Auroville is such a place that belongs to nobody in particular and to humanity as a whole
Sailendra Pattnayak
Could it be possible to dream of a place ‘that belongs to nobody in particular and to humanity as a whole?’ Probably this will be the wildest of utopias. Yet such a place has been made possible in India more than fifty years ago. Auroville – the City of Dawn was inaugurated on 28 February 1968 near Pondicherry in a makeshift amphitheater on a denuded plateau, a desert of hard red soil.
The first point of the Auroville Charter read – “Auroville belongs nobody in particular…it was the dream idea of the Mother of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry: “an ideal city – a geographic base for the Integral Yoga where men and women from around the world could live together and practice Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy”.
Better to Have Gone
For some months now the residents of Auroville have been trying to attract the world’s attention. A national highway from Thrissur of Tamilnadu to Pondicherry is to cut through Auroville and the first round of felling of trees has begun.
During the last fifty years the denuded land, the red desert has been transformed into a dense-green oasis for which its residents have poured their sweat and blood. “Over the years, Aurovillians had dug irrigation trenches, built dams, drilled wells and planted more than three million trees. The result of all this labor was dramatic and inspiring. Auroville is arguably the most successful reforestation effort in India and a global model for environmental conservation”. We read in the Prologue of Akash Kapur’s ‘Better to Have Gone – Auroville: Love, Death and the Quest for Utopia’ (2021).
‘Better to have Gone’ is indeed the story of the post-second-world-war generations, the story of disillusioned-fifties and turbulent sixties as the young everywhere left the comforts of home and assurances of their countries in search of the meanings of life and of being human. So we find the destinies of such diverse characters from every possible corner of the world converging on this red desert in the south. And those searchers only could have made Auroville possible. As a resident of Auroville of American origin told recently to the author Akash Kapur – “Auroville could not have happened without the sixties. It was just such a creature of its time. We brought everything with us – all the good stuff, all the baggage. Hope, faith, love, free love, drugs, all the sloppiness, all the energy and good vibes….. Most of all, we were young. We were so young and innocent. We were naïve. I don’t think anything could have happened without that naiveté”.
Indeed, the most important thing was naiveté, one’s strength of faith. The entire process of Integral Yoga is based upon the understanding and internalization of one single short sentence – “Man is a transitional being”. And as one proceeds comes to realize that “evolution is not finished….As man emerged from the animal, so out of man must emerge the next species. So one of the main purposes of Integral Yoga is to hasten the natural process of evolution, to push beyond the human limits of physical and mental and bring about the next species – the supramental being. And it must be willed into existence”. This evolutionary strand is at the heart of the Auroville experience and the new city was intended as the cradle for the supramental being.
The Firsts
The very first settlers on the land of Auroville, whom the Mother called ‘the Fore-comers’, had undergone hardships that were almost inhuman and could be endured only using unshakeable faith. So also the joys they experienced were of a quality beyond ordinary conception. The book is an honest and to a great extent successful presentation of the experiences of the early settlers and also the terrible time that was to follow immediately after the departure of the Mother and continued for more than a decade known as the ‘Auroville’s Revolution’ which was to affect every soul involved and even the “innocent bystanders whose lives (and hopes for a more perfect world) will forever be signed by this disheartening period in the community’s history’’.
The author and his childhood friend Auralice (later they were wife and husband) were born and lived their childhood and early adolescence in Auroville. With the tragic death of the mother and the foster father of Auralice, she was taken to New York by the sister of her foster father and many years later Akash went to study in the USA where they met again and eventually got married. “We were living in Brooklyn. We had rented a one-bedroom apartment on Atlantic Avenue….we worked at jobs, we spent our paychecks on usual things….We had a lot of friends; we led good, normal lives”.
However, those two deaths that happened on the same day kept on haunting them. “They loomed huge in our lives, hers especially”. It was also so in the collective conscience of Auroville. Even after all those years “the deaths remained shrouded, inscrutable tragedies that hovered over’’ and ultimately made their return back to Auroville. The Two Who Died on the Same Day!
“October of 1986, a man lies dying in a hut at the edge of a canyon. His name is John Anthony Walker”. In the Prologue itself, we read. “He is on a mattress on a cement floor, and by his side sits a woman wrapped in a shawl, a yellow cat in her lap, and she cries. Her name is Diene Maes”. The two beings were “part of a great adventure, the quest to build a new world called Auroville. They had arrived here like so many idealists and romantics, filled with aspiration and optimism, and they worked hard, held their faith diligently”.
John Walker
John was born in 1942 in an ultra-rich West Coast family. His father was the director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and being a mentor to Jackie Kennedy regularly visited the White House. While studying in Harvard John attended lectures by Aldous Huxley and was a part of Timothy Leary’s Harvard LSD experiment. And soon John will be searching and seeking new horizons. He discovers Buddhism, reