Is there free expression in Auroville?

Auroville Today: The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 defined free expression as ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers’. Many countries, including India, guarantee freedom of expression in their constitution. But each country also specifies limitations to this freedom. Where are we in Auroville in terms of freedom of expression?

Fabienne: At present, we do not have a public platform where we can tell each other what we really think.

Mauna: I think we have full freedom of expression as long as we observe the ‘party line’, that is as long as it is within the context of the yoga, within the terminology of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo.

Akash: The problem with saying that the party line is Mother and Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy is that it is such a wide philosophy that your interpretation of it may be very different from mine.

Speaking as a writer, I don’t think the situation regarding free expression in Auroville is particularly dire but it is pretty clear that if you say certain things you will be violating unspoken norms, and this leads to a lot of self-censorship. The longer you have lived here, the more you know how to navigate these things.

What are these invisible lines or norms that we are not meant to violate?

Manoj: Nobody would write on Auronet about the Indian Prime Minister, Mr. Modi.

Akash: We had an example of somebody on Auronet who used to question the Master Plan in very loud terms. Some people responded by saying he was violating what Mother wanted for Auroville, so this was clearly a line for them.

Krishna: I remember that Charu, when speaking about his caricatures, told me he would never make fun of the Matrimandir. Jesse, when I interviewed him about his recent play, Citizen One, said he wouldn’t make fun of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo. So these are obviously lines they draw for themselves.

So does this mean that there is no general agreement about what can and cannot be expressed in Auroville?

Manoj: Yes. That is why each group should be allowed to choose what form of expression they allow or disallow in their context.

Fabienne: In fact, this is what happens at present. In Outreach I do my own ‘censorship’ of material because I know that if something about Auroville which is not explained in a proper way goes outside, it might cause more damage than good.

Meenakshi: I am the editor of a Tamil monthly that goes to schools and colleges all over Tamil Nadu. We have decided to publish only positive news. If I was editing a magazine for the local bioregion which was presenting Auroville, I would also only present positive news.

Akash: For me, the sign of a confident society is if you can say this is a great place but it is not perfect. We give a much worse impression of Auroville when we look as if we have got something to hide and we pretend that we are a fairy tale. Any journalist sniffs this out right away.

Fabienne: From an outreach perspective, I think we should be able to speak to the world about anything that happens here, including the problems we face, but we have to provide the context because otherwise it is very difficult to understand what is happening here. But providing context is complicated; it takes a lot of time.

That’s why most of the time the things that do go out are shallow and superficial.

Akash: If we accept that every group has a right to decide what is expressed within its context, then we are effectively saying that we don’t accept freedom of expression as a baseline principle. I think we need to decide as a community whether there is freedom of expression in Auroville and what that means, and if we agree upon this, it should be observed across all groups in Auroville. Otherwise, every individual group will have the right to shut down a performance or rip out a page that they don’t like from a magazine. This is not freedom of expression.

Manoj: But is it freedom when everybody has to observe a party line regarding what can or cannot be expressed?

Krishna: We already have a kind of party line, which refers to unity in diversity. In that case, should not all our groups be committed to giving platforms for the expression of diversity?

Fabienne: But not if diversity means bad taste. There are many different ways to express the same thing: it can be done with elegance.

Since Auroville is meant to be constantly evolving, inevitably that will mean the status quo must be constantly challenged. Artists often take the lead in doing this. Sometimes this will take the form of a provocation, like Dharmesh’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’ installation which represented The Charter as a corpse. Is pushing the envelope like this a particular challenge in this community?

Manoj: I don’t agree that this is the way to promote change. Art has the potential to invoke something profound but instead of invoking, it has now degenerated into provoking. This doesn’t elevate society, it creates reaction and pain rather than healing. I think this approach reflects the artist’s lack of capacity to invoke something higher.

Akash: But what you consider provoking I might consider invoking. It is a very personal thing. Does your personal interpretation somehow become a standard to define what can or cannot happen?

Manoj: This is exactly why, while artists are free to create whatever they want, those working in a particular context also have a right to filter out and choose what they would put and what they would not. These are all different aspects of freedom.

