Perceptions and misconceptions about Auroville

When I first came to Auroville in 1993, as a graduate student on a two week break from Canada, I was perplexed that Auroville could not be seen even when one was in the midst of it. I remember entering Auroville from the AuroOrchard side and when the taxi was on the winding road from Edayanachavady to New Creation I was told that I had arrived. I wondered what was hidden behind those beautiful silk cotton, tamarind and acacia trees. A sense of mystery hung in the air. And this mystery continues to greet every first comer because even today much of the town’s built environment, whether it is residential or administrative, is somewhat removed from the main roads of this unique growing international town. This town, if it can be called one, is still a cluster of interspersed settlements and small communities scattered between the East Coast Road on one side and the old Madras highway on the other end. There are few signposts indicating Auroville’s real location on nearby roads and highways, thus mystifying the place further.  

In the mid-nineties when I came back to Auroville for a longer stay, I got the opportunity to teach a couple of years at the local college as a temporary lecturer. It was here that I got to know how Auroville was perceived by a sizeable group of people in its immediate vicinity. While most of my colleagues credited Auroville for its greening work and eco-friendly manufacturing initiatives, they had not really spent any time there beyond a one-time visit. 

During those days I felt under constant surveillance. It wasn’t just my accent that set me apart, it was everything. I was an outsider not because I was a non-Tamil Indian woman educated in the West, but because I lived in Auroville, a place that made me doubly so. A tiny forested settlement, Auroville was in effect a limbo township without clear boundaries, although it was officially part of Tamil Nadu. It had carved a weird place in the local imagination mainly because no one understood why hundreds of people from so many different countries had chosen to make this rural place on earth their home and why the men and women, with their casual attire and careless habits, continued to thrive in the seemingly godforsaken place. For the traditional minded, Auroville signified a lack – of definition, of decorum, of cultural roots – that made it suspect in more ways than one. 

To add to the already tarnished image of this somewhat hippy town was the history of its conflict with the Sri Aurobindo Society (SAS). Some supporters of the Society promoted Auroville as a place of eccentricity and loose morals, where Western couples lounged all Sunday on the beach. 

However, for Priya Davidar, a professor of Ecology and a long-term resident of Pondy, Auroville’s simple but “free-wheeling lifestyle” was a welcome break from the conservative milieu she encountered in Pondicherry when she arrived from Harvard University in the 1980s. While doing her PhD under the renowned ornithologist Dr Salim Ali, Priya, of Tamil Christian parentage, would often visit Auroville where pioneering work was still going on. In recent years, she feels Auroville’s steady entrepreneurial expansion in the areas of food, clothing and other “innovative” products and services while involving the local communities has changed its reputation in a positive way in the local minds.  

In relation to tourists who have visited in person or online, Auroville holds a somewhat ambiguous place.  Many metropolitan Indians, especially from Mumbai and Delhi, only ‘visit’ Auroville via websites or shops in their city where they can buy the unique products manufactured here. Others associate Auroville with mainly a spiritual identity and expect to find a temple-centred commune or ashram lifestyle when they come to visit the place for the first time. What they discover instead is a fast-paced tourist circuit that is composed of the Visitors Centre,  Matrimandir Viewing Point, Auroville boutiques and restaurants where normal looking people, not the sadhaks they imagined, conduct their day-to-day business. It is possible to do all this tourism in a few hours. When they are back home, the tourists are unable to recall whether Auroville is a town, city or an eco-village. What they often do remember, however, is an atmosphere that they have perhaps not encountered before. 

Adjectives such as “marvellous” and “inspiring” can frequently be found in the personal responses recorded in the visitors handbook at the Information Centre. An American tourist had this to say after watching the video and visiting the Matrimandir Viewing Point – “truly an enlightened concept and vision”. “Serene, amazing, blessed,” was another comment left by a South African tourist. Not all comments from the Indian tourists were positive, however. Some complained about having to wait one day to meditate in the Matrimandir chamber when they wanted to visit on the same day.  It is hard for tourists to understand that they need to wait and develop some understanding of the place before they can be allowed inside the Chamber.

Perhaps there are varied responses to Auroville because this is a place that resists definition and cannot be categorized neatly, and this can lead to some misunderstanding. It is indeed a unique place where fifty nationalities jostle for mental and physical space to create something that is outside the mainstream. But it is not easy to explain this to people who either do not live within Auroville or who are here on a first and perhaps only trip.