AV 2018-2058: A Brief Survey by Prof. R. Balakrishnan, Dept. of History AV University

In 2018 Auroville had come to a moment of decision: the income of many residents only allowed them a very basic of standard of living; city planning was bureaucratic; public transportation did not exist and the road system still mostly dirt; building individual houses in the city area was virtually prohibited; it had no internal police force nor the legal authority to resolve disputes; and it had no effective body of representatives to make and enforce decisions. Most of all, it did not have the shared vision to complete its environmental mission begun by some of the early settlers.

Many who were there at that time will think that I have overstated Auroville’s problems, and perhaps I have. After all, it was still a developing township with a thriving small creative economy. Besides, the stated purpose of Auroville was to achieve human unity through serving the divine consciousness and produce residents of a higher order of humanity.

This 2018 Auroville, under the control of the first generation of settlers and the original galaxy town plan, was guided not so much by the quest for the material welfare of its residents but by the spiritual legacy of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo who, they thought, continued to watch over and guide it.

Aurovilians at that time could be divided into three broad categories. There were residents who did not live a life much different from what they would have in any expat community. The second group was primarily religious, with overt faith that The Mother could and did intervene in their lives and in Auroville as a whole. The third was a group of dedicated sadhaks who were trying to actually attain the divine consciousness that The Mother and Sri Aurobindo personified. The thread of The Mother’s utopian dream held all three loosely together.

This reliance on The Mother’s force (and on the original Galaxy design, impractical though it was) helped to keep the town in suspension while its residents figured out how to govern themselves and how to deal with the impact of a surging south Indian economy. Because Auroville had grown from a small community into a 2500 person town, this governance issue had become more complicated. At that time, before the imposition of the ARA (Auroville Reorganization Act) by the Indian government, it was done by committee, resulting in a lack of decisive implementation, especially since many Aurovilians only recognized the authority of The Mother as interpreted by themselves. Auroville was an introverted community, just beginning to realize its connection to and dependence on the surrounding region.

But there were many in Auroville who recognized that the real purpose of this reforested town was to become an incubator for green practices and planning that could transform not just the bioregion but further beyond. The GBR (Green Building Requirement), passed in 2030, made certain that no Auroville building could be henceforth constructed without using the latest techniques for sustainable structures.

Around this time, as Auroville became increasingly surrounded by random development, this impasse began to change. Auroville had around 3,500 residents then, and many had come recently from the professional Indian middle classes. While the old guard decried this influx as not international, these newcomers were providing the economic and inventive impetus for change. Besides, the old guard was indeed old and tired, unable to fight the conflicts of the past. The newcomers wanted a town that responded to their material needs while also offering arts, culture, education (the Auroville International School had begun in 2025, the University 10 years later), and the chance to live a life free from the rigidity of Indian society in a pollution-free environment. As the religious impulse faded, the spiritual practice of Integral Yoga became concentrated in small, intense groups who formed the Sadhak Circles we recognize now.

Today, as we know, the new generation of pioneers sees Auroville as the city that India and the overheated earth needs to demonstrate green, sustainable living. Although the population seems to have leveled off at 15,000, the number of visitors who come here to ride our solar buses on the Green Tour increases by the day, along with the volunteers who come to learn about the latest ecological practices.

Though Auroville has changed much in the past 40 years, its environmental mission has only begun. Taking advantage of all discoveries from within and without, Auroville wants to move forward with the quest to live in harmony with our transformed red green earth.