The second caravan: a modern odyssey

In early 1974 an Aurovilian, Jean-Claude Bieri, who was on a visit to France, suggested forming another caravan to take a large number of people to Auroville. Christine Devin, Nicole Elfi and Shankar, who were working in the office of the Auroville French Association in Paris, enthusiastically took up the challenge of organizing it. While Jean-Claude went to Germany to purchase a second-hand Mercedes bus, they circulated news about the caravan in their bulletin, and began collecting names.

By September about 30 people had signed up, and their details had been sent to Shyamsunder, the Auroville liaison appointed by Mother (Mother had left her body in November, 1973). Not everybody was immediately accepted by him. Nicole and Christine were rejected because they not have sufficient funds to stay for one year in Auroville, Claude Arpi because he did not treat the application form with the proper respect (“it seemed so old world”), and Paul Pinthon was invited to apply again in a few years. However, Paul wrote back to Shyamsunder that he had decided to come now and nothing would stop him, and when Shankar wrote a similar comment on behalf of the others, the issue was not raised again.

By this time the Mercedes bus had been repaired and converted, and two vans had joined the fleet as it was planned to transport considerable equipment to Auroville, in addition to the luggage of the caravanners, some of whom did not expect to return to France. The luggage included Claude’s dental equipment, pullovers for Tibetans, Paul’s record collection and a friend’s set of Playboy magazines. He had planned to sell them en route, but finally was persuaded to leave them behind because of anticipated problems at border crossings.

The journey of 13,000 kilometres would last two months (for most of them) and would take them through Italy, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, before reaching India. It did not begin auspiciously. While the rest of the caravan waited in Provence, one lorry that was meant to bring equipment failed to show up – it was rumoured that all the wheels had been stolen – and was never seen again. When the rest finally set off, on the first evening the driver of one of the vans managed to demolish the roof of a petrol station when he miscalculated the height. The van survived, but the bill for the damage to the petrol station was sent to the Association, much to Shankar’s chagrin.

Eastern Europe was a new and not always pleasant experience for the caravanners. In Bulgaria they were stopped by large men with guns – “We didn’t know if they were gangsters, army or police” said Hervé – who demanded to see their passports, and in Yugoslavia the caravan had camped for the night when the police told them to move on because they mistook them for a circus.

It was with some relief, then, that the caravan reached Istanbul, gateway to Asia. It was here that Claude experienced his first Turkish bath. “One of my travel companions was convinced (and he convinced me quickly) that the first thing to do was to find a Turkish bath, to ‘wash away’ all our fatigue and tension. Indeed, we soon found one of those famous baths (for men only, of course). I don’t think I’ve ever experienced such pain, right down to the cells of my body, inflicted by the huge paws of the Turkish masseur, and all the while my companion kept telling me, ‘the more it hurts, the better it is for the body’.”

In eastern Turkey, the caravan stopped by a river one evening. The place seemed secluded, so a few of the women took off most of their clothes and began to bathe. However, the place was not as secluded as they had thought. They were being watched by an excited group of young men. That evening, as the group was preparing supper, they suddenly became aware that they had visitors: the young men were gathering around. It was a dangerous moment. Luckily, the mayor of the nearby town came along with his dogs. “He told us we could stay the night but had to move on in the morning,” remembers Christine. “This man spent the whole night guarding us with his dogs, and we also took turns ourselves to guard the camp. We didn’t sleep. Next day we resumed our journey at full speed.”

Iran was next. One day they were camped next to the Caspian when a man came along and invited them back to his place. “It was huge,” remembers Paul Pinthon, “with many rooms. Incredible as it may seem, this man, who was a general of the Shah of Iran, knew about Sri Aurobindo and Mother. He gave us caviar and vodka and let us sleep on the floor of his palace.”

It was a welcome break for the caravanners from the daily routine of long hours on the road and setting up and taking down camp. By this time, many of the roles had been established. Jean-Claude, Michelle Cortella and Jacques were the bus drivers, Hervé and Guy the van drivers, Paul Vincent, the tour guide who made sure they stopped at the right time every day, sat resplendent in his red robes at the front of the bus, and Paul Pinthon took responsibility for handling passport matters at border crossings.

By this time, also, differences were beginning to emerge among the caravanners. At first these were minor, like issues about sharing chores like the cooking and washing-up. Then there were those who wanted to get to Auroville as quickly as possible and those who wanted to do some sightseeing on the way. And then there were ‘the forcings’. “The forcings,” explains Christine, “were the times when we couldn’t find the right place to stop for the night and we would start discussing where to stop. Then Hervé, would say, ‘Discuss all you like but I am going to keep driving,’ and we would end up driving through the night.”

“I had everybody’s luggage with me,” says Hervé, “so they were obliged to follow.”

