Searching for the spirit of seva

Tapas’s family comes from Rajpipla, Gujarat, a town that, in pre-Independence India, was one of the numerous Princely States of India. Her great-great-grandfather had been the Chief Minister, known as Diwan, to the Maharajah of Rajpipla.

Dr. Becharlal Bhatt, Tapas’s grandfather, was the personal doctor of Maharaja Sayaji Rao Gaekwad of Baroda. One day, in the late 1890’s, her grandfather asked the Maharajah of Baroda for help in securing ancestral land inherited from his great grandfather. The Maharaja referred him to his private secretary. This was none other than Sri Aurobindo, who gave him detailed advice about what he should do.

When Sri Aurobindo moved to Pondicherry, the grandfather also decided to move to Pondicherry in 1928, although often he would return to Rajpipla for work and family purposes. During his long stay in the Ashram, Dr. Becharlal studied Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga under His guidance. He also served as the first doctor in the Ashram dispensary. In fact, he became one of Sri Aurobindo’s doctors and was one of the attendants who looked after him for 12 years after Sri Aurobindo suffered a fractured leg.

Tapas’s father, Vibhuprasad Bhatt, also started visiting the Ashram from the age of fifteen because of his father’s connection. The grandfather often asked Sri Aurobindo for advice about how he should deal with his son. Sri Aurobindo wrote to him that one his two sons, Vibhu, had an inner opening to spiritual growth, and it would be good for him if he stayed in the Ashram. However, he advised the grandfather not to impose any choice on his sons.

Although very devoted to Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, Tapas’s father decided not to join the Ashram. Instead, he decided that all his five children should grow up and be educated in the Ashram School from an early age.

“We came in 1956,” remembers Tapas, “I was only four years old and we used to see Mother twice a day. My parents would drag my sister and me out early in the morning and we would wait under Mother’s balcony at six for her to come out. In the evening after sports we would queue up in the playground and Mother would greet every child and give us a sweet or something.”

Tapas recalls that the children would write to Mother and that she answered every child’s letter. At one time Tapas wrote to her, saying she wanted to be an ‘ideal child’. “She sent a reply to my prayer, saying, ‘Please keep this with you. It will help you to overcome all your obstacles in life’. (I still have that letter in my pocket). This was how we imbibed The Mother’s atmosphere of always reaching towards something higher.”

In 1958, the family had to return to Rajpipla to try to settle a property dispute, returning in December 1962. The Free Progress system of education began in the Ashram in 1964 and Tapas followed it until 1970.

In the mid 1960s, Mother was already beginning to talk about the concept of Auroville. In 1965, she appointed Roger Anger as chief architect for the project.

“Whenever Roger visited Pondicherry,” remembers Tapas, “he would come directly from Mother’s room to our class because he was very close to Tanmaya, our main teacher. I remember one exercise we did with Roger. He explained that Mother wanted to start this special project. Then he gave each of us a big sheet of paper and asked us to draw our inner image of the central soul of the city. I don’t remember what I drew, but it may have been a lotus.”

Tapas became very interested in the project and often visited Roger’s office to look at the maps and drawings.

For a month before the inauguration, the whole school closed down to allow the students and teachers to prepare the event. Every day for the week before the inauguration, Tapas jumped on the bus and joined Roger’s team and worked all day with local village women making kolams in a pond near the Banyan Tree, a pond which Roger had designed. “I loved it out there where there was so much space and sky. I was following my naive passion for the unknown.”

On the night of the 27th February, to her great surprise, Tapas received a letter from her School, informing her that she was to represent Syria at the ceremony the next day. “The entire ceremony was so well organized I felt carried, every second, on the clouds of a rainbow surrounding the red earth and bright blue sky, while humanity was praying for the dream of Auroville to become a reality!

“On that day, for the first time, I felt that Auroville was to be my place.”

