The unique status of Auroville is its protection. An interview with Dr. Karan Singh

Auroville Today: You have chaired the Auroville Foundation from the beginning, with two intermissions when Dr. M.S. Swaminathan and later Dr. Kireet Joshi were Chairman. How do you assess the perception of the Foundation in the community today?

Dr. Karan Sigh: It has greatly evolved. Earlier, there were two sets of tensions. One was between the community and the Auroville Foundation; and the other within the community itself. Regarding the first, I believe that successive Governing Boards have managed to make people realise the importance of the Auroville Foundation. We have not been trying to impose our views, but we have been able to provide an envelope of stability, safety and security. We also managed to improve the relationship with the Indian Government, which led, amongst other things, to Auroville getting a visa policy which is unique in India. The Foundation with its so-called ‘external’ elements of the Board, International Advisory Council and Secretary has become accepted as an integral part of Auroville. I am not saying that the cooperation is complete; but definitely it is much better than it was before.

Regarding the second set of problems, we have managed to iron out many difficulties within the community, such as, for example, the problems around the manifestation of the Matrimandir. This too, I think, has helped create awareness of the usefulness of the Foundation.

In your long tenure as Chairman, you have also had your personal ups and downs with Auroville. Would you like to comment?

I wouldn’t call them ‘personal ups and downs’. I never faced any personal antagonism. But the very position I was holding automatically brought about a certain amount of resentment, which of course I was aware of. I did succeed in getting over that. I may be wrong but my hunch is that today there is nothing like that left; in fact I was very moved by the way the community responded to the Board in this farewell gathering.

The remarkable thing is that you stuck to this job for a very long time. I remember you once told us that you never took the same job twice.

In some subtle way I have always been connected to Auroville. You could say that I was the first person responsible for the setting up of the Auroville Foundation. It was my speech in the Lok Sabha in the 1970s that set the ball rolling. There were all those reports about the fights between the Sri Aurobindo Society and the Aurovilians, and I urged the government to take action for the protection of Auroville. It triggered a debate. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who herself had a very close tie with The Mother, appointed in 1976 the Kulkarni committee to investigate, and its report led to the Auroville Emergency Provision Ordinance and afterwards to the Auroville Emergency Provision Act, 1980.

When that Act expired, I was no longer a Member of Parliament. Now it was the turn of Kireetbhai [Dr. Kireet Joshi, eds.], a great scholar of Sri Aurobindo’s works and a devotee of The Mother, who was then Special Secretary, Ministry of Education. He drafted the Auroville Foundation Bill, which Shri Shiv Shankar, the Minister of Education, then introduced in Parliament. This became the Auroville Foundation Act, 1988. Three years later, the government appointed me as its first Chairman. I asked Kireet to join the Board. He agreed, but to my regret he never attended a single meeting of the Board. I have never understood why, because he did have a high regard for me. For example once, after I had given a lecture on Sri Aurobindo at the Banaras University, Kireet came to me to tell me that he had seen Sri Aurobindo’s hand above my head. He would also tell me what Mother had told him about me.

I resigned from my chairmanship of the Foundation in 1996 on the mistaken assumption that there would be a conflict of interest between my upcoming membership of the Rajya Sabha and being Chairman of the Auroville Foundation, as this could be considered ‘an office of profit.’ It later turned out that there was no such conflict of interest. Ten years later, the Government passed an amendment to the Parliament (Prevention of Disqualification) Act in which it is now explicitly mentioned that a legislator can hold the office of Chairman, Secretary or Member of the Auroville Foundation.

Dr. M.S. Swaminathan took over when I resigned, and three years later it was the turn of Kireetbhai to become Chairman. He held the post from 1999 till 2004. Afterwards I was reappointed. I am very grateful to have been allowed to play this role which, I believe, wouldn’t have been possible without the blessing of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother.

Yet, you do not consider yourself a devotee of Sri Aurobindo but one of Shiva. You even built a Shiva temple on the beach nearby Auroville, and in your book ‘Meetings with Remarkable Women’, The Mother is not really given a special place.

I am a great admirer of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, but I am not an Aurobindonian in that sense or an Aurobindo scholar, even though I did my Ph.D. thesis on Sri Aurobindo’s political thoughts. [Prophet of Indian Nationalism, A Study of the Political Thought of Sri Aurobindo Ghosh (1893-1910), eds.]. I have perhaps a psychicor spiritual link with Sri Aurobindo and The Mother.

I met the Mother thrice. I first met her together with my mother and my wife, in 1956. The next time was much later, when I also met with Navajata and Frederick. I distinctly remember the third time, when Mother was much older. I knelt in front of her, and she looked at me for a long time and then said a long drawn out ‘Yeeeeeess.’ But I never learned what that exactly meant. Perhaps she saw me as an instrument for Her work. If so, I hope I have been able to answer to that expectation in my work for Auroville and for the Aurobindo community in the world, which for me includes the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, the Sri Aurobindo Society, Auroville and the Auroville International Centres.

In this regard I have been instrumental in getting many things done. I was a member of the National Committee for the Sri Aurobindo Centenary Celebrations which managed to acquire the Sri Aurobindo Bhavan in Baroda (now called Vadodara) whih is the house where Sri Aurobindo had lived for fourteen years, and the Sri Aurobindo Bhavan in Calcutta in the house where he was born.

