Snapshots of 40 years in Auroville

Some Aurovilians just do their work, don’t attend meetings and almost never express their views in public. One of those is Jocelyne, who lives in a difficult-to-find house behind Aurovelo. Here is her sharing. 

It was 1970. I was living in Paris and had lost my job. I decided to go and visit my sister who was living in a community in South India. I told our mother that I was going to check if it was a sect or not. As I had been fired, I had some cash to pay for the ticket.

I flew to Mumbai and took a train to Chennai. This was my first time to India, so I was fully unprepared – I had brought no food, no water, no bed sheets, nothing. At every station I bought bananas, chickoos and tea, and so endured the slow two-day train ride. On the last leg of my trip, my luck turned. Instead of taking the bus alone to Pondicherry, as soon as I exited the train in Chennai I saw a few people waiting: Vincenzo, Jean-Claude B., Swapna and my sister Claudine! They took me to Auroville, to Aspiration. There, Stephen told me that it was darshan day and asked: “Do you want to go and see The Mother?” I was fully zombied from the trip and didn’t know the first thing about darshans, but answered: “Yeah, why not?” We went by Unimog, a small lorry, standing with the others in the back. It was April 24th, 1970. That darshan didn’t impress me much but I was curious, of course.

The second time I saw The Mother was for my birthday. We had to wait in a room full of people. We were asked to sit down, and as there was someone else from Auroville next to me, I started chatting. A lady came and said ‘shush!’ That worked only for five minutes. The lady came back again, and repeated her ‘shush!!”, this time a little louder. I was miffed, but I had to wait for two more hours, so that gave me the time to cool down. In retrospect, I understood that this was for the best, so that I could be more open and receptive. When I met Her, I was blown over. She looked at me, I looked back at Her straight in the eye, despite having been told to look down. Then, something happened in me so strongly that I forgot everything while leaving: my birthday card, my chappals... For three days, I was on a cloud.

Initially, I had planned to come for three months only, but I stayed on, and on, and on, for five years. I worked a bit for Roger Anger and for a short while at the Comité Administratif d’Auroville, the CAA. Soon after, the problems with the Sri Aurobindo Society started. I remember that once we went to the CAA to ask for the accounts, and our request was bluntly refused. “You stay up there and do the yoga, we manage the money,” they said. We went back to Aspiration and told the other community members that we felt that it would get worse. They didn’t believe us, but it soon did. I, however, was never party to the fights that followed for I held firm to what The Mother had said, that whenever there was a problem, ‘don’t fight but go find a solution instead’.

In those days I had also started, together with Clare and Swapna, the first crèche for children from Kuilayapalayam village. The village was in deep poverty; the children were hungry and were not taken care of. It was clear that we had to do something. We brought soap to clean them, and discovered that they had never even seen soap in their lives. We washed and fed them every day. After about a year, there was a problem and we left the crèche.

I then had a brief stint as a painter and redid all the huts in Aspiration. After that, I started working in Fraternity, joining the first weaving section. The unit made bedspreads, lampshades, hammocks, embroidery and mats. André Viozat was there: he made the first leather-measuring machines.

My prolonged stay was a bit of an issue for our mother, who decided to check for herself why both her daughters had decided to remain in that place in South India. Given the fact that she didn’t speak a word of English, had never travelled by plane and didn’t even have a passport, her decision to come here was very brave. She stayed one month, and it was much to her liking. She was, in fact, far more positive about Auroville than I: whenever I would criticise, she would point out the positive aspects. My mother insisted I return to see my father in France, I promised ‘next year’ and left it at that.

In those early years, the influence of Satprem was considerable. Claudine knew him as she had worked in the press. One day, when we met him on the marina, Claudine introduced me: “This is Jocelyne, she is completely different from me, she is always joyful.” Satprem turned to me and gravely said: “This is not joy. Go inside yourself and find the true joy.” I was stunned. He may have tried to make me aware of the difference between the supramental ananda and my simple joy of life, but if so, he didn’t succeed. My joy evaporated on the spot; I was livid.

Nevertheless, I gained a measure of respect for him a few months later. I had accompanied a girl to JIPMER, the government hospital. She had flipped. I listened to her ramblings the entire night, but when I left JIPMER, my mind had become a sieve: I didn’t know anymore what was and what wasn’t important. I wanted to be shaken out of it, but nobody seemed to understand what was happening to me. A group of us had met Satprem at the Ashram tennis court to discuss another matter with him. I was standing a little farther off and at one moment, Satprem looked at me insistently and suddenly my mental confusion was gone! Much later Mother’s Agenda came out. I’ve read it twice now, and although I was rather irritated with Saptrem’s complaining about his lack of spiritual experiences, I am now reading the work again.

