The Auroville situation: a view from outside

Debashish has been a frequent visitor to Auroville, where, as a reputed scholar on the subject, he has given talks on Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy and spiritual practice. Since 2016, he has also been bringing groups from the U.S. to Auroville for short study experiences. The most recent visit was in August this year. 

This is the third group you have brought to Auroville.

Yes, and this group was the best prepared. I realised from previous experience that merely studying Auroville from an ethnographic or anthropological viewpoint is very inadequate. You have to have a deeper understanding of what is going on here. 

So this time I made sure that I had prepared the students. They went through a number of courses beforehand on the Integral Yoga and philosophical background to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, as well as other aspects of Indian philosophy, and they also learned about the sociological aspect: that Auroville is a communitarian experiment. 

Another very important aspect I learned from my last visit is that there are powerful undercurrents in Auroville relating to its past. I realised that the group needed to understand this before coming here, so I had them read not only the Mother’s statements about Auroville but also two books on its traumatic history: Akash Kapur’s Better to Have Gone and Amrit’s Children of Change. So they got a sense not only of the teachings but of the psychological and historical forces that inhabit this place. Furthermore, the students had been reading on their own about the present situation in Auroville.

All this prior background knowledge enabled the group to see and hear things that would otherwise have slipped their attention. In fact, I am very happy with the responsiveness of the students and the way that they interacted with Auroville.

What was their programme in Auroville?

They were here for three weeks. For the first ten to twelve days they visited different units and services and spoke to a cross-section of Aurovilians, as well as visiting the Ashram. Then they conducted deeper research into an aspect of Auroville which they were interested in. 

When they go back they will be writing papers about the experience and some may present their studies in two conferences which are being planned later this year in the U.S. 

This is a particularly tumultuous time to be in Auroville. What were their perceptions, insights?

Given their preparation, when they started talking to people there were things they were looking for, and I think they got a good view of the present situation that is informed by facts. From the beginning, they could see there was an elephant in the room in almost every conversation. That elephant was that most Aurovilians felt they had come here to realise an ideal, but that their work of many years was in jeopardy because of external forces impinging on their lives.

This deep unease was often unexpressed. When it was stated, the students could hear deep-seated fears, and a state of helplessness that veered towards despair, and sometimes towards intense aspiration, calling to something higher, because many seemed to feel that they are at a dead-end. 

Did the fact that the students had read these two books about Auroville’s history cause them to see similarities between what happened in the 1970s and what is happening now?

Absolutely. Yes. They see all the forces that were part of the earlier conflict being very much alive now. 

So the sense that these problems only began two years ago is not correct?

No, the group felt these issues have a much longer duration because they were not dealt with in the 1970s but pushed beneath the surface. In particular, they felt the core issue was not dealt with then. 

What do they think is the core issue?

They feel that the core issue is ownership.  Many of the people who came to Auroville in the 1960s were products of the counterculture and were looking for a new kind of life. The Mother appealed to this sense. She said that the existing world is based on wrong foundations and those who come to Auroville should have an aspiration for a new kind of life. Connected with this is what the Mother calls ‘divine anarchy’ and Sri Aurobindo calls ‘spiritual anarchism’ in his social and political texts. It involves an aspiration for a grassroots sense of oneness that has no need of ownership or governance from the top. 

That’s the aspiration with which the Mother created Auroville as a social experiment in human unity founded on her and Sri Aurobindo’s vision for a future civilization. Of course, others have had such a vision, for example Marx dreamed of a future of collective self-governance, but these thinkers lacked the psychological knowledge for its achievement. The Mother based this social objective on the development of a consciousness of unity and harmony through yogic praxis. That’s why the very first article in the Charter of Auroville says that Auroville belongs to nobody in particular, it belongs to humanity as a whole. In other words, it was not intended to be a place that is ‘owned’ by any institution, individual or group, but rather a place which would provide the freedom for a collective growth of consciousness that develops the conditions for divine anarchy. 

However, the Mother was very conscious that the world was not ready for this, that there are legal realities which could not be ignored, so for practical purposes, such as buying land, she arranged for the Sri Aurobindo Society to  legally own Auroville, although this ownership was meant to be only in name. But the will to own and control Auroville proved too strong, and the Government of India had to step in, so to say, to protect the Mother’s dream.  

When the ownership of Auroville shifted to the Government of India, the feeling was that the government would be like a benevolent Big Brother which would keep Mother’s dream alive and allow the Aurovilians to develop in the way that they needed to achieve this, while, at the same time, ensuring that no others would claim ownership. For many years, this seemed to be the case.

But then the government changed, and we now see a government that has a strong sense of ownership of the cultural identity of India, and, seemingly, also wishes to shape Auroville according to this identity. Its legal ownership of Auroville gives it the justification to mould Auroville to its larger plans.

Politically, the Auroville Foundation Act of 1988, framed at the conclusion of the conflict of the 1970s, seemed to provide a governing structure that empowered the residents of Auroville, but according to its present interpretation, the Residents’ Assembly has been sidelined in favor of non-Aurovilians who are government appointed and/or persons loyal to the government.  

This clash of approaches to ownership seems to be at the core of what’s happening now. It is a return to a struggle for ownership over a community which has been envisioned to have no ownership. 

And ownership of Auroville has suddenly become very attractive. Not only from the viewpoint of consumption – some of my students found themselves like happy kids in a candy store, they went about tasting coffee, gelato or cuisine from across the world, or buying products and services of the New Age world market – but Auroville is also beginning to look like an experiment that is offering solutions to larger world problems, and this is attracting some of the brighter minds of our time. From this point of view it is a bud ready to bloom, both materially and culturally, offering an attractive prospect for ownership leading to material and ideological exploitation. 

