Auroville Press celebrates 40 years

“Much of the Press’s history has disappeared in the fogs of memory,” says Claude. “When I came to Auroville, we started L’Encens d’Auroville, the incense manufacturing unit which is now called Maroma. The year was 1976; the team consisted of Paul Pinthon, André Tardeil, who left soon afterwards, and ‘Small’ Patrice (Marot). My job was printing the packaging, which I did at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press in Pondicherry. Every day I would cycle down, along the narrow canyon, and then later back up to Auroville. The Ashram Press was run by Mr. Ranganathan, a wonderful gentleman with whom over the years I developed an intense contact. Basically, he taught me everything about printing. But we wanted to have our own press. With his help, and with our own means, we managed to buy a small letter press.”

“The Auroville Press - that is, the small letter press - was located in a small space in what is now the Pour Tous building in Aspiration. But we badly needed to expand. We then got a building in Fraternity, the place where you now find Mason & Co, the chocolate unit, and later also the building in Fraternity that is colloquially called ‘the Flying Saucer’ or ‘the Hamburger’. We employed more people, and started doing everything connected with printing: making hand-made paper, printing, screen printing, book binding and so on. We even had a laboratory where we made the plates, and a huge Repro camera for big films which was made for us by Lorenzo at Toujours Mieux (now called Aureka).”

“But by the end of the 1980s, we felt the need to have our own large press,” continues Claude. “We were ambitious; we wanted to print L’Agenda de Mère. Satprem, in those years, had a huge influence in Auroville. But where to get such a press? Our small letter press was not suitable for such a big work.

“Micheline Etévenon, who at the request of Satprem had started the Institut de Récherches Évolutives in Paris, helped out. She purchased for us a second-hand Dominant offset machine from Czechoslovakia. At the time, India’s import duties were high. We didn’t have the money. But then the administrators of Auroville, Justice L.P. Nigam and Shri P.N. Ojha, helped out. After months of filing forms and going up and down to Chennai, they got us the duty exemption. Then, one day at 5 o’clock in the morning, a truck arrived with a huge crate. Our ‘baby’, the offset machine, had finally arrived.

“Another problem was how to operate the press. We ourselves had little idea. Abha and I went to Bombay and met with J.R.D. Tata, who agreed to help. His Tata Press then trained two Aurovilians, Pascal and Marc-André, and by the time the machine arrived, the two trained printers were ready to start work. But our ambition to print L’Agenda de Mère in French went unfulfilled. Micheline and Satprem wanted it to be done as soon as possible, so it was printed in France.

“At the time there was another Press in Auroville, the Auro Press, run by Mr. Barun Tagore in the building where we are now. Barun was related to the Sri Aurobindo Society, and he became involved in the struggles between the Sri Aurobindo Society and the Aurovilians. There was a court case, which Auroville ultimately won. Barun vacated the building and we moved in.”

“I worked at the time in Pour Tous at Aspiration,” says Christine. “The Auro Press of Barun Tagore was next door, so I visited some times. I stopped working for Pour Tous in 1985 when the work on the Hindi Agenda started, and moved to the Press. Sir C.P.N. Singh, who later became Governor of Uttar Pradesh and who was a friend and the mentor of Dr. Kireet Joshi, had found us a highly qualified translator, a wonderful man.” “But as he was doing tantric pujas for a minimum of 7 hours day, the translation took years,” adds Claude, smiling. “And then the big job was to print the first three volumes of the Hindi version of L’Agenda de Mère.”

“After Aurelec, the Auroville computer company, had started operations, we bought a computer with 8-inch floppy disc drives. One day, after two months of hard labour, the floppy failed. In despair we called Aurelec, who asked if we had a backup? For sure we hadn’t. The work was lost and we learned a hard lesson,” says Christine, laughing.

“At that time we worked with one of the largest presses in Chennai, Chandamama , which was well-known for publishing small children’s magazines in all the languages of India. They had a linotron, the ancestor of the typesetting. We would bring our 8-inch floppy, and they would create galleys, which we then had to proof. Serge had meanwhile created his own unit, Saraswati, and helped us doing the montage. If there was a mistake, for example when a wrong Hindi letter had been used, we would need to go back to Madras to retype that one letter, and then Serge would do the work of cutting out the wrong one and pasting in the right letter. But it earned us a pat on the back from Shri Narasimha Rao, who visited the Press and was very impressed that we were printing in Hindi.”

“By then we had also printed The Aim of Life, a book edited by Kireet Joshi, and, at his request, all the brochures of the International Youth Year held in Auroville. We were fully self-sustainable. At some point in time we employed almost 20 people. Kireet remained our patron in the years to come, during which we printed books such as The Good Teacher and The Good Pupil and around 30 monographs.”

