Auroville 80

However, Nadia Loury’s bilingual (French/English) photographic book, Auroville 80, helps us look at the 80s with new eyes. For what she captures are not the iconic moments but, as the sub-title suggests, ‘the poetry of daily life’. So we see Aurovilians working in the fields, meeting under the Banyan, drinking tea at the Matrimandir, organizing food deliveries at Pour Tous. It could become a catalogue of trivia, yet through Nadia’s lens something else shines through: a sense of perseverance, dedication, fraternity and even a quiet joy in what was clearly still a struggle to survive. 

Indeed, one of the surprises of this book is how basic Auroville still was in the 1980s. Many Aurovilians were living under keet, struggling to erect the first rickety Cretan windmills, crowbaring holes in the unforgiving laterite. Yet even as green shoots were pushing through that soil, in the same way these photographs show that the foundations of a collective life were being laid in education, town planning, governance and health care. 

And while the Matrimandir space frame emerged in its tessellated glory, everywhere, it seems, the Auroville children were having fun.  

This is a lovely book. It’s no easy thing to capture the texture, the magic, of the quotidian but Nadia succeeds. Along with her sensitive commentary, her fine photographs allow us to touch the heart of an experience which, while it may seem foreign to more recent residents, still fires the soul of many of those early explorers.  

Auroville 80: the poetry of daily life. Published by Auroville Press 2020. Available at the Visitors Centre bookshop Rs 1050 for Aurovilians, Rs 1500 others. Also on auroville.com. Price in Europe 25 euros (+ mailing charges). People there can contact Nadia at [email protected]. The profits from this book will go towards land purchase via the Acres for Auroville land campaign.