The need for building a value-based society

It took me many, many years before I had the courage to tell my parents that I was in a live-in relationship with a man. My statement was received, at first, in silence. I believe my parents suspected the fact, but were in denial. Then my dad quietly asked, why didn’t I just marry my boyfriend. The pain in his voice regarding my life-choices was undeniable.

I held forth about how I did not believe in marriages. I asserted that I saw marriage as a social sanction to my relationship, and that I had denounced the society that I had grown up in. And how I believed that if my partner and I could not keep the love and the beauty of our relationship alive, I did not see why society – the network of our extended family and friends – should try to save the relationship. My dad looked unconvinced. I pulled out a compilation of the Mother’s words in Auroville and read to him a passage of how the Mother did not want couples to stay together if they no longer loved each other. My dad sighed. And then said, “I can accept your choice, but it is for the sake of the society that I would wish to see you married. It is hard for me to tell them (our extended friends and family) that you just live with a man.” Again, the pain in his voice was unmistakable.

It was my parents who introduced me to Auroville. I always thought (and declared as much) that I came from a progressive family – from the educated, upper middle-class, urban society. Dad was an engineer, and had been to Europe and USA as a young trainee engineer. And mum found Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s vision of life to be a liberating experience. Growing up, I had all the freedom I wanted. Rarely, if ever, I felt discriminated against for being a woman. And yet, here we were at loggerheads, unable to resolve the dissonance between an individual choice and socially-established norms.

Marriage in India is a deadly serious issue. Indians can be warm, loving, generous, and accepting, but all of that can change in a flash if one wants to marry into the family. And then, the stifling weight of the cultural traditions come crashing down. Caste, social status, wealth of the prospective spouse, become immensely important issues. My parents and I, somehow without explicitly speaking about it, came to a mutual agreement. They accepted my decision. They accepted my partner, even treating him with the love and respect that is accorded to a son-in-law, but they never mentioned him to our relatives. I too tacitly respected their feelings and did not flaunt my live-in relationship. Our extended family just assumed that I had chosen to remain single.

Needless to say that the only reason I could carry of this deception was because Auroville was located far away from where I grew up in India. These invisible fault lines in our culture and society would have been far more treacherous to navigate if I had grown up in one of the local villages around Auroville. For a local Aurovilian, one’s parents and one’s relatives are cognizant of the life-choices that one makes, and transcending those deep-rooted cultural issues of gender, caste, and status are not easy.

This point was painfully driven home to me on a recent issue when a young (as young as I was when I told my parents of my choice) Aurovilian woman, born in the Dalit colony of a local village decided to marry a friend whom she loved, an Aurovilian man from the same village but belonging to a different caste. A few days before the marriage, the prospective groom was “abducted” or forcibly sent to a rehabilitation center for an indefinite period of time on allegations that he was a drug addict. Other than ascertaining that the man was living at the rehabilitation center, investigations proved to be futile. The immediate family, all of whom are Aurovilians, made it clear that they did not want any further interference in what to them was a very personal, family issue. The matter was dropped, especially as there was a perceived threat that upper caste villagers from the surrounding area may rise in revolt against Auroville. Given the absence of the groom, the marriage was called off, and the girl stoically accepted her fate. Was caste discrimination an issue here? Most likely, but it could not be proven. Despite the lack of proof, under current Indian laws, there was enough circumstantial evidence to register a complaint with the police, but in the end, a conscious choice was made not to pursue this option.

What the incident highlighted for me was the realization how naïve we are, as Aurovilians, in our eagerness to embrace this adventure of building a new society. We think, merely by embracing the ideal of human unity, by accepting the Mother’s invitation of “goodwill,” that we can all harmoniously move together, as a collective, towards a society, based on equality and freedom. Alas, it is not so easy, our collective unconscious, our cultural baggage of unexamined assumptions follows us into our new life here. This is even more true for local Aurovilians, for they never can have sufficient distance from their old life – the friends and extended family that they grew up with live just across the road and to a greater or lesser are present in their day-to-day life.

In the over four decades of its existence, the community of Auroville has learnt many things – there is now an increasing division of labour, increasing organization and management and professionalism in every sector – yet, it has never paused to reflect on what sort of society we are building. As a community, we have never asked how can we to bring to light our cultural shadows so that we can more fully embrace the ideal of human unity. Social psychology tells us that as individuals, we struggle in our personal and social lives with competing values: traditional and individual values such as the need for self-achievement, power, status, social respect compete with the universal human values of liberty, equality and fraternity. And it needs deep introspection at an individual and collective level to build a value-based society.

Alvin Toffler, the futurist, reportedly remarked that the illiterates of the 21st century are not the ones who cannot read and write, they are ones who cannot unlearn and re-learn. And I fear that we, especially those of us who joined Auroville as adults, count among those illiterates. Educating ourselves to be a better human being in order to build a better society should be our first and foremost goal. This is not an easy task. Merely attending talks on Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy or participating in the numerous popular positive psychology workshops being offered here is not likely to do the trick. Growth is a slippery slope, and it is largely up to the individual to embark upon and persist in this uncharted journey. It requires searing honesty, unflinching courage, and a relentless will to determine that the choices one makes and the actions one undertakes are in integrity with our professed ideals. And unlike the bricks and mortar with which we build the city, growth in the individual and the collective cannot be objectively measured and celebrated. And yet, this was precisely the task The Mother gave us, to create “a new society expressing and embodying the new consciousness.”