Many years later, I managed to get Sri Aurobindo’s statue placed in the Indian Parliament, next to that of Vivekananda, and later a similar statue at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. That, in fact, is a marvel. In India, Sri Aurobindo and Vivekananda are venerated figures. But UNESCO, as a rule, doesn’t accept any statues in its compound.

They made an exception for Sri Aurobindo, I think not only because he was a mahayogi, but also because of his writings on the unity and future of mankind. It also helped that the General Assembly of UNESCO had passed all those resolutions in support of Auroville. I do not want to take egoistic pride in these achievements, but there is a sense of satisfaction.

Regarding my personal spiritual affiliation, it didn’t start with Shiva. In Hinduism there is the concept of the Kul Devata and the Ishta Devata. The Kul Devata is the family deity, which for us Singhs is Sri Rama, Vishnu’s eighth incarnation. Our family temple is the Raghunath temple in Jammu, dedicated to Sri Ram, which was built by one of my ancestors.

The Ishta Devata is one’s chosen deity – you can choose which particular form of the divine you feel most connected to. For me, this started with Krishna.

I was in my early twenties when I chanced on the book Among the Great by Dilip Kumar Roy, to whom Sri Aurobindo has written hundreds of letters. Dilip sent me later another of his books, Sri Aurobindo Came to Me, in which there is a substantial section with Sri Aurobindo’s comments on Dilip’s correspondence with a certain Sri Krishnaprem. I contacted Sri Krishnaprem, who was living with his disciple Sri Madhava Ashish in Mirtola, a small village near Almora. We developed a deep friendship and exchanged many letters. I would often visit the Mirtola Ashram and pray at its Radha-Krishna temple. That was my phase of Krishna worship. [A selection of this correspondence has been published in the book ‘Letters from Mirtola’, eds.]

The advantage of Hinduism is that there is no ultimate duality. Unlike many other religions, you can change course and change your affiliation to another deity, depending on your personal inner evolution. I turned to Shiva.

As a spiritual connect, I built in the year 2000 a small Shiva temple at the beach of Pudhukuppam, 12 kilometres north of Auroville. But it got destroyed in the tsunami of December 2004. I then asked Auroville architect Satprem Maïni from the Auroville Earth Institute to build a new temple, in the shape of a pyramid. It became the Sri Karneshwar Nataraja temple. I visit it every time I come here, including this time after the Board meeting and the farewell gathering with the community.

In your address to the community during this gathering you recalled your speech in the Lok Sabha in 1980 when you had spoken of Auroville as ‘an arrow shot into the future’ and that that arrow is still in flight. Would you care to elaborate?

What I really wanted to say is that Auroville is a work in progress. My concern is that so far we haven’t yet started building the city. A lot of buildings have come up, but the city proper still has to begin. So the Auroville arrow is in mid-air, which really places a heavy responsibility on the Aurovilians and on the Governing Board to see that its flight continues.

The true problem is: how to build Auroville? Building a single structure like the Matrimandir was by itself a marvel. If the Aurovilians had done nothing else, it would be considered an outstanding achievement. And the Aurovilians have done much besides. But to build a township is something different altogether. We neither have the funds nor do we own all the lands. It is not like building Chandigarh, the capital of the states of Punjab and Haryana, or Amaravati, the upcoming capital of Andra Pradesh, where the Government provided all the lands and the funds. With Auroville, it isn’t as simple. That’s why we are proceeding slowly – trying to get the lands and the funds.

Auroville’s unique situation is that it is called a township, but it is more comparable to a university campus: we offer learning possibilities and all the immoveable assets are owned by the Auroville Foundation. That puts big constraints on Auroville’s development where any institution or business wanting to come in can only do so by making donations to the Foundation to get a place to start its work.

It is an interesting comparison. I agree, you can call Auroville a living university. But The Mother’s concept was that of a township, therefore we have to move towards that ideal and build an urban settlement. The Auroville Foundation Act is a supportive act, it wasn’t a take-over by the Government of India, which is why Auroville is not treated and funded as a University. In fact, the unique status of Auroville is also its protection. Otherwise a big commercial or industrial undertaking could easily buy up the whole of Auroville and it would lose its autonomy.

So how do we build the city?

It’s a big question. A first condition is that the community needs to agree on where it wants to go. Today, we are particularly looking at two problems. One is the Galaxy concept and the need for a town plan. One would have thought that after almost 50 years the community would have come to some kind of consensus. But there is still division on it. As I see it, the Galaxy is a general visionary plan which will need to be adjusted to the ground realities from time to time. But it is for the community to sort this out. Perhaps it can agree on a ‘Galaxy Plus’ – keeping the old design, adjusted to the ground realities, perhaps with more modern earth-friendly buildings. But I do not want the Governing Board to get involved in that discussion.

The other topic is the desirability of the Tamil Nadu government setting up an external authority, a New Town Development Authority, for the Auroville area. Here too, the Board has not taken a stand. We expect that the Secretary will steer the discussion and advise the Board on the best line of action.

A positive impact may occur because of the planned 50th anniversary celebrations. I hope that Auroville’s golden jubilee can be used to the maximum to enrich and enhance the entire structure of Auroville.

This was the last meeting of this Governing Board and there are some apprehensions from the community about the next. Would you like to comment?

I know the Aurovilians are a little edgy but I can’t comment, it is not in my hands. It is for the Government of India to decide on the material plane and for Sri Aurobindo and The Mother on the spiritual plane. I was touched that both the International Advisory Council and the Working Committee have recommended that I be given another term, and I will be glad to do so. But if that doesn’t happen, that’s all right, I will have done my part.