Over the years, the first caravan had delighted in recounting how their trip had been, recalling their experiences of what had happened in Turkey or Afghanistan or wherever. This had made me quite jealous as I had come by plane, which was clearly an inferior mode of travel. Meanwhile, the second caravan had arrived, and when a few of them decided to drive back to France, I boldly asked if I could tag along. It was April 1975. We travelled leisurely, first visiting Calcutta, then  trekking in Pokhara, Nepal, then back to India and crossing Afghanistan – I saw the Bamiyan Buddhas –  and through Iran and Turkey back to Europe. Meanwhile, I had fallen in love with the driver Jean-Claude R. and had become pregnant. I gave birth to my first daughter Sourya in Paris in 1977. To my surprise, my sister Claudine wrote that she, too, was pregnant. She gave birth to her son, Martanda, two months later.

I stayed in France for almost nine years, from 1975 to 1984. In that period, I returned three times to Auroville to see how things were developing. In 1978, everybody was fighting and there was no school. In 1981, it had started to become better. During my 1984 visit, I ascertained that schooling had become acceptable for my daughter. My 1970 visit had been pure discovery, but when I decided to return on December 5th 1984 to settle, it was for Auroville, Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. Having met Rolf, we decided to live together with my daughter, but there was a housing crisis. He then built the first bamboo-vermiculite-roofed house in Ami, where I lived for 30 years.

After two years, I was pregnant again, and my second daughter, Divya, was born. Three months after her delivery, I joined Transition School at the request of my sister Claudine. Yet another teacher had given up, she complained. In fact, all the ‘real’ teachers were resigning as they couldn’t handle the children. I left Divya in the care of my household worker, my ‘amma’ as we say in Auroville, and taught Maths and French there three mornings a week.

The children were indeed unruly. On a scale of 1 to 100, I was doing 85% discipline and 15% teaching. The proportion slowly changed, there was finally more teaching. I learned not to scream at the children to get their attention, but instead to lower the temperature of my voice a few degrees, slow down my words, and articulate a bit more clearly. Usually, these warning signs were sufficient to calm the children down.

For the children, Auroville was paradise. Their playground was nature: they climbed trees, swam in the sea and in the Auroville kolams [the water catchment areas, eds], ate berries and fruits from the forests, stole peanuts from the neighbouring farmers’ fields, jumped in the open well of Discipline, climbed the roof of Bharat Nivas, or hung out at the Matrimandir construction site. There was no radio, no television, no internet. They were wild and free. I think that this freedom allowed them to become independent and responsible at quite an early age.

When I first came to Auroville, I knew nothing about Sri Aurobindo or The Mother, but there was such an atmosphere that you were just carried into it, you wanted to understand. 

When l first read the Auroville Charter, l fell in love with the expression “unending education”. 

At the time, everybody was talking about “updating” your studies, your training, whatever, but the concept of “unending education” was really new, even smiled at and deemed impossible to achieve. l am happy to see that now it has become widely accepted. 

Back then, I read The Mother’s writings on education among others, but in the beginning the children were so wild and illiterate that I was already happy when they just cooled down and started concentrating. For me, what was important was to be with them, day after day, and support them in any way I could. 

Joan and Aloka’s Awareness Through the Body classes also helped. These classes began as a programme to improve the posture of the children, but soon evolved into helping them develop their capacity for attention, concentration and relaxation. They were encouraged to become more conscious of what was going on in and around their bodies and their minds. The classes helped increase the children’s self-awareness and sense of responsibility. We teachers also did those exercises and I learned many things for my personal development. Yoga nidra has remained one of my preferential ways for focusing within.

Awareness Through the Body, like Jossy’s Sandboxes, were complementary to the classical way of teaching in Transition School. Later on, I introduced board and card games in order to develop logic and strategy. Nowadays, my time in Transition School is equally divided between French classes and games.

In all these years, I never got involved in community politics. My interest was always in education, all the time. Only once I attended a community meeting, in 1978, in one of those circular buildings at Bharat Nivas, where at least 150 people – many of them French nationals – were outdoing each other in criticising Kalya. It was so mean, I hated it. Kalya laughed, but for me, it was awful. I couldn’t relate to that attitude of the “Frenchies”, even though I am French myself. I never was part of the French circle. Anyway, I would much rather stay at home and paint than go to a General Meeting.

I am sometimes asked if Auroville has improved. I think it has. I do not agree with people who complain that Auroville isn’t as good as it was before. Auroville has changed, for sure. Back then, there were no rules; today we have them aplenty, perhaps too many. But that simply means that this is the situation we have got to work with now.

Looking back on more than 40 years in Auroville, I can say I have never regretted my decision to come back, but I admit that life – in particular dealing with one’s own difficulties – has been challenging. I now see how foolish I was when I first came to Auroville: I was 23, and I thought I was an adult. I now understand those sweet smiles of the Ashramites in the early 1970s, and I admit that I, too, have a tendency to smile now at those young people who join Auroville, and know nothing. I have started to understand more, re-reading the works of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, studying Savitri, trying to deepen myself, but this is too personal to talk about here.