Auroville Dream and Reality: an anthology

When Akash Kapur told me some years ago that Penguin India was keen to publish a collection of Auroville writing, my first reaction was, ‘Why?’ I was convinced that we didn’t have enough good writers to warrant such a publication, and that if something was somehow cobbled together and Penguin went ahead and published it, the result would be, at best, an embarrassment for all concerned.

Auroville: Dream and Reality proves how wrong I was for it contains writing of the highest quality and originality. It is also by far the best anthology of Aurovilian writing that I have come across.

What makes it so successful? Well, quite a lot is due to the editor, Akash Kapur’s, decision to focus upon a particular kind of writing. Noting in the Introduction that the writing that emerges from Auroville often has an ‘abstract quality’ because it focuses upon the ‘ideal and philosophies rather than the salt of daily life’, he decided to favour pieces that ‘dug below the surface of grand policy statements, ambitious blueprints and (often whitewashed) portraiture’.

The result is that much of the best writing in this collection has an immediacy that seems to draw directly from the grain of the Auroville experience. Here, for example, is Bob Lawlor, one of the very first pioneers, on working in the midday sun of the tropics:

“At noon one looks into the face of the worker that hands the stone slab to you, and into the face of the worker to which you hand it on, and sees that the slightly staggering bodies are empty and hollow now. God sometimes provides a space above the body of labour into which the essence of the being can escape during those sun-seared hours of pressure and fatigue. The bodies are moving, the dance continues, the work goes on.”

But even in the sun-seared landscapes of the early Auroville, amid the daily struggles to survive, the focus upon ‘essence’ of being and the search for something else is never far away.

This intense conflation of material struggle and spiritual search seems to be a keynote of the early Auroville experience and it required a particular kind of person: not a hero in the grand romantic mold, but somebody very different. Namas understood this one evening while observing fellow Aurovilians in Unity Kitchen. “I saw it in several eyes and bodies, in the sudden almost trance-like immobility striking randomly here and there, sudden motionless silence falling in between the mass of food and talk.

I saw it in myself, how, suddenly, between thoughts, with a mouth full of soup and a spoon poised for more, I was suddenly doing nothing but staring at the wall, all my life and energy focused purely and stupidly on nothing but pushing, pushing against that wall.

And I couldn’t help but be impressed. Not so much with myself – oh, a little with myself – but with the quality of the bodies gathered together here in Auroville. They know how to endure those bodies. It is perhaps all they know, but still it is a kind of genius. The idiot savants of endurance, obstinate as mules.”

Those early Aurovilians did not look upon themselves as writers. In fact, ‘literature’, great writing, was something they eschewed. As Savitra put it in his introduction to the first issue of The Auroville Review, “We want simply to convey something of Auroville, something that comes from our life here. We don’t want to just play with words and weave brilliant verbal canvases. We want to express Auroville.” And, he asks, among all the great writers of the world “where is that one drop of the Truth?”

The search for the ‘True’ required new ways of looking as well as new forms of expression because, as Ruud Lohhman pointed out, a ‘city with a soul’ cannot be explained in conventional terms. Consequently, some of these writers seek other approaches. They fictionalise Auroville, or they cast it into metaphors that help us see with new eyes. Here is Raymond Thépot on the frequent clashes that took place between Aurovilians:

“Flare-ups do occur between complementary poles. There are also contradictory poles, which will have to wear out their opposition and discover that they need each other, integrated within a wider circuit. Meanwhile, it may be that the crackling tension sparking on and on between them is fruitful for everyone. The most stable relationship seems to be triangular: one is not sure where the apex of the triangle is located but all the connecting threads do pass over this pulley, without which nothing would hold up.”

In his Introduction, Akash speaks of wanting to bring Auroville writing out of the shadows. This he has triumphantly done. He also suggests that the anthology could be an opportunity to begin defining the contours of a literature of Auroville. Does such literature exist?

It’s hard to say. However, what is apparent from this collection is that certain themes keep emerging. One is the primacy of experience over philosophy. Ruud Lohman returned to Auroville with the idea of writing a thesis on Jesus and Sri Aurobindo. But he soon realised that this was pointless as “the dialogue between the Great cannot be understood mentally but only by a plunge into identification”.

Distrust of the mind and of conventional ideas is strong in the early writers. David Wickenden defines the choice confronting Aurovilians as being “to release the old ideas, attune to Auroville’s naturally evolving reality, and trust the external conditions would work themselves out as they should, or to resist, hold fast to the concepts, and try to twist stuff, or otherwise coerce reality into the mould”. It’s a challenge which remains with us today.

Another recurring theme is that outer manifestation depends upon radical inner change. As Bob Lawlor puts it, “That red hot landscape by the sea in south India will be transformed into a City of the Dawn – if the inner landscape of human nature can change and evolve towards the spirit”.

Transformation accelerated by the intensity of the search for ‘the true’ and by the challenging material conditions (which are always taken as a spur to change) is another leitmotif. David Wickenden, describing Angad’s difficulty of getting even the simplest things done in constructing a pottery, characterises it as Auroville’s “peculiar alchemy”. In another context, contemplating the radicalism of Auroville’s early society which sees westerners in loincloths driving bullock carts and villagers designing windmills, he realises that “This in itself makes possible, even inevitable, rather powerful human mutations and quieter, more immediate, fruitful, syntheses.”

This anthology contains writing (as well as photography and cartoons) from the beginning up to the present, but it is clear that the 1970’s and 1980’s was a golden period of Auroville writing. Somehow, those early Aurovilians lived with an inner intensity that enabled them to forge a poetry of the soil out of their daily struggle with matter.

Today, the Aurovilians face different challenges. They require, perhaps, a different mode of expression that has yet to be discovered. But one thing we can learn from those early writers: that without ‘fire’ there is no art.

Auroville Dream and Reality: an anthology. 

Edited and introduced by Akash Kapur.

Penguin Random House India, 2018.

Available on auroville.com and on Amazon.in