelyn suggesting the idea of a common fund to which people could contribute to pay for various services, like their food etc. This was the Pour Tous Fund that started on 1st January, 1976, and which, initially, Alain and Yusuf helped manage.

At that time, the relationship with the Sri Aurobindo Society (SAS) was deteriorating, but Alain remembers that the Chairman, Navajata, was conciliatory at first and agreed to pay maintenance money for Aurovilians into the new Fund. “But this never happened and soon we heard he wanted to crush the Pour Tous Fund.”

But the Fund survived because quite a few Aurovilians and the Auroville centres abroad and friends donated money to support the Aurovilians in their struggle with the Society. “We became financially independent of the Society. So it was a grace that Navajata forced us to take this step.” Later, the Fund began running a deficit because they were trying to cover everybody’s requests, and this was not sustainable. It was succeeded by the Envelopes system.

“This was Paul Pinton’s suggestion. He said we should do what the Mother did in the Ashram. She had envelopes for different activities and people would contribute to them. ‘So we open the envelopes and money will come,’ said Paul. I thought to myself, I hope it will be as easy as that!”

In fact, this system ran quite successfully from 1978 to 1985. Every week a group, which often included Alain, would meet to allocate the available funds. “The spirit of these meetings was good, but they were very lean years. We were making coffee out of kumbu, pies out of old bread, and ice cream out of soya milk. I remember an Aurovilian coming into the Pour Tous stall and shouting, ‘Cluster beans, nothing but cluster beans, we are not animals!’”

The conflict with the Society

From 1976, the Aurovilians were involved in a continuous guerrilla warfare with the Society, which was attempting to assert its control over Auroville. The ‘Pour Tous meetings’, which began as weekly meetings in the small Pour Tous building to discuss the Auroville economy, became the main tool for community decision-making during this period.

In 1979, Alain met Kireet Joshi for the first time. Kireet had been the Registrar of the Ashram Centre of Education, and then Indira Gandhi called him to Delhi to take up an important post in the Education Ministry. But Kireet continued to be deeply connected with Auroville, and was instrumental in assisting it at critical moments in its history.

The first such moment was in late 1980 when Indira Gandhi’s government wished to pass the Auroville (Emergency Provisions) Act. This Act would temporarily take away from the Society the management of Auroville. Kireet’s first key intervention was, at Indira Gandhi’s request, to help get the Ordinance, and later the Act, passed, by obtaining the lifting of court injunctions against the proposed Ordinance brought by the SAS.

Immediately the Society appealed again on the basis that Auroville was a religious institution and therefore the Government was not authorised to take action in such cases. The case went to the Supreme Court. The Society had a very good lawyer who made a devastating presentation of their case; the government lawyer was not nearly as effective.

Alain recalls Kireet telling him that one evening during the case, Kireet addressed Mother. He said things were not going well and that he felt something decisive should be said about the issue of the Integral Yoga and religion, but he didn’t know what. “During the night he had a dream where he had a parchment on which was written some words, and they were so clear that in the morning he wrote them down. Then he went to the government lawyer and gave him this note. He told him that at one point in the proceedings he wanted him to say exactly what was written in the note. When he did so, Kireet saw the Chief Justice say, ‘That’s it’, and from that moment the case turned in Auroville’s favour.”

For many Aurovilians, the Act came out of the blue, almost like a miracle, but Alain had had a premonition some years earlier that the power of the Society over Auroville could be broken.

“I had a dream that we, the Aurovilians, were in a kind of forest or jungle. There was a sense of menace, and at one moment, something like a flying fortress appeared and it seemed it was going to flatten everything. Then one of us had a tiny weapon and fired it. And, suddenly, this enormous machine reared up, then started to disintegrate. It was as if a drop of something else, more true, had the power to destroy something that seemed extremely powerful.”

Fighting among ourselves

In many respects, the Auroville Act provided a breathing space for Auroville in its conflict with the Society. But, as Alain puts it, the 1980s were a strange period. The late 1970s had been characterised by the struggle with the Society, led by a core group that was predominantly French and centred in Aspiration community.

“Many of them had come with the second caravan in 1974 and they imported a sense of French radicalism which, I feel, was very instrumental and useful to launch the ‘revolution’ against the SAS. However, this seed of radicalism exploded in the 1980s when we no longer had a common enemy because we began to fight among ourselves. There was the Neutral issue [the ‘Neutrals’ were those Aurovilians who did not back the attempt of the dominant Auroville group to separate Auroville from the Society eds.] and some of the radicals were quite horrible to the people in this group. And then The Agenda became a very big thing. At one point a message came, at the time some said from Sujata, Satprem’s companion, that Aurovilians should be asked if they agreed that Mother’s Agenda is at the core of Auroville. Whoever could not agree should not be in Auroville.”

Alain was horrified by this. In fact, he and Christine had come to be looked upon somewhat askance because, in 1976, they had moved out of Aspiration into a house in Auromodèle. “I remember one of the radicals telling others not to speak to me because I was no longer ‘clear enough’!”

