India and Auroville

During the recent visit of the Governing Board, its Chairman, Dr. Karan Singh inaugurated the Educational and Research Network of Auroville, which connects us to the National Knowledge Network of India [see Auroville Today No.313-14].

It seemed like a big moment. And perhaps it was, because it will certainly increase our ability to interact with academics and researchers across India and beyond. But it would be wrong to see this as the moment when Auroville joined the larger world. After all, Aurovilians have been active in the larger India for the past 35 years or more.

There are many aspects of this outreach. Our environmentalists travel the country to run workshops on tree-planting and organic farming or to create eco-parks like Adyar Poonga in Chennai; our architects design homes and office buildings; our Renewable Energy specialists erect solar systems even in the remotest parts; Auroville artists exhibit in many major cities; the products and services of our commercial units are sold or availed of all over India; and Auroville’s village and educational outreach activities continue to extend into and beyond the bioregion.

And, of course, there is also the ‘inreach’ : many people visit Auroville to concentrate in the Matrimandir and to attend workshops and trainings in everything from mud architecture to WATSU.

But there are still many people who do not know of Auroville, or who view it as a slightly exotic, self-contained bubble, with little or no relevance to the larger India.

Why is this? Partly, no doubt, the ‘bubble’ perception is because Auroville continues to be confused with the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, where the focus is much more inward-looking. Many people are unaware of Mother’s clarifications regarding the distinction between the two. In 1965, for example, three years before Auroville’s inauguration, she was asked if the projected experiment was meant “more for the outside” world than the Ashram. She replied, “Oh, yes! It’s a town, so it is the whole contact with the outside”.

She gave a fuller explanation of the relationship between the two institutions when, in 1969, she wrote a note for a UNESCO committee.

“The task of giving a concrete form to Sri Aurobindo’s vision was entrusted to The Mother. The creation of a new world, a new humanity, a new society expressing and embodying the new consciousness is the work she has undertaken. By the very nature of things, it is a collective ideal that calls for a collective effort so that it may be realized in terms of an integral human perfection. The Ashram founded and built by The Mother was the first step towards the accomplishment of this goal. The project of Auroville is the next step, more exterior, which seeks to widen the base of this attempt to establish harmony between soul and body, spirit and nature, heaven and earth, in the collective life of mankind.”

One reason for misconceptions about Auroville is the difficulty of explaining it: it doesn’t fit into any convenient box. Another reason, no doubt, is Aurovilians’ aversion to propaganda, to the ‘selling’ of Auroville, which is based, among other things, on Sri Aurobindo’s forthright rejection of the practice.

“I don’t believe in advertisement except for books etc.,” he wrote in 1934, “ and in propaganda except for politics and patent medicines. But for serious work it is a poison. It means either a stunt or a boom – and stunts and booms exhaust the thing they carry on their crest and leave it lifeless and broken high and dry on the shores of nowhere – or it means a movement. A movement in the case of a work like mine means the founding of a school or a sect or some other damned nonsense.”

Yet another reason, perhaps, is that there is unclarity among ourselves about how we should engage with the wider India.

The recent history of our relationship with the Government of India is an interesting case study here. When the Auroville Foundation Act was first mooted, many concerns were expressed in the community about the possible implications of fuller government involvement in Auroville (government-appointed administrators had been resident in Auroville since the passing of the Auroville Emergency Powers Act in 1980, but they had been using a light hand). The concerns were either that the Aurovilians would lose control over their ‘own’ project ; or that the ‘purity’ of the ideal would somehow be affected (Mother’s warning that “To hand over the management of Auroville to any country or any group however big it may be is an absolute impossibility”, was much quoted at the time).

The fact that the Foundation Act was largely drafted by Kireet Joshi, a great supporter of Auroville, and set up to protect the ideals contained in the Auroville Charter was ignored or, perhaps, disbelieved. And the idea, mooted by a senior Aurovilian at the time, that government involvement could be a two-way street – that this could also be a channel for Auroville’s ideals to reach a wider world – was rather peremptorily dismissed.

Today, the situation is not so clear-cut. On the one hand, we have had uneasy relationships with some of our Secretaries to the Governing Board, and some Aurovilians find the Foundation’s procedures too bureaucratic (although, in truth, we have displayed a remarkable talent for this ourselves). On the other hand, it can be argued that Auroville’s status as an autonomous body set up by the Government of India and accountable, ultimately, to the Indian Parliament, gives it a great deal of protection from those who would like to co-opt it for their own ends, as well as facilitating access to government funding.

Perhaps, at root, Auroville’s somewhat ambivalent relationship with the larger India is a reflection of the fact that we are simultaneously attracted by some of its aspects – like the sense of a young world on the move, throwing off old constraints and exploring new pathways – and fearful that, without a sufficiently strong inner compass or ‘anchor’, Auroville may be taken over by its more destructive aspects.

At an individual level, the failure to wholeheartedly embrace the world as a forum for transformational yoga, which is implied in Mother’s UNESCO note, may also reflect how far we still cling to traditional ideas that separate, and oppose, the “world” and “spirituality”.

All of which suggests that we still have a lot to learn. And unlearn.