Auroville as a modern utopia?

Auroville Today: Why did you choose Auroville for your thesis?

This takes me back to my undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley. My thesis mentor convinced me to focus on Auroville. I wasn’t planning to, and my first reaction was that it might be academically illegitimate for me to study my own community.  I also thought that Auroville might be too small and fringe an experiment to be considered relevant to research. He told me then it could be a Ph.D! I did my undergraduate thesis on Auroville, but felt I was just scratching the surface. I had gone deeper into understanding the why of Auroville, but I wanted to understand how the ideals were lived on a day-to-day basis: what was actually animating people to be part of this experiment, what were the challenges, and how were they addressing them? I thought this would be very relevant to understanding how a utopian vision could be put into practice, as well as being of relevance to similar experiments. So I decided to take this up as a Ph.D. 

What were your most important findings?

I discovered that institutionalization could be pre-figurative, meaning that it remains experimental, open to change, and encourages evolution towards given ideals. For example, observing meetings of the Budget Coordination Committee (BCC), these were evidently very different from a typical bureaucratic exercise where you have a policy and just apply it.  While the BCC have certain policies or guidelines, they never enforced them indiscriminately: they really brought care and attention to each situation, referring back to the core ideals. 

Interestingly, Sri Aurobindo spoke about a subjective society, which, hopefully, Auroville is starting to be, as an intermediary stage between a society governed by ego to one governed by the divine, in which people would invent tools, means, frameworks that would contain elements of both – as prefigurative of the gnostic society as possible, but still only approximating it. So the ways of organising would be temporary, open to being changed, because they would be receptive to a deeper understanding of what is needed to shift for the society at large. Overall,  I think we’ve mastered the flexible part but now we need to start thinking about not just continually changing structures and policies but about how these can continue to evolve towards the ideal. 

Another key insight concerned the role of spirituality in “activism”, or active citizenship. A common critique of spiritual practice is that it is removed from the real world, and that it discourages people from being change-makers because they accept that nothing needs to change, as it is part of a deeper purpose. What I found in my research on Auroville is that not only are the spiritual ideals at the heart of this community, but they really inspire people to act within it. After all, Mother said that Auroville is a place for practicing karma yoga. I also think spirituality has been key to sustaining this utopian experiment over so many years – it’s challenging to work towards high ideals and feel as though one is falling short. The Mother’s felt presence, vision, and charismatic authority is still very strong: it is one of the main ‘glues’ of this community.

My other key finding concerns the power of experimentation. The Pour Tous Distribution Centre (PTDC) started with conversations among a few friends but was able to scale up over time to become an institution. Similarly, recent changes to the Entry Policy started with a few concerned individuals who got together and then presented it to the larger community.  I think one of the takeaways from this is that we need to keep experimenting in small groups because these are very important sites of exchange which can end up developing into something much bigger. 

In Auroville anybody can suggest and implement a project or propose a policy, so there really is space for residents to be conscious and actively shape their society. I think this is rare; even in representative democracies this is not possible – only elected officials are able to design, present, and decide on new policies.

Let’s examine your thesis in a little more detail. Firstly, what exactly does pre-figurative utopianism mean?

I use pre-figurative utopianism to describe what I see as the utopian praxis of Auroville. It is not based on a blueprint of a perfect world that is predetermined, like 19th century utopian experiments, but about figuring out as we go how to bring our ideals into present practice. It is about starting to engage with those ideals within the limitation of the present and our present consciousness.

To me this really links with the ideal in the Charter, of Auroville being a site of unending education.  We are an experimental society that is constantly learning from our experiments and growing with these. In previous blueprint conceptions of utopia the ongoing transformative aspects were not at all taken into account. The assumption was if you just organise people differently, you will achieve an ideal society.

But what about the Charter, and core texts like A Dream and To Be an Aurovilian? Aren’t these blueprints?

If you look at what The Mother said about the economy, for example, for which there were certain elements that were clearly expressed, these were nonetheless not detailed or determined as social systems to be applied – there remains the underlying understanding that one needs to experiment and work with these founding ideals.   

Why did you choose governance and economy as the topics for studying prefigurative utopianism in Auroville? For many Aurovilians, these are far from being shining examples of a new future. 

I took these two areas because they are two of the biggest ‘thorns’ in our collective body and I thought there was a need to study and reflect upon them rather than upon our more obvious successes.  

You identify what you consider to be some of the pre-figurative aspects of our present governance system, like practices that encourage the embodiment of spiritually-centred states, and the opportunity for changing the structures and forms. But it could be argued that these do not necessarily lead us towards the ideal. For example, it is not clear that our highly participatory, horizontal form of governance will necessarily lead us towards what Mother defined as divine anarchy. 

I think our horizontal form of governance with its non-hierarchical, consensual modes of decision-making would be considered very progressive by the rest of the world. However, from the point of view of Auroville, I’m not so sure. I don’t think that horizontal governance and what Mother wanted in terms of governance can be conflated, and I absolutely don’t think that the participatory form of governance alone will make it a more conscious process, or that this is the only form through which divine anarchy can be attained. In fact, I think we may need to explore beyond this mode as it’s definitely not working satisfactorily, even though it is much lauded elsewhere.

PTDC is one of the examples you provide of prefigurative utopianism in relationship to our economy. In its collective accounting and spirit of service, PTDC is clearly an attempt to advance us towards our ideals. Yet many of the participants use it as just another shop. Doesn’t this suggest that even if you offer new forms, it is extremely difficult to change old ways?

I think PTDC was more successful at the beginning because the people who signed up early really wanted to participate in the experiment; perhaps this became diluted over time. I think the challenge with these types of experiments is that we need to keep educating each other the experiment, and to keep exchanging about how we are doing it and why we are doing it. We all have moments when it is difficult to stay inspired individually or to reflect individually on what we are doing with our lives, but we can be very inspired by each other. 

From your study, do you feel there are enough positive experiments happening in the present Auroville to move us beyond the inertia of the old ways, all the things that make people resist something new, like issues of personal insecurity?

I do think there are many positives; even in our present governance system and economy there are more forward-looking than backward-looking aspects. But I think we should be very concerned about resistance to change. Change is hardest when it starts touching questions of personal security, or when basic needs have not been met, because if people’s basic needs aren’t met they don’t have the bandwidth to consider new ways.  So we have to work hard as a society to ensure that those things are taken care of. 

Were there major surprises that resulted from your study?

Yes. Before I undertook this research, I was not sure whether our ideals were being articulated and embodied in our community practice. The extent to which this is the case defied my expectations.  I had not realised that the figures and work of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo continued to be so deeply 

influential.

Again, I did not think I would end up questioning the merit of horizontal forms of political organising, or suggesting that bureaucracy and institutionalisation might have pre-figurative potential when they facilitate desired alternative social relations and remain flexible and responsive to evolution.

My understanding of the relationship with the Indian government was also one of the big surprises for me. If one looks at the history of intentional communities around the world, one sees that a lot of them were disbanded because of government pressure: either they didn’t conform to the law or were threatening the status quo.  So then I realized that it is actually very unique for an alternative society like Auroville to have the support and recognition of a government.  In fact, I think the Government of India has been uniquely facilitative of this project.  

Finally, something that really surprised me happened during my in-depth interviews with people whose views and opinions I had not been able to relate to at all. I began to understand how their approach connected to our ideals.  That, for me, was really powerful. It didn’t mean that I could agree with them, but now I could understand and accept how we could still be in this together. So, once again, this points to the need for better forms of dialogue, understanding and sharing.