We have identified invisible norms as one of the restraining factors upon free expression in this community. Are there others?

Manoj: I sense there is a lot of fear in this community about what the government may do if we express ourselves openly. To me this threat is predominantly imaginary.

Akash: This is used as the strongest argument against freedom of expression here.

Manoj: Recently, somebody on Auronet expressed doubt about the Holocaust and this created such a panic: people wondered what the government would think if they read this. It is pure fear. I don’t agree at all with what he said but why do we have to ban it?

Krishna: But there are comebacks to articles we publish. Recently, on our Auroville Art Service Facebook page, we published articles from major Indian newspapers about artists refusing government awards, and we received a strong comment from somebody who comes to Auroville regularly that Auroville should not involve itself in politics and not be posting such articles. He sent an email to the Working Committee complaining about it. As a result, we changed the name of the administrator on our site because we did not want anybody’s visa to be put into question.

And somebody did want to write about the Indian government and Auroville in our recent MAgzAV issue but we asked them not to write an article that was critical. So we do apply self-censorship.

Fabienne: A real problem regarding free expression in Auroville is when somebody feels they are not able to say the truth because they are afraid of repercussions regarding their visa. This has actually happened in the past.

Manoj: A lot of problems come because our mode of communication with each other is still very crude. We hammer each other rather than trying to find the underlying truth of different perspectives.

This ‘hammering’ happens quite a lot on Auronet, our internal communication platform, of which you are one of the administrators. In the past, there was moderation but now, as a result of accusations of ‘censorship’, the administrators do not moderate postings and people have the freedom to express themselves in any way they wish. Now some people have stopped posting or even participating because they have been attacked. This raises the question: at what point does the personal freedom to express oneself freely interfere with other people’s freedom?

Manoj: This is a huge challenge because while we have ‘Rules of the Game’ on Auronet, we cannot enforce them. Since we stopped moderation, the readership and the diversity of what is expressed on Auronet has gone down. The freedom of expression has actually gone down and the forum is dominated by a very few voices.

Akash: I feel that the administrators, Manoj and Annemarie, have one of the toughest jobs in the community. However, I don’t think there should be any additional constraints on what people can post on Auronet, no matter how extreme or bizarre the remarks may be. As a community, I do not think we should be shutting people down. Some people wanted this to happen to the person who initiated the recent Holocaust denial thread but even though I thought the original post was abhorrent, I still defended his right to state his views.

Meenakshi: Language is another major factor that limits freedom of expression. Almost 50% of the Auroville population, many from the local area, do not speak or express themselves in English. Even though Mother talked about four languages for Auroville, Auroville has become an English-speaking society, so freedom of speech is inhibited if you do not speak English.

At the same time, individual freedom of expression means little to many of our Tamil residents. They are more concerned with their family or small group or clan, and if there is anything that needs to be expressed, they will select their leader or representative to go to the relevant group to express it. There is no real individual expression. Of course, there are a few exceptional people who can express themselves well in what they want to say.

Fabienne: Language is a huge issue. I believe if the French could speak English well, Auroville would be a different place.

Akash: A lot of the conflicts that happened in the 1970s and 1980s were clearly to do with communication problems between two cultural groups, one of which was predominantly French. It would have been very different if there had been more people able to speak across the language divide.

Krishna: I often notice that when I express myself in my own language it has a very different emotion attached to it than when I say it in another language. In English I tend to be polite, in Tamil I can be very strong!

Cultural sensitivities also seem to play an important role in inhibiting free expression in Auroville. The recent issue of the arts group magazine, MAgzAV, was on the theme of ‘elephants in the room’ and it featured, as its centre fold, a somewhat morphed photo of the Matrimandir with the features of an elephant. The Visitors Centre agreed to sell it but when some members of their local Aurovilian staff were disturbed by this image, these pages were removed by the management.

Meenakshi: One of the Aurovilian ladies who objected was born and brought up in Kottakarai. She has grown along with the Matrimandir and reverse it as the soul of Auroville, so she felt really hurt that the soul had been presented in this way.

