Learnings from the front line and beyond

Auroville Today: What is your present situation?

Maël: I am in the south-east of France where I just moved in with my girlfriend, so a new chapter in my life is opening up. After two exhausting years of working for Auroville from a distance, my term in the Working Committee (WCom) ended not long ago and now I am trying to move on with my life. Among other things, this means finding a job in Europe.

Was your decision to leave Auroville voluntary?

No. When I returned from France after the long Covid period in 2021, my long-term plan was to build my life in Auroville. So, in 2023 when I received a Leave India notice from the Indian Government because my visa recommendation was not granted by the Secretary, it was a huge shock. I was born here, my roots are here, and I always looked on this place as my home.

It seems that the Leave Notice was in some way connected with your membership in the Working Committee of the Residents’ Assembly. How did it come about that you joined the Working Committee?

I landed back in Auroville on 4 December 2021, which was just before the bulldozers were sent to demolish the Youth Centre and its surrounding forest. Even if at that point I was only planning to come for a few months, I felt it was a special moment in Auroville’s history and that something was calling me to stay. I had a sense that this could be the first step in a total takeover of Auroville, and I wanted to help avoid this the best I could. I saw forces at play that I could personally not align with because I thought, and still think, they were antithetical to what Auroville represents.

So very quickly I started engaging with the situation on the ground, and taking on more and more commitments in the service of Auroville’s values. I really felt there was and still is a necessity to affirm these values in the face of an ongoing threat to appropriate, twist and denature them.

There were discussions about replacing certain members of the WCom who were not aligned with the views of the larger community, but at that time I definitely wasn’t planning on joining the Committee. I had been a member of the Residents’ Assembly Service (RAS) before, and I thought that if I did join a group again, it would more likely be like the Council, a body seeking ways of resolving conflict: this was the kind of space I felt easiest in. I was not really interested in joining the Working Committee because it has more of an official status, and I was never drawn to wearing a suit and talking to important people. That’s how I perceived the Working Committee at the time!

So what changed your mind?

At a certain point, it became clear to me that the Working Committee’s role in protecting Auroville’s values in this crisis would be the most impactful. But even when I was asked, I initially said ‘no’ because I didn’t think it would be my place and, frankly speaking, I was afraid of what it would do to me. For joining a working group like that means that you become a representative of the community, so you have to follow a certain etiquette and be careful of the way you speak about things.

Also, I was afraid of starting to take myself too seriously if I had this kind of responsibility. I’ve always wanted a lot of humour in my life, and was aware of my inclination to be earnest, so I

wasn’t sure that I wanted to get into something which might turn me into a grave and austere human being! But, in the end, I felt an inner call and I agreed to serve. I was then 27 years old, and I felt it was important for me as a youth of Auroville to take a stand in what would undoubtedly shape our collective future. I also wanted to act from a space of courage, trust and faith, rather than a space of fear.

Were your fears confirmed? Did your identity become more defined, more confined, by taking up this work?

To some extent, yes. I think from the moment I joined the WCom, and especially after we really felt we needed to hold the fort against the takeover, something which was and still is definitely needed, I became more aware of Indian and world politics and perhaps less naive. In parallel, certain sides of me, which were more candid or contemplative, became less and less visible to myself. 

When you join a group, it strengthens in you the common values of this group. It can be subtle, but something takes over your personal identity at times, and these other sides of you get less attention and less space for expression.

Belonging to such a group, especially in such an intense situation, also had a huge impact on the way I was perceived by others. Before joining the WCom, many people didn’t know me, and those who did perceived more of my sensitive nature because of my soft touch, artistic side and love for poetry. I have always considered myself as someone quite balanced although with a firm stand on certain values, and I was able to speak with others who had very different values and very different understandings of reality. But after I joined, this was less and less possible, because I started being perceived as a symbol of something.

Also, what was difficult for me when I was a Working Committee member was that I couldn’t allow myself to feel resigned or to grieve. When you’re fighting to protect Auroville’s values, you need to hold on to and project hope and courage. And when you’re trying to protect people’s lives from very concrete threats like eviction, you can’t help but feel angry. In all cases, when you’re in the position of a WCom member, your focus is on putting out the fires. So you only allow yourself to feel the emotions that are at the service of your mission as a group; but because of this I wasn’t really allowing myself to connect with the full spectrum of my emotions.

This means that, particularly in the current context, if you are a member of the WCom you may to some extent be wearing a mask. It’s not that you’re faking, but you cannot allow all sides of yourself to be expressed because the community is looking to you for support, for guidance, to give them hope and courage. You become a kind of collective psychotherapist to help people deal with their own fears and struggles!

Being a member of the Working Committee, I felt absolutely honoured by the amount of trust we were receiving as a group. All of that love and support, all that gratitude, sometimes from people I had never met, was so beautiful. It was really the best thing I experienced as a Working Committee member. But the downside is that there was so much trust, so much expectation, that sometimes it felt as if the seven of us in the WCom were carrying the whole weight of Auroville on our shoulders. I believe this is still the case today, both the trust and the weight.