There were other tensions, remembers Christine, as people’s propensities and capacities began to emerge. “There were the complainers and the preachers. There were the hard workers who did the shopping, cooking and dishes, and there were those who only came to the fire when the soup was served. There were those who wanted to sleep in the morning and those who took responsibility for getting us going on time. There were the professional protesters who wanted daily meetings and argued about whether decisions should be made by a relative majority or an absolute majority, there were the reasonable ones who tried to discipline the unruly, and then there were those who remained stubbornly silent. In other words, this group of individuals was already a mini Auroville.”

Surprisingly, one of the things they never talked about en route was Auroville, in spite of the fact that Auroville was their destination and that three of them – Jean-Claude, Paul Vincent and Jacques Chapdelaine, a Canadian – had been there before. “We were more interested in the new things we were discovering on the way,” explains Paul Pinthon, “and, anyway, the major topic was always who was going to do the cooking. If nobody cooked, there would have been a revolution!”

The cultures they were passing through also exerted their own pressure on the group. Claude remembers that the people of Iran were very tense. “You felt the power of the ayatollahs.”

At first Afghanistan felt far more relaxed. “Nature was so beautiful, the air so clean,” says Christine, “and the people from the mountains had such a noble quality to them”.

They stopped in Herat, where the only vehicles were tongas. “It was like stepping into the Middle Ages,” says Christine. “At night you would hear nothing but the bells of the tongas. It was beautiful.”

However, there was another side to Afghanistan. They were passing through a Pashtun area and the army and tribes people constantly stopped the caravan and demanded money to proceed. And it was in Afghanistan that the most serious incident of the whole journey took place.

Guy was driving one of the vans along the road when a man suddenly appeared from behind a bus. Guy could not stop in time, the man was knocked down and his leg broken. Hervé, who was also in the van, takes up the story. “We stopped immediately and were surrounded by about a hundred people. A man with a gun came into the van, and we had to take the injured man to the next village, where we had to pick up an official before taking the man to hospital. It took this official five or six hours to say goodbye to his family because we had to go back to Herat, and meanwhile the guy was groaning in the back of the van.

“We took him to hospital, then we came back to the village with a police escort. We parked the van outside the office of the local chief of police, which was just a small room. The chief of police got a guy out of jail to play an instrument, and meanwhile somebody offered him a trout. He started cooking it in front of us while the other one was playing this instrument in the corner, and then we all ate together. Later, he sent the musician back to jail (the police chief obviously only released him when he wanted a musical accompaniment to his meals) and asked us to sleep on the floor, but we insisted on sleeping in the van for security.

“In the morning, we found we were free to do whatever we wanted. So for some weeks, while we waited for the guy to be released from hospital, every morning we would go to the baker for bread and then we settled down for the day. A few times we had to go to court to answer questions. There was a jail in town but we never went to jail. I was relaxed. I was reading Mother’s Entretiens and eating well, but Guy was suffering. He wanted to get away as soon as possible.”

Guy was not the only one who was suffering. The rest of the caravan stopped in Kabul and held many intense meetings about what they should do next. “The differences between our different groupings, the ‘vitalists’, the ‘supramentals’, the ‘democrats’, the ‘I don’t cares’ and the hard workers were increasing,” remembers Claude. “Winter was coming and tensions mounted because we did not know if the Khyber Pass, (between Afghanistan and Pakistan), would be open much longer. Should we leave or wait for Guy and Hervé to be released?

“All this was the subject of many debates, meetings, disputes, altercations. The actual human unity was not always obvious. Finally, it was decided that Christine and myself would remain and try to free our two fellow prisoners with the assistance of the Embassy of France, while the others continued on to India.”

When the French Embassy staff proved as sleepy and uncooperative as everybody else in Kabul, Christine and Claude took the train to Amritsar, and finally caught up with the rest of the caravan in Delhi.

The first contact with India was a significant moment for some of the caravanners. “The Golden Temple in Amritsar was very beautiful,” remembers Claude. “I attended the reading of the Guru Granth Sahib, the holy book of the Sikhs, and it was my first contact with this profound India. It was another world in which we had entered ... to stay.

Forty years later, we forget sometimes what makes India so special, but if one is willing to take a step back, we can always find this India that welcomed us so warmly in 1974 and ... preserved us.”

Paul Pinthon had a similar deep experience at the border crossing itself.

“In Pakistan we had felt the hatred in the streets because the women in our caravan were not wearing chadors. When I entered India, the first thing I saw were women, they were so magnificent, so feminine, and then birds. It was like a welcoming. It was a very strong moment.”

Once the caravan reached India, the tourist lobby among the caravanners finally won out, and quite a few side trips were made to places like Agra, Brindavan and Khajuraho, as the caravan made its way towards Pondicherry (Claude, Paul Pinthon, Nicole and Christine went to Brindavan and Mathura to avoid even looking at the Taj Mahal, which was right in front of their noses at one time. But that is another story).

Near Hyderabad, the bus hit a speed breaker while travelling too fast and the front of the vehicle collapsed. “There followed one of the most fantastic repairs that I have ever done in my life,” remembers Paul Vincent. He and Jean-Claude ran a large wooden beam underneath the bus and joined this to a kind of mast. The collapsed front and back of the vehicle were then tied with strong ropes to this mast. Incredibly, this makeshift repair held up until the caravan reached Auroville.

The main part of the caravan, 35 people, finally arrived in Aspiration on December 20th, 1974. “My first impression of Auroville was that it was so beautiful,” remembers Christine, “the nature was very beautiful.” Amazingly, while accommodation was already scarce in those days, everybody was allocated a place to stay, some in Aspiration itself, others in communities like Utility.

Some weeks later, Hervé and Guy finally arrived. They had been released from ‘trout’ custody after a few weeks, but their adventures were not over. When they reached the Pakistan border, the border guard demanded the transit permit for the van and they realized they had mislaid it. Hervé went into the back of the vehicle, scribbled something on a piece of paper, poured a little oil over it, then presented it to the border guard. He stamped it without comment.

However, when they reached the Indian border, the Indian guards were not so obliging. When Guy and Hervé could not produce the correct import document for the vehicle, the border police confiscated the vehicle. “They cocooned it completely in the kind of paper you wrap samosas in,” said Hervé. Hervé and Guy tried for some days to get help from Pondicherry and Auroville, but nobody responded. In the end, they took the train to Pondicherry. “When the Toujours Mieux people heard that all the promised equipment had been confiscated at the border, they were furious,” remembers Hervé. Eventually, an Aurovilian did fly up to negotiate the release of the van and most of its contents. But Paul Pinthon’s prized collection of records was never seen again.

Today, only seven of those thirty four caravanners are still living here: Claude Arpi, Christine Devin, Paul Pinthon, Paul Vincent, Hervé, Jerome and Gundolf. In fact, many of the original group did not stay long. “Everybody had their own motive for coming,” says Claude, “And it soon became clear that not everybody was coming for Auroville.”

“Some had dreams,” explains Paul Pinthon, “but their dreams were too far from the reality. Some people thought Auroville was already built. It was a big shock for them when they saw how little was here, and that the Matrimandir was just four pillars sticking out of the earth. They were just not ready for this. For me, however, it was exactly the right time.”

So what was the significance of the second caravan to those who had made the journey?

For some, like Paul Pinthon, it was an invaluable introduction to Auroville and the Aurovilians. “The caravan helped us, prepared us, for what we were coming to. I took the caravan as a tool to learn, because I knew it was a kind of mini-Auroville.”

For others, like Christine, it was a unique adventure. “We sung around a fire with kids in Anatolia; we tasted caviar washed down with vodka on the banks of the Caspian Sea. We visited the bazaars of Istanbul and Kabul and politely refused to barter one (or two) of the girls for fifty camels. We negotiated with the Afghan authorities for the release of our friends. We drank Turkish coffee on the shore of the Black Sea, ate Yugoslav yogurt that tasted like cement, Iranian naans the size of carpets, black bread of the Afghan military and brown rice – we were all macrobiotic in those days – transported from France in large jute bags. We camped at the foot of the Taj Mahal, in the middle of the temples of Khajuraho, and we prayed in the sacred dust of Brindavan.”

And what about the significance of this caravan for Auroville?

Paul Vincent felt that a kind of group spirit had been created that would survive long after the caravanners arrived in Auroville. “It would be the seed that would form the body of the revolt of Auroville against the oppression of the so-called ‘leaders’ and ‘owner’ of Auroville in 1975. If these people had been able to predict what was going to happen, they would never have allowed us to come to Auroville.”

Paul Pinthon did not feel that the caravanners ever ‘bonded’ and that the arrival of the second caravan did not change anything immediately. “But we were all full of enthusiasm; we were new, we were fresh. In that sense the second caravan brought young blood in order to participate in that fight with the Society.”

Claude remembers that they immediately started to change things. “We started to clean up the Health Centre and change things at the school. There was one Bengali devotee teaching at the school. He would bring water in the morning from the Samadhi, and every student had to stand in line and get a drop of that water. We stopped that, but they didn’t like it at all, the Ashram people who were coming to Auroville. The old establishment got a bit tense.”

There were to be no more caravans. Within a few years the overland route to India was almost impassable and Auroville was no longer the ‘promised land’ of the early 1970s: life here became progressively harder as the struggle with the Society intensified. Yet, for all its shortcomings, the caravan symbolized something of the spirit of those times and the heartfelt response to Mother’s call – “I invite you to the great adventure” – that inspired, and continues to inspire, so many of those early Aurovilians.

In that sense, the caravan never stopped rolling…

This article is partly based on articles by Christine and Claude in the February, 2015 issue of La Revue d’Auroville.