In 1985 when Luc Venet, a then close associate of Satprem, sent a letter saying that Auroville was a lost cause and may disappear into the dust of history, many in the French group took it very much to heart. A few years later, quite a number of them left.

The ‘father figures’

The key figure in all this was Satprem, Mother’s confidant with whom she had shared her explorations in the physical yoga documented in The Agenda. Although he never lived in Auroville, he was revered by quite a few Aurovilians. They considered that Satprem had been poorly treated by the Ashram which he felt, partly on the basis of some of Mother’s comments, to have become fossilised. He supported the Aurovilians in their struggle with the Society.

Yet Satprem was a complex figure. “Satprem was somebody we had deep reverence for,” says Alain, “but after 2000 we began to hear strange things. Because of this, the way we looked at him took quite a hit. Ultimately, I can only say that for me Satprem is an exceptional being who, because of that exceptionality, could be so close to the Mother; in fact, he was the only one, she said, who could truly understand her. He was a yogi. On the other hand, there are some aspects of his personality which are difficult to understand and don’t seem consistent with his other high qualities. But who are we to pass judgement on such giants as Satprem?”

Alain remembers the time Satprem visited a number of Aurovilians when they had been put in jail in Tindivanam in 1976 for occupying Navajata’s hut in Aspiration. “He came to see us without warning. I had been talking with another Aurovilian when he looked behind me and said, ‘Oh, Satprem!’ We all turned and, suddenly, it was if nothing moved any more: we were all immobile. Without a word, Satprem began to look deeply at each one of us. Then he touched the bars of the jail and said, ‘We are fighting to remove all these things’.

Afterwards, we were all crying....”

Alain believes that Kireet, the other great ‘father figure’ of Auroville in those years, was also very much a yogi. “From morning to evening he was a servant of The Mother: everything he did was for her. He understood that not everybody was like him in this, yet he believed that everything should be done from this standpoint. I think the problems he encountered are partly due to the fact that people are not really like that.”

For example, when Kireet was made Chairman of the Governing Board and International Advisory Council of the Auroville Foundation in 1999, people like Alain were overjoyed. Apart from anything else, Kireet had been the chief architect of the Auroville Foundation Act [see Alain’s account in Auroville Today # 304, November 2014 ]. “I could not dream of a better chairman. Now, I felt, there was a chance that a truer Auroville would come.”

But, like many others in the community, he felt a sense of disappointment by the end of Kireet’s tenure. It was during this time that Roger Anger and many other people in the community felt that the Matrimandir management team needed to be replaced. However, Kireet hesitated to do this, and Roger felt he was not being forceful enough. Finally, the decision was taken out of his hands by the Secretary of the Foundation, who replaced the management. “This was a very painful moment for Kireet. It also cast a shadow over his chairmanship.”

Nevertheless, Alain feels that Kireet has been an extraordinary worker for Auroville and is very grateful to have been closely associated in this work.

Changing perceptions

The 1990s were a difficult period for Alain. For him, it began with a community vote for members of the first Working Committee. Alain was one of the obvious candidates as he had been part of a previous Executive Council. However, when the votes were collated, Alain came last. “There had been a strong lobby against the ‘Kireetistes’, like Frederick, Patricia and myself, and I got the maximum negative votes. I think the idea of introducing negative voting was really nasty and, even today, I think this was the worst example of politics I have seen in Auroville.”

The background to this vote was changing perceptions in the community regarding the Foundation Act, which was passed in 1988. “It had been drafted by Kireet, and he wondered how it would be received in Auroville. I was part of the Task Force that had been in Delhi to assist him and when we returned to Auroville, we did not know what the reaction would be. We were happily surprised by the general response. I think most people had a sense that in a certain kind of way, Auroville was free at last, although some people had strong reservations.”

Among the people who were most unhappy with the Act were the managers of Aurelec, because they did not want the Auroville computer company to be part of the Foundation. “I was a trustee of Aurelec at that time and I said there was no way we could make an exception for them because then the Society would have grounds to challenge the Act. But the Aurelec management was adamant, and managed to convince many others in the community that government involvement in Auroville was a bad thing.”

The negative vote, says Alain, “left an acid taste in my mouth, and I lost trust in the collective.” For many years, Alain had been at the centre of community affairs, but now he withdrew. A few years later, there was another vote to choose people for the next Working Committee, and this time he came top, but he refused to serve. “Since then, I have never been part of a Working Committee because I have never wanted to.”

Alain began collaborating with the Auroville Press and, later, Auroville Papers. “I remember I was very enthusiastic when Serge, who was heading the Press at that time, said we have to start making handmade paper. Our first attempt at handmade paper produced something that looked like a pancake, but by the end of the decade we were in production, and today it is doing well.”