Thankfully, we had a lot of good laughs among our team; and so in the end, humour was present and helped us navigate the difficult times! From what I can see, this spirit of mutual support and good humour continues with the current Working Committee.

Were there times when you did not feel fully aligned with some of the decisions of the Working Committee?

Overall, I always felt fully aligned with my colleagues and with the type of actions we decided to take. And I think this is a trait that is shared by all members of this Working Committee. In fact, it’s quite incredible when the stakes are so high that we’ve always been really aligned and always trusted each other a lot. The fact that there was a common understanding of what is at stake in this crisis, and what we should do about it, made everything easier. There have been small instances when I was not fully aligned with specific elements of the language in a few of our communications, but here we are not talking about overall intent, just about the choice of a word or a certain way of presenting something. It’s very minor and has never been an issue. And in all these instances, my inputs were always welcomed, which definitely helped me feel valued and seen.

I feel a lot of gratitude for those who shared this Working Committee path with me. It was an incredible learning experience, and a truly bonding adventure. I have a lot of love, respect and consideration for those who have been and still are in, or working closely with, the WCom.

Did your experience of being in the Working Committee change your understanding of certain things?

A big learning was better understanding how the Indian Government, the State government and big institutions like UNESCO function at their different levels. I was also amazed by the amount of connections Auroville has in India and the larger world, and by the number of supporters we have who are concerned by what is happening today.

Unfortunately, another thing I’ve learned is how powerless many of these people are right now to influence the situation. I had lofty ideas that UNESCO, for example, would protect Auroville in this crisis, but very quickly I understood the limitations of such entities and big institutions in taking concrete actions, especially in today’s global political climate.

What did you learn about the community?

I think we’ve collectively been playing a lot, and for a long time, the ‘persecutor – victim – saviour’ role-playing game. This existed before the current administration took over, and has only intensified since then. I can see we’ve presented ourselves a lot like victims, putting the entire blame on an external persecutor – the administration. And some of us have agreed to play the saviours, and to carry the weight of everyone’s well-being. Let me be clear: I believe that there is indeed a real persecution at play, and I’m outraged by the way some fellow Aurovilians are treated today, with a total lack of respect and consideration. It’s grave, and this calls us to take action or clearly position ourselves. It’s needed. But the problem is that these roles tend to stick to our skins, and we sometimes lose sight of who we are deeper within. We start identifying with the role of victims, or that of saviours. And it progressively eats away the other parts of us – until we manage to take a step back. So we need to ask ourselves, every single day, if we’re acting from a space of integrity and empowerment, or from a role we’ve agreed to play.

Another pattern I saw is the pattern of working groups being consumed by fire-fighting. This is not new. It has been happening for years and I had already seen this when I was in the RAS. But it is even clearer today when the fire is everywhere, and all the energy of a working group like the Working Committee needs to go into reacting to events; in coordinating responses, calling out lies, responding to threats, keeping key players informed. There is no time or space to do anything else because when there is a fire, you need to try and put it out: you can’t plant seeds when the forest is burning.

But what’s missing is people who are not in a reactionary role and who have the time, space and skills to push for creative solutions and to offer a way ahead.

But others do not seem to be taking this up at present.

No. I think one of the reasons this is not happening is a tendency in the community to consider that the working groups should be doing these things, but the truth is that most of the time the working groups do not have the capacity to do this. Another reason is that the skilled people are already juggling different jobs and have a limited bandwidth. And of course, the current situation doesn’t invite creative solutions, as we know how difficult they’d be to implement.

Still, I think it would have been lighter for me as a Working Committee member if I had had the feeling there were more initiatives regarding the way forward, or simply how to deal with the present crisis, coming from the larger community. More spontaneity in our collective responses. 

Yet in the early days of the present crisis it wasn’t all left to the working groups to come up with responses.

It is interesting to see how the dynamics changed. In December 2021, a lot of small groups started spontaneously organising to resist the takeover. A few people came together because they felt their inner truth was telling them to act, and they went ahead and did something, like properly documenting what was happening, talking to interested press outlets or petitioning the courts for a Stay Order. All these were individual initiatives, there was no centralisation of power, and you could feel the organic community of Auroville expressing itself. It was beautifully spontaneous.

But from the moment some of us were selected in June 2022 to be in charge of certain things, I felt that the responsibility became more centralised and these natural movements of self-organisation became less present. This form of institutionalisation might be bound to happen when a movement lasts for years, and when both fatigue and fear start to creep in, but I do sometimes regret the freshness of the early months of response.

What I liked about this initial movement was that it was very similar to how Auroville has developed. All our present achievements began with individual initiatives. People felt something was needed, so they launched a project. I think what’s really fantastic about Auroville, and now I’m speaking more as an anthropologist and social scientist, is to see the amount of creativity that has been poured into this small community from individuals with an inner calling, with the intuition that something needed to happen and then went about and did it.

I’m quite sure that we wouldn’t have managed to create so many things if we had done it in a very structured way, if we had been following a plan, from the beginning. It’s true that sometimes it has seemed chaotic. But I think the beauty of Auroville is also in its messiness, because Auroville is for experimentation, which means there will always be failures as well as successes.

