Revisiting history: people, power and politics

Of all the four parks that grace the city area of Auroville, Darkali is the most beautiful of them all. It is hard to explain this to people who have not spent enough time in nature to develop an environmental consciousness. Nature is not dumb. The wilderness, or even just pockets of land that have not been totally subjugated by the human will, have a silent, healing presence. When I am alone in such places, I feel it. Away from the chatter of human beings and their noisy devices, the silence of nature comforts me and reminds me that I am a mere strand in the web of life. Medical science has also documented the beneficial effect of nature on human beings.

Darkali, for me, despite its fitness track, is not a recreational park. It is a sanctuary and, like the forested canyons of Auroville, a reminder of how humans can collaborate with the Spirit of Matter to bring back life into a dying land. The undulating landscape of Darkali, etched with gullies and canyons, had been carefully curated by its stewards to form a series of cascading catchment ponds. Aesthetically designed bridges that blended into the green and brown landscape gave passage across these ponds and check dams. As the biggest water reservoir in the city area, it was not surprising to see that even after months since the last downpour, there was still water in one of the ponds in Darkali. Given the availability of water, the slow regeneration of soil through the accumulation of biomass or leaf litter, the bounty of the Tropical Dry Evergreen Forest that provides food to birds and animals throughout the year, it is little wonder that Darkali became a sanctuary for wildlife. Some endangered species like Honey Buzzards are known to roost only in this magical, verdant park.

The insistence on a perfectly circular road 9.1 metres wide through this landscape, without even allowing the slightest concession of a small detour to maximise water catchment, is unfathomable, even when the importance of the yantric form of the Galaxy Town Plan is explained to me. Born as a Hindu, I have travelled widely in India and marvelled at the geometrical symmetry of temple towns that are laid out in concentric squares. But I cannot subscribe to the rigid imposition of form over function. Especially in Auroville, where the individual was given the space, the freedom, and the opportunity, to grow individually and collectively and collaborate with the Spirit.

Walking through the bunds and depressions of Darkali yesterday as the chain saws hummed and tall trees toppled with that unnerving, rude cracking sound, I was reminded of the history of the land. Of how it once was, according to the Irumbai temple inscriptions, a dense forest teeming with life, and how succeeding colonial armies of the French and the British had raped the land and stripped it bare, till it turned to desert and dust. I was reminded of the power of the tropics, of how simple, basic conservation of soil and water allows nature to heal. And of the selfless labour of the people who, over half-a-century, had planted, sheltered and watered seedlings that sprouted to life, and in turn, gave birth to more life. The lessons of history here are not lost to me: people in absolute power tend to destroy and subject matter to their will; anarchies, though frustratingly ungovernable, when based on the principle of stewardship and not ownership sometimes do manifest beauty in ways that enhance the collective.

The passage of days as we go through these turbulent times in Auroville is agonizingly slow. And the future is shrouded in uncertainty. At this present moment, often feeling forced to choose between warring sides (“are you with us or against us?”), I do not have the clarity to state what benefits and what ills the current trends of development will bring. For development is not necessarily benign. And the lessons of history are best understood in hindsight. In a few decades, perhaps, it will be clearer to take an account of what did we lose, what did we gain, and overall, what we did learn that will help us to take another small step together, collectively.

Today, I simply mourn for all that we are losing. And I, irrationally perhaps, still hold on to that fragile, fleeting hope: “beyond all ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field where we can meet”. (Rumi)