However, between 1968 and 1970 Tapas did not return, except on picnics with friends in the Utility canyon. But when the Matrimandir construction began, Mother gave permission for the Free Progress students to work one day a week on the structure, and Tapas always went. She also began secretly sneaking out during school holidays to work at Matrimandir. Sometimes, with Shyamsunder’s permission, she would stay in Matrimandir Camp, which is where the Matrimandir workers lived.

“I will always remember one occasion. On the evening of the 16th November, 1973, we finished concreting the last pillar. Patricia and I were up early the next morning to prepare breakfast, and then the phone rang. I picked it up and a voice said, ‘Please inform everybody that Mother has left her body’. So Patricia and I went to every room in the Camp and woke people up to give them the news. It was a huge shock for everyone: nobody could believe that she had left.”

That morning, a bus took the Aurovilians to see Mother. She was lying in the meditation room of the Ashram. “One of my aunts said, ‘Don’t worry Tapas, wait another four days. She has not gone; she will be coming back in her body’. I also would not believe that she had gone. But on the 20th November, they put her in the Samadhi.”

Tapas’s father was in Baroda at the time. The night Mother passed away, he had two dreams in which he heard The Mother’s voice saying, ‘Wake up, Vibhu, come back to Pondicherry now’. The next morning he put the radio on and heard that Mother had left.

When he arrived in Pondicherry Mother was already in the Samadhi. “He wept for a week,” remembers Tapas, “he had been very close to The Mother and he could not stand the idea that he would not see her again. He kept saying, ‘I have surrendered my children to you now, but now that you have left what will I do with them?’”

But, for Tapas, that early morning call in the Camp had been decisive. “I decided that I would stay in Auroville and not go back to the Ashram.” However, her father ordered her to return, telling her that she had to complete her education.

“The night before returning to Pondicherry - I had been weeping all day as I did not want to go back - I had two dreams. In one dream, I saw the finished Matrimandir chamber, exactly as it is today. When I entered, I sat next to the second pillar and next to me, meditating, there was a huge green python.

“In the second dream, I was sick and everybody came to my room to say goodbye for the last time because they realised I had to leave my body. Today, I realize it was symbolic of the fact that I really wanted to make a new step in my life by coming to Auroville. It took some years, but I think my new life started from that day.”

It took some years because of her father’s health. Tapas explains that traditionally an Indian woman cannot leave home until she is married. And while her father was enlightened in many ways, and was fine with the fact that her Aurovilian partner was French, he did not want her to go to Auroville without marrying him.

“I told him, I am not going to Auroville to get married, I am going to Auroville for Mother’s ideals, and I’m going there to learn how to be an individual because in our Indian tradition of joint family system, the need for an individual space does for growth is absent, as one is taught to fit in to a collective body.”

Finally, her father relented.

Tapas moved to Auroville on November 1st, 1977. In fact, because of the upheaval with the Sri Aurobindo Society, many of her Ashram friends had already moved there, including her friend Marc-Andre.

“When I came to Auroville, I began by house-sitting someone’s house. It was the first time in my life that I had slept alone in a house and I wept like a dog, because in Indian families there is always sharing of space and we never sleep alone.

“Yet my early days in Auroville were the happiest of my life. We shared accommodation with Joy, Jean, Vivek and other friends until we got a place for ourselves, and even though we didn’t have much food it was a very intense collective life in Aspiration community; we all had a strong aspiration to serve The Mother through Auroville.

“I learned so many things in Auroville. I learned how to cook, to weave, to do the accounts, administration and translation work for the original Auroville Bi-lingual Review. I learned what it meant to take a conscious decision to live with a man. However, the extreme collectivism was so intense that at a certain point I started questioning who I was as an individual and as an Indian woman. I had developed something of my individuality in Auroville, but not enough.”

Tapas had long had a dream to explore the world beyond India. In 1971, Tapas had tried to join a fine art school in Paris, but it did not work out. In 1983, after six years of living in Auroville, she was ready to take the next step and she moved to Paris.

