Better to Have Gone: Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville

This book evolved out of Akash Kapur’s deeply personal quest for an explanation of the tragic deaths, in Auroville in the mid 1980s, of Diane and John Walker, the mother and adoptive father of his wife, Auralice.

The precipitating event was Diane’s fall while working on the Matrimandir. Suffering terrible injuries which resulted in lower body paralysis, after initial hospitalization she refused medical assistance because she had been told she should be healed by the Mother’s force alone. When Diane did not improve, she became almost totally dependent upon John for support. When John subsequently fell ill himself with, possibly, very treatable ailments, he likewise spurned medical help, and this finally resulted in his death. Diane died by suicide the same day.

This double tragedy continued to impact Auralice. At one level, therefore, the motivation for writing the book, in which Auralice fully participated, was therapeutic. As Akash put it, it was “part of a process of healing for Auralice”.

However, in seeking for a deeper explanation of the tragedy, Akash needed to expand the frame to include what was happening in the larger community at that time, and how this influenced the lives and choices of Diane and John. Apart from the pervasive idealism of the 1960s, these factors included tensions engendered by a conflict with the Sri Aurobindo Society (SAS, here pseudonymously referred to as the CFY, or “Committee for the Yoga”), a belief in the wider, even occult significance of certain happenings, and a widening understanding – aided by the gradual publication of volumes of Mothers’ Agenda – of Mother’s work on transforming her body.

According to Akash, however, the most powerful influence upon Diane was Satprem, a charismatic individual who had worked closely with Mother. Satprem, a strong supporter of the community’s attempt to free itself from control of the SAS and with a group of devoted followers in Auroville, viewed Diane’s fall in apocalyptic terms. It was the “sign of a Falsehood”, “an indication of the divisions within Auroville and of the corruption of the Mother’s dream.”

Consequently, he tied her healing to the healing not only of Auroville, but also of the wider world. In healing Diane’s broken body he saw the possibility for the continuation of Mother’s work of physical transformation, so he told her that the healing must be done by the Mother’s force alone, not by doctors.

Diane wholeheartedly embraced this injunction. This, the triumph of principles over humanity, as Akash put it, is for him the explanation of the subsequent tragedy which also swept up John (who also refused medical help). But what also becomes clear is that even if Satprem was the dominant influence, Diane and John’s stubborn idealism made them willing accomplices.

Akash has shaped an immense amount of research conducted over many years into a riveting if, at times, uncomfortable, read. In elegant prose, marred by an occasional weakness for the over-dramatic (“hunger and malnutrition stalked the community”), he provides fascinating background on Diane, and, in particular, John, the East Coast socialite from a wealthy family who, in the words of one observer, “was a swan trying to be a crow”. John’s eloquent letters to his family back home chart his discovery and celebration of that early Auroville, as well as his personal ‘pilgrimage’.

They touched his father who, while irritated by his son’s persistent funding requests, wrote: “I admire you on your pilgrimage. May it have a good ending. But no matter, better to have gone on it than to have stayed here quietly. At the end of my life I realize that there is nothing worthwhile except love and compassion and the search, which I have not made, for reality.”

While the book lucidly traces out the main lines of the influences which precipitated the tragedy, Akash admits “There are things that happened in those years that defy explanation. I have trouble understanding them”. Consequently, he explains he is taking the stories he’s been told at face value and he leaves it up to the reader how he/she interprets them.

But, of course, any author has to make choices about what to include, and this inevitably shapes the narrative. In this respect, writing about a complex, multi-dimensional experiment like Auroville is particularly challenging: write one sentence, it sometimes seems, and you’ve already got it wrong. Having said this, Akash does a fine job. He is remarkably evenhanded, insightful, in how he handles the complexities of that period.

Occasionally, however, he succumbs to a questionable generalisation. Speaking of Auroville’s ‘revolution’, for example, he says nobody will “escape the flames”, “not Diane, not John, not Auralice, nor the scores of combatants and innocent bystanders whose lives (and hopes for a more prefect world) will forever be singed by this disheartening period in the community's history”.

I suspect that many Aurovilians who lived through that period, while agreeing it was a difficult time, would not feel they have been “forever singed”. And it’s important to remember that the subsequent ‘civil war’, which Akash describes as ‘all-consuming’, did not affect all Aurovilians equally. Many of these “idiot savants of endurance” continued quietly with their work of afforestation, education, or putting the fledgling Auroville economy upon its feet.