“Over the years, our structure changed and some activities were split off. Papyrus became a separate unit dealing with paper; Lumière started screen printing; Auroville Press Publishers began selling books; and we opened the Wild Seagull bookshop. The Press was doing the design, printing and binding. All these units worked closely together.”

“By the end of the 1980s we started having labour problems,” says Claude. “One employee became ‘President of the Workers Union of Auroville Press’ and we entered a long period of endless discussions, ranging from demands for salary increase to the quality of the cookies served at tea time - the Marie biscuits we served were apparently indigestible: they called them ‘dog biscuits’. We talked and talked, and so did our advisers, Dilip Kapur and Meenakshi. All to no avail. One day, after an emotional outburst, they all wrote and submitted their resignations. This self-resignation meant that we did not need to pay them compensation but only outstanding salaries and gratuity. I took a loan, we paid them off, and we closed the unit for a few months. Afterwards we started again, this time on a much smaller scale.”

“But those were funny times,” says Christine, “and we lived with many tensions. For example, the very fact of buying a computer from Aurelec was a cause for conflict, as the management of Aurelec had refused to be taken over by the Government - they’d started a court case which they ultimately lost. Our interaction with them was seen as a betrayal by some.”

“And there were other tensions,” adds Claude. “There was a religious war going on between those who were closer to Satprem and those who were more distant. Almost every evening there were emotional scenes in Aspiration Kitchen. If that had a consequence for the Press, it was that we did not get the order to print the English translation of the 13 volumes of the Mother’s Agenda. To our regret, it was printed at the Thompson Press in Chennai.”

“Claude withdrew from the Press in 1991,” says Luisa. “Serge and I had just returned from a self-imposed exile in France - together with some other French Aurovilians we had left Auroville in 1988- and we were invited to take over the Press in this building in Aspiration. It was a godsend. Olivier and Christian also came back. We started printing the books for Mira Aditi - the Indian outlet for The Agenda and Satprem’s books - such as his The Adventure of Consciousness in Hindi and others.”

“Sometimes we lost Auroville clients,” says Claude. “A major one was Auroville Today; the editors objected to Serge’s decision to only print what he approved of, which they saw as censorship. Other Auroville units left for price reasons. Lumière even had to close after Maroma decided to terminate the silk-screening of their incense packets. Luckily, SAIIER and Savitri Bhavan and other units and individuals continue being staunch supporters of the Press. We have been publishing almost all of SAIIER’s publications, Savitri Bhavan’s Tamil and English newsletters and Shraddhavan’s book series The English of Savitri. But there are quite a few Aurovilians and Auroville units who do not feel the need to support another Auroville unit. For example, not all Aurovilians who receive a grant from the Government of India to write and publish a book ask us for a quotation.”

“It is not because the quality of our work is lacking,” says Luisa. “When some time ago Marc-André visited Auroville - he had left Auroville many years ago to start working in one of the largest printing houses in France - he complimented us on the quality of the illustrated children’s books as ‘truly excellent’. Over the years, Auroville Press Publishers has been able to maintain those high standards of printing, such as in Turning Points, a coffee-table book by photographer Nadia Loury; a series of illustrated children’s books; a book on organic cultivation of cashews; the book about J.R.D. Tata by Frederick; and many others. And there are a few very interesting projects in the pipeline. We have also started doing screen printing.”

“But the future is uncertain,” says Christine. “Before COVID, we were doing somehow OK. But since the pandemic, it has been difficult. We don’t know how long we can survive. In Chennai, two major printing presses closed down as they could not compete with Chinese imports. And of course, neither can we.”

“We came with a spirit of service, not to do business,” says Luisa. “Auroville Press is a means for our karma yoga, but we will never work 24/7 in order to be competitive. Moreover, except for Jaya, we all are at a period of our lives where we still are active but no longer have the drive ‘to go for it’. All of us are ready to do something else. For the Press to become commercially viable, it will need a massive capital influx and a lot of fresh young energy.”

“Auroville Press will continue in the niche market of special products, such as illustrated children’s books,” says Jaya, who is being groomed to manage the Press in the future. “I expect that the sales in our bookshop will pick up again now that India has re-opened its borders. For foreign visitors are very interested in the publications we sell, most of which are on spirituality, on integral yoga, on Indian culture, and on the many aspects of Auroville, including writings by Auroville authors. We also want to increase our online sales through Amazon and Auroville.com. So I am not pessimistic about the future of the Press. We have an excellent team, we function as a family and each one has been trained for many years to look for perfection in all that they do. Usually people working with us appreciate this atmosphere and want to come back to us for their next work.”