The beginnings of a revolution?

Long ago I gave up trying to answer the question ‘How does Auroville work?’ The ‘Auroville process’ is far too complicated and unclear. Perhaps this is because there are so many different forces at work here, jostling for supremacy, all the while under the relentless pressure of that ‘Something Else’ which keeps us permanently (and, from an evolutionary viewpoint, fortunately) off-balance.

This makes any attempts at commenting on Auroville events extremely perilous. Needless to say, this has never stopped Aurovilians, including myself, from expressing themselves on what we believe to be the important issues of the day. 

Take the ongoing process of choosing a new Working Committee and Council. This is an ordeal we impose upon ourselves every two years or so. Every time we criticize the result and promise ourselves that next time we will improve the process, only to be disappointed again.

This time there was a sustained effort to come up with a selection process which was very different from before. But hardly had the initial result been announced then the criticism started. “These groups are not representative of the community as a whole”; “Many of these people are not competent to carry out the work ”; “Some of these people are just interested in power”; “How could you allow people to be selected who, in the past, have acted against the interests of Auroville or have fallen far short of the ideals?”. 

All these, I have to admit, were also my initial responses. How, I wondered, could such a deeply-considered process have given such a disappointing result? Why did the Selection Group favour self-selection? Had they not anticipated that those who thirsted for power and authority would take advantage of the open door? And were they not naïve to believe that the inclusion of a ‘value element' in the selection process would suffice to pull everybody up to a higher level of consciousness?

All these remain, for me, unanswered questions. But it took me some time to perceive that there may be another dimension to this. For if there is one thing which Aurovilians have been united upon recently it is the need for radical change in our governance and organization. Of course, we don’t agree upon how that should happen. Some favour returning all power to the Residents Assembly. Others feel that we should hand greater power to those individuals and groups who have a proven track record of working for the larger good of the community.

But what we all in our different ways are aspiring for here is nothing less than a revolution in our present structure. And revolutions are messy. They never run in the way their leaders intend, and generally it takes a period of considerable turmoil and chaos before any fundamental changes are felt. I don’t see any reason why the situation should be different here. 

I mention this because I’ve started to wonder if the latest selection process may not actually mark the rather clumsy beginnings of a revolution in our governance and organizational process. If this is the case, what clues might it furnish to its eventual shape? 

Two things immediately stand out. Firstly, the new organizational proposal could result in the breaking down of the poisonous division between working groups and ‘community’, as many tasks previously performed by the groups will now be taken up by resource people from the larger community. 

Secondly, the result of the selection process reveals a clear generational and cultural shift. ‘Generational’ because more young people have put themselves forward this time; ‘cultural’ because far more candidates than before – something like 50% of the total – were born in the local villages or in the region. 

It’s dangerous to read too much into this. It could well be, as some people seem to fear, that village politics are simply being transposed into Auroville. But it may also signal a deeper, more fundamental shift, and that is from the Westernized, rational organizational model which has dominated in Auroville until now to a different phase of development and governance. Perhaps, after all, the Western model has done its work of laying a solid foundation – so necessary because of the boundary-less, high-energy field of this place – and now we need another way of dealing with our extreme diversity than through defining mandates and guidelines or creating more groups; something more akin to a dance than to a rigid template. 

I associate this ‘fluidity’ more with the local culture than with the Western mind-based approach. However, I don’t mistake this for what Sri Aurobindo defined as an ‘intuitive’ consciousness, and I have no idea if this section of our population, the Tamil Aurovilians who have grown up and been educated here, are actually the most open to this different way of approaching things. Many long-term Aurovilians from other cultures are also searching for such another way. In this sense, the present selection process is not necessarily the final word or the people chosen for these groups are the ‘right ones’. As the Working Committee, for example, requires very specific skills we will probably have to go through many revisions and much turmoil before we reach something more generally acceptable. 

But revolutions begin with the breaking up – often clumsy, often crude – of an existing log-jam, and it may just be that this particular process, which has scandalized some and overjoyed others, could be the barrier-breaker for the next step in Auroville’s evolution. It is useful to remember this as we fasten our seat-belts and prepare ourselves for the hair-raising, rambunctious journey which seems to be our preferred mode of making progress in Auroville. What, I think, would be wrong at this point would be to stand on the station called Status Quo and refuse to board the train.