“Paris was like jumping into the ocean and learning to swim. The Ashram and Auroville were bubbles, you were so protected. Paris was for my intellectual growth - for 12 months I had to work very hard to revive my mind - and for my independence.” Tapas studied for a B.A. in Linguistics, and also got a part-time job teaching English Language in the École Nationale d’Administration. “I was teaching people who were going to become big politicians or part of the French Government administration.”

Later she got a job in the Indian Embassy, firstly in the visa section and later as a cultural attaché. “That is when I discovered my Indian roots because I had to officially represent India vis-a-vis the French Ministry of Culture and the French Ministry of External Affairs. For the first time in my life, I had to learn how to dress in Indian style, give diplomatic presentations, go to ambassadorial receptions etc. It was six years of full discovery of India, at the historical, political, cultural and educational levels.

“During the time I stayed in Paris, I always saw Mother saying to me, ‘You always wanted to do this, now you’ve got it’. I told myself that as long as I know I’m growing, I will stay. The moment I feel I have reached a stagnation point, I will come back to Auroville.”

In 1992, after ten years away, she felt ready to return.

However, before she returned she did an arts management course run by the French Ministry of Culture. “It was a fantastic, very rich training by an institution which has the most advanced cultural policies in the world”.

When she returned to Auroville, she put all the experience she had gained at the service of the community. Along with Paolo she worked in Kalamitra, a group to promote cultural events and workshops in the field of the arts. She also made Auroville part of an international network for the arts, and brought many artists and performers to the community, as well as setting up a residency project that would host artists to do research projects in Auroville.

When she came back, Tapas did not pay much attention to what was happening in the community because she was so glad to be home. But, gradually, she sensed that changes had taken place. “For example, I wanted to give my money to the farms and I thought I would get a house in exchange. But I was told, ‘Don’t dream about that happening. Hold on to your money’.”

However, she felt the real changes began in 2005 when the Economy Group started closing down all the Auroville Services that they felt were not ‘productive’ or self-supporting. “Overnight, we got a message that the Kalamitra budget would be stopped. If we wanted it to continue, we had to meet the Economy Group and justify the projects we wanted them to support. I had just finished the renovation of the whole Sri Aurobindo Auditorium and had already planned many cultural projects for the coming year, and they cut the budget without even calling me for a meeting or explaining anything. That was really a shock. I felt this was a real attitude change in the community, that now everything was going to be put upon a commercial basis rather than emphasising the spirit of service, and I decided I had had enough.”

Tapas returned to Paris and registered for a doctorate. Her subject, which she had begun researching before she left in 1992, was eco-feminism. For seven years she was back in an academic milieu, although every year she would return to Auroville for a number of months.

“When, in 2012, I came back for good I felt Auroville was drifting more than ever. But I decided to reintegrate and continue my work with the arts because I know that it is only when you put your hand in the mud that you can participate in making changes.”

What changes would she like to see happen? The main one centres around the concept of ‘seva’. “Seva has to do with voluntary work with the inner spirit of service. In the Ashram we were motivated from a very young age to work in the spirit of service to the Divine, and Auroville’s early days were no different. There was so much simplicity, joy and sharing, and the dominant spirit was how to serve the collective.

“What makes me sad today is that, in our constant economic struggle to survive, we Aurovilians are becoming more and more commercial in our dealings with each other and losing the spirit of inclusiveness and service. To reach Mother’s dream we need to experiment. Mother has given us this laboratory, she says, ‘You do the research and I will look after you’, so we should all consider ourselves as researchers and volunteers working in the spirit of seva.

“My innermost prayer to The Mother today is that she helps us bring back the key Auroville ideals as the central focus of our lives, and invokes in us the highest spirit of service and full faith in her adventure of the Unknown; that she helps us be ideal and perfect instruments for the manifestation of her Dream.”