In the meantime, Alain and Christine, his partner, were invited to visit Michel and Nicole in Kotagiri. They were working on The Agenda and other works, as well as taking care of the place. “We went first for three days, later two weeks during which time we met Satprem, and it became obvious they would like us to move there and help with the work. I was quite attracted, but Christine was unsure.”

The Quit Notice

When they returned to Auroville, Alain discovered he had a Quit Notice. “I was told I had to leave India in 15 days. Then started for me the craziest period, which lasted for three years.” The background was a meeting between some Aurovilians and Roger, during which they discussed many things, including the future status of Auroville. When a report of the meeting was published in the News and Notes, the then Secretary of the Foundation took strong objection to the part that he interpreted as saying some people wanted to separate Auroville from India. “He said this was ‘treason’. I felt this was an overreaction and published an open letter to him that was unnecessarily aggressive. As a result, the Secretary sent a damning report to the higher authorities saying that I was a very dangerous person who was trying to carve Auroville out of India.”

It was a very serious charge. Normally, it would result in immediate expulsion with no possibility of return. However, after many efforts it was possible to keep it in abeyance for some time. After three years, however, the local Regional Registration Office (RRO) told him that his request to stay had finally been rejected, and he had to leave India, along with Juanita, another Aurovilian.

“Frederick, Juanita and myself decided to go to Delhi to see what could be done. Through a contact of Kireet, we managed to meet the Home Secretary. He advised me to go to France for some time, but said I would be allowed to return. I felt uneasy, and when I told Kireet about the interview, he said that it could not be left like that. A strong statement had to be made to the Minister, saying there could be no question of Auroville being taken out of India because Mother and Sri Aurobindo wanted Auroville to be at the core of India.

“In between, there was a call from the office of Mr. Advani, the Home Minister, saying he wanted a photograph of Sri Aurobindo. We got it and went to see Advani’s private secretary. We told him we would like to present it to the Home Minister personally. At one point, we were allowed to go in and Advani was standing behind his desk. He made a gesture for us to sit. Then immediately I started to speak. ‘Sir, I know there is a very serious case against me but I sincerely believe it was a misunderstanding. It is alleged we want to take Auroville out of India but this is just not possible because as disciples of Mother and Sri Aurobindo there is no way we could believe this: it is contrary to their teaching’.

“Advani said he would speak to the Home Secretary. In the afternoon Advani’s secretary called a friend who had been helping us very much, and said, ‘Your friends are free birds’. I was elated. In things like this you really feel the protection.”

Alain remembers his subsequent visit to the Pondicherry RRO. “It was very moving. They could have been annoyed that I had managed to remain in India, but everybody was smiling, happy for me. This tells you something about the Indian psyche.”

Educational activities

In 1982, Kireet asked Alain to be the first Director of the Sri Aurobindo International Institute of Educational Research (SAIIER), which Kireet saw both as a channel for government funding of Auroville and a vehicle for promoting Mother’s educational ideas in Auroville. Alain worked for SAIIER till 1992 when he resigned.

In 2000, however, Alain resumed working with Kireet on an even bigger project that he wanted the government to fund, the Centre for International Research in Human Unity (CIRHU). “We established a small group, which worked well together, and we drew up a rather ludicrous plan called CIRHU-SAIIER that would cost 125 crores. When I showed it to Kireet, however, he was very happy with our work. Of course, we didn’t get that money, but it did result in a sizeable upgrading of Auroville’s annual grant from the government.”

Later Alain became involved in village outreach activities. “It started immediately after the tsunami of December 2004. A group formed to help rehabilitate the affected villagers, and I was asked to look after the money, quite a lot of which we received in the form of large cash donations. So, once again, I was dealing with money!

“Then Bhavana asked me to be a Trustee of the Auroville Village Action. I agreed because it was her, but then she played a trick on me, and passed away.”

Alain is also on the present management team of the Sustainable Livelihood Institute [see Auroville Today, no 319, February, 2016]. “Joss and Bhavana had been discussing this project for many years, and more recently Ram Subramaniam became involved. I don’t pretend that I do a lot on the ground. I see my role more as helping Ram, the present SLI Director, for whom I have great respect, in his work and in his interactions with Auroville. Joss is, of course, also a key element in this SLI adventure.

“This seems to be a pattern with me – helping people with greater capabilities in certain fields. I was a bit like the deputy of Kireetbhai because I felt it was something that I had to do. In fact, I have this strong feeling that basically you have to accept what comes to you: I’m deeply convinced that the true way of living would be this deep acceptance of whatever “life” wants you to do. It doesn’t really matter what that is, for this Consciousness is as careful with minute things as it is with the big things.

“The real thing that I regret is that I don’t have enough of this way of being, of accepting what comes to me, because sometimes I feel I have been resisting…

“Sometimes I think people credit me with more than I can actually do but I feel I can provide some kind of ballast: despite everything, people have a certain trust in me. I consider that very precious and I am very careful to maintain it.”