Krishna: When we asked the manager of HERS to sell it, initially he had the same negative response. But after a discussion, he said you have a right to your expression and I will stock it here. He could overcome his initial visual response.

What was the purpose of representing the Matrimandir like this?

Krishna: There is a policy being discussed regarding images of the Matrimandir. The idea is that any Aurovilian who takes a photograph of the Matrimandir and uses it commercially has first to get it approved by the Matrimandir team.

So, among other things, we wanted to promote debate about this policy as well as to consider what is the worst thing that could happen if Aurovilians used images of the Matrimandir. It seems one of the things we cannot speak about is anything to do with the Matrimandir…

Mauna: But there was no article accompanying the image that explained this.

Krishna: The photographer originally photoshopped a lot of photos unrelated to any of the articles. This particular image, like all the other images in this series, was not related to any specific article.

Manoj: When you see the image there is an immediate energy transfer, and an intellectual explanation of it is a completely different layer which doesn’t touch this original response. For me, this image represents a loss of the sacred. We are a civilisation that has lost the sense of the sacred and now anything goes.

Mauna: If you see in this picture a loss of the sense of sacredness, I think you do not understand something. It’s an image: sacredness has nothing to do with it, it transcends it. What I saw as the intention of this issue of the magazine was to kick a little bit against our ‘holy houses’ and I support this, although I think it was done a little bit too crudely and inelegantly.

Akash: But it seems to have served its purpose. We are all talking about it.

Manoj: If you provoke, there will be a response. In a collective context, you are dealing with collective emotions. When you deal with collective emotions using their sacred symbols in the name of freedom of expression, the collective emotions will burst out and it won’t develop further. You cannot transform anything by this method.

Akash: But history is full of examples where a book or a performance that annoyed people served an amazing social purpose. So I don’t agree that you can’t effect transformation this way. Sometimes you need to poke at things that are discriminatory or repressive, you need to call them out and bring them to the surface.

Can we suggest ways that would promote free expression while assisting the transformative process?

Fabienne: There is no easy solution.

Meenakshi: Regarding the native Aurovilians, I think they need to be guided to express clearly what they want. The next generation is going out for higher education, they are learning to express themselves better. However, the problem is that when they come back they have lost the Auroville context. We need to reinvigorate them with our fire.

Mauna: Could we begin by formulating the unstated norms that inhibit free expression? If we become aware of them as a collective, it may be a way to transcend them.

I also think it would help if we could all be a little bit lighter in the way we express ourselves.

Fabienne: My first reaction regarding the Holocaust posting was to laugh; it was so ridiculous, there was no need to respond. We should be able to put these things aside and not react.

Manoj: As a starting point, we have been given knowledge of Integral Yoga. So how can we use this to communicate better? How do we enter a space of communication that leads to transformation and oneness?

Krishna: If we really want to evolve, to move towards something new, we have to recognise that whatever one is saying is coming from one’s conditioning and what the other person is expressing is from their conditioning, and that we have to move beyond both for the new thing to emerge. I am here to drop all this and the other person is also here to drop all this because this is what we all committed to when we came here.

As a first step, however, I think fearless expression is important because people should be able to say what is important for them. If we are not able to express these positions, we are not able to move towards the new.

Akash: And we don’t find the new by refusing to engage with views that frighten or offend us.

Manoj: When friction and controversies happen, you are seeing the fault lines in our community. Actually, this is where the creative ferment is at work, this is where we can get out of our egos because we all have supremely sophisticated egos, and many people do not like Auronet because it is ruthless when it comes to hammering your ego. It is painful to be in that space but in terms of transformation, I find the raw, chaotic nature of Auroville very healthy. It wakes you up; it pushes you beyond your limits.

When the Visitors Centre takes out the Matrimandir page, it is an action that creates a conversation: it is a golden opportunity to step beyond our fixed notions and to see how we can take the next step. In this sense, every conflict is a wonderful opportunity to go beyond.

Akash: It’s interesting that we are having this conversation now because many of these issues around free expression are going to come up in the context of preparations for the 50th anniversary next year. How Auroville is represented, what we tell the world about ourselves, and what we don’t tell the world – these are all going to be big issues.