Perhaps this is the nub of present conflict, because many of those who have aligned themselves with the present administration seem to want a very structured plan to work with. They distrust the organic, the spontaneous. They feel too much falls through the cracks, that there is a danger of duplication or of different groups working against each other, unless there is centralised direction. Do you think there is a higher synthesis where spontaneous creativity can exist within a framework that gives a sense of general direction?

I agree that the dichotomy between spontaneity and planning is at the root of the conflict today, and I think a balance can be found.

I do believe that having a common vision and seeing how to implement it is needed to some extent, which is why I think there is a need to have regular planning sessions in the community to see where we want to put our collective priorities. And when I say planning here, I don’t just mean town-planning, rather setting clear directions in all areas of our collective life and adventure.

But I also think that Auroville’s creativity stems from the possibility of diving into the unknown. For me, Auroville is an adventure in the unknown, a playground for testing new things. If Auroville is about the emergence of something new, as a result of people coming together without plans but with goodwill and sincere dedication, one understands why Mother repeatedly insisted on the need for flexibility, for not setting things in stone.

Auroville is attempting something which has not been attempted before, so it is impossible to say from the very beginning that we need a blueprint for what we are going to do, because from the moment you have a rigid plan you kill the creativity, the spontaneity, the movement of life that evolves. What has made Auroville possible for so long is that this flow of life could find a playground to express itself here, through individuals who have been channels, consciously or unconsciously, of those higher forces which have created what Auroville has become today.

Of course, it is very human to want to control, to plan, but Auroville is not supposed to be just a human project: it is a place to create a new being, a new society, something truly daring. So I don’t see how you can advocate for a very rigid planning process, with full control over everything that happens here, while being at the service of this emergence of the unknown.

In fact, if you listen to Kireet Joshi, who drafted the Auroville Foundation Act, it is clear that he wanted the Act, and therefore the Government, to protect the experimental nature of Auroville. That experimental nature is the crux of everything, it’s the core of the project, what makes the dream possible.

Now that you no longer are fire-fighting on a daily basis and geographically distant, do you have a better sense of a possible way forward?

I think there could be many solutions, starting with organising a well-structured and well-facilitated process for bringing people together to find creative solutions. Auroville won’t go back to what it was before, and we need to shape a new path forward. However, in the current situation it is hard to see such a process happening. There is so much instability, so many people are afraid for their future in Auroville, and right now the current administration bans people from even coming together, calling gatherings “illegal”, so the amount of participation in such an event would likely not be large.

Also, there is no way right now that people could implement whatever creative solutions they might come up with, so the motivation to participate in such an event would be very low. Still, if there are some committed people who want to dedicate their energy to a project like this, it will likely be of use one day, when the administration changes.

Some people feel this is Auroville’s ‘Kurukshetra moment’, that we are in a battle which will decide the fate of Auroville. Some Aurovilians have seemingly already decided that Auroville is finished, and have left. What is your view?

I have the sense that a very important battle is being played out right now, but this is not just about Auroville; it is happening in the whole world. Everywhere there is the rise of more and more powerful dictators and authoritarian regimes, a resurgence of fascism and the suppression of all forms of opposition while, at the same time, AI is completely changing our relationship to reality. We are already in a world situation which social scientists call ‘post truth’ and there is widespread disillusionment, especially among the young.

The situation everywhere is so serious that you can’t get out of it by escaping from Auroville. In fact, I believe Auroville is a mirror of what is going on in the world, and if we can’t do something about it in Auroville, we won’t be able to do it anywhere else. And if we can do something here, it will have ripple effects, symbolically and on the invisible plane, everywhere else in the world.

Thankfully quite a few people are still committed to staying in Auroville, but the many people who are leaving represent a real loss of skills and creativity.

My belief is that there is indeed a big fight between different forces, but I don’t want to call them ‘light’ and ‘dark’ because I don’t like demonising things that I don’t agree with. What’s for sure is that different forces and values are clashing with each other, and right now Auroville might be living its last moments, at least the Auroville that we know.

However, I don’t think it’s the end of Auroville in Tamil Nadu. It will evolve into something else, but whether that something else is a place that I want to be connected to is another question. I can’t say what the future will be, but looking at Auroville today, it’s quite clear: if you’re interested in community life, participatory governance, or applying sustainable responses to global challenges like climate change, Auroville is no longer the most fertile ground for doing this. At least right now.

But Auroville is more than a place. It’s also a certain way of being, a spirit, a set of values and understandings. All these immaterial aspects of Auroville will surely continue to live on in the people who have been living here, so perhaps this is the moment for it to spread out into the world, to inspire other projects which may not be called Auroville but which may have similar ideals and values.

This is where I want to put my energy now. To make sure that the spirit of Auroville, the ideals, learnings and achievements of Auroville are alive in the world, and that our community continues to flourish across borders. Maybe today is the time to break out of our cosy Auroville cocoon, and to create a truly vibrant global network of Aurovilians at heart.