There’s also the fact that the growing middle class of India wants a sense of identity, something that is being fostered by the present government, and from this viewpoint it sees Auroville as a cultural commodity, like a crown jewel for the national identity. 

So there is pressure to appropriate Auroville culturally, politically, and economically. I think part of the rhetoric around making Auroville a city for fifty thousand people, bringing in roads and infrastructure, serves this intention of cultural appropriation to create a site of national identity for spiritual tourism. In fact, some of my students had visited Shantiniketan before coming here, and they fear that, in terms of the government’s ambitions, Auroville could become something similar, an empty, memorial structure or spiritual theme park. 

Ownership, of course, also has its inverse aspect. Some of the students feel that a few Aurovilians they have met exhibited their own tendency towards ownership of what they have been creating over the years, a form of closure from which they are resisting change. There may be some truth in this but I don’t think it is the predominant way in which this township has been developing. 

Around this central issue of ownership, there are a number of other oppositions that have associated themselves to complicate the polarization. Forces have re-emerged from those former days in the conflict with the Sri Aurobindo Society. For example, postcolonial insecurities which get translated into the feeling that, “Here are those foreigners who colonised us in the past and are now creating an enclave inside our country.” You hear this rhetoric repeatedly, that these Westerners are culturally blind towards India, are arrogant and insulting towards its culture, they’re dirty hippies who take drugs, etc. This then becomes a part of the spin through which the polarization appeals to certain people. Whatever the truth of such statements, it should be clear that a bunch of irresponsible drug-takers could not have created the flowering of Auroville that we see at this time.

In some quarters, the opposition is framed around religiosity, a sense that Auroville is a sacred space of reverence to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and needs to be run by the rules and rituals of ‘holiness’. This is pitted in some against the Mother’s statement that there should be no religion and a minimum of rules in Auroville. This also demonstrates another aspect of the conflict – what may be called quotation wars. There are those who claim to know exactly what the Mother wanted for Auroville, quoting texts that they weaponize like commandments. Several of these arguments owe their genesis to the conflict of the 1970s that remained unresolved and have re-emerged to group themselves around the central problem of national ownership and identity politics. 

So it’s simplistic to think that the present turmoil can be reduced just to one binary opposition, like the narrative that says that it’s all about those who want Mother’s town and those who resist it?

Exactly. But we saw many residents who view the conflict in these partial terms, formulating it through some specific opposition, while there are many factors clustering together at the same time.

Some of the students did.  

And what did they hear from these people?

They heard several of the narratives I’ve mentioned. For example, that the Aurovilians have ignored the Mother’s plans for Auroville and the government is helping to enforce these; or the allegation that some Aurovilians have a myopic sense of ownership because they have created their personal utopia and don’t want anything to change, and this is retarding the building of the city; or that it’s a new form of colonialism, that Westerners look down on Indians, they don’t understand spirituality and they need to be taught a lesson. These are some of the voices that they have heard. 

Your students seem to have a dystopian view of what is happening and may happen to Auroville. Do they envisage any alternative future?

It’s a dystopian view and it is disturbing. Regarding alternative futures, the students see Auroville as fulfilling its purpose by becoming a model town that can solve the problems of humanity through its power of consciousness, for this could be the seed of something that is replicable.

Some feel this possibility could only be protected by the kind of federated world union Sri Aurobindo envisaged. But that is a seemingly impractical dream today; the hope for a world union or even a world conscience has never seemed more distant.

Otherwise, they are looking for the answers emerging from Aurovilians themselves. One of these is dependence on the courts. In our times of rampant political falsehood, many hold the judiciary as the last incorruptible institution that may vindicate humanism. We see this here, too. Despite recent legal setbacks, a number of people in Auroville are hoping that the judiciary will prove to be its saviour.

Another view they heard repeatedly is the need for faith in the Mother. I think the level of helplessness is very great at present – that’s the most tragic aspect of the present situation – but people who were here in the 1970s when Auroville was threatened by the Sri Aurobindo Society felt that Mother acted and saved Auroville then, even though she was no longer in her body, and she will do so again. There are some who are totally confident that, whatever forces may be dominant at present, Mother’s vision will manifest. According to them, there is nothing to be done but to have faith in the Mother and wait for the storm to pass. There are others who feel that it is a test of sadhana and if individuals were fully sincere, the situation would go away by itself.

Some people would say that another avenue that needs to be pursued vigorously at this time is education; that people around the world have to understand what this place is really about, and what is at stake here, because today Auroville is not well known even in India.

Absolutely. Many of the students, as well as myself, feel that Aurovilians have not developed the ability to express why they are here, what the place is about, and why it is important to the world. This can’t be done by simply repeating the words of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo because that turns it into a mere personality cult and a religion. It has to be done from personal experience through creative expressions of clarity and conviction in various circumstances and to various audiences here and now. 

And how do you respond personally to the present situation in Auroville? 

I agree it’s a very difficult time. Although many people feel powerless, I believe one has to stand up against the forces which threaten Mother’s vision of freedom in Auroville, and find those avenues of power which one can utilise. But to do this while understanding the gravity and complexity of the situation, and do it strategically, one has to be very conscious of the fact that one can be easily eliminated. One is up against an antagonist who seems too big and powerful, a Goliath.

The other thing I feel is the need for a new language to validate as widely as possible the reality of Auroville, and why the Mother has created it. It’s very important that more people in the world understand this at this moment both inside and outside Auroville, starting with Aurovilians themselves. 

But perhaps the most powerful thing that can be done at this time is to gather oneself, intensify one’s aspiration and call to the Mother for help.