Akash admits that most Aurovilians were not radicalized. But it is, perhaps, an inevitable consequence of the book’s focus that this ‘other’ Auroville tends to be neglected or coloured by the central tragedy. This makes the ‘very different’ Auroville Akash encounters when he revisits in 1994, a place of freedom and opportunity where people are trying to build a better world, somewhat inexplicable for the uninformed reader. For, in truth, those other aspects were always there, running alongside, or underneath, the more dramatic moments in our history.

An important question raised in the book concerns the nature of extremism and its relationship to idealism. At one point, Akash describes Auroville’s evolution as “revealing the dark and often extremist underbelly of utopia”. So do communities like Auroville with high ideals tend to attract or engender extremism? And at what point does fierce commitment to an ideal topple over into extremist behaviour, to intolerance, to a tendency to divide people into sheep and goats? Akash would reply that it’s when one loses touch with one’s humanity. It’s a good response. But the question remains, does the particular form of ‘irrationality’ which drives one on an adventure like Auroville’s open the door at the same time to the possible eruption of that ‘dark underbelly”?

These are deep, important questions. Akash would probably be the first to admit there is still much to be understood here, although he hints at his awareness of the complexity when he writes that extremism is much less prominent in the Auroville now, for Auroville’s society has become more conventional, “for better or worse”. And he finds himself admiring, even envying, John’s faith, despite its calamitous consequences; for “so few of us find that kind of purpose”.

Moreover, he questions the easy attribution of ‘craziness’ to the main characters in this story. “Crazy is a blunt concept. There are levels of intensity, degrees of deviation from the norm. There’s no doubt that John and Diane stepped pretty far out on the scale, that they pushed the boundaries of normalcy (another blunt concept). But I’ve spent almost ten years chasing this story, and I know that there were many versions of reality, many versions of the truth, that played out in my hometown. I’m not prepared to say which one was right. I’m not here to say anyone was crazy.”

A comprehensive study of the nexus of idealism and extremism would require a major work, although it may be pertinent that in The Life Divine Sri Aurobindo explains that in a laboratory for consciousness evolution (like the Ashram or Auroville), the forces of both evolution and what pervert or oppose it tend to get raised to the highest pitch:

It might be that, in such a concentration of effort, all the difficulties of the change would present themselves with a concentrated force; for each seeker, carrying in himself the possibilities but also the imperfections of a world that has to be transformed, would bring in not only his capacities but his difficulties and the oppositions of the old nature and, mixed together in the restricted circle of a small and close common life, these might assume a considerably enhanced force of obstruction which would tend to counterbalance the enhanced power and concentration of the forces making for the evolution.

While a deep exploration of this phenomenon was not Akash’s intention in this book, without it the complexity of motivations behind incidents like the book burning or head shaving in Aspiration remains unknown, providing easy ammunition for those who wish to denigrate societies like Auroville which have high aspirations. “A flawed utopia” – the headlines write themselves.

Some Aurovilians may criticise Akash for writing this book (which is being widely reviewed and selling very well on Amazon) precisely because they fear it will engender this type of bad publicity. Yet it is very important that this crucial period of Auroville’s history is examined in more depth, because so far most of the accounts of what happened then have been superficial and one-sided.

To paraphrase the philosopher, George Santayana, “Those who have not learned about the past are condemned to repeat it.” And who can say that the past is really past when the roots of idealism and extremism, of belief and dogmatism, seem so deeply entwined?

Ultimately, though, this is also a book about personal change. Akash and Auralice, after living in the U.S., returned to make a home in the community. “We have lived with this book for more than a decade, and the experience has changed how we see ourselves and our community; and changed, also, our feelings about the very idea of utopia and the search for perfection,” writes Akash.

If Auralice still seems somewhat uncertain that her past is fully processed, for Akash something seems to have shifted. In a recent interview, he mentioned that he started writing the book with “skepticism” towards things like idealism and faith. “But to my surprise I ended up somewhere different. I saw a certain nobility in faith. A door has been opened … I have not yet walked through it.”

This is a fine book, an important book, particularly for Aurovilians. For in helping us begin to make sense of a critical episode in Auroville’s past, it warns us of the shadows that sometimes lurk in the corners of the brightest lights. And it underlines the need not to lose touch with our basic humanity even as we reach for the highest ideals.

Better to Have Gone: Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville, published by Scribner, 2021, is available on Amazon.in in hardback and paperback. On Amazon.com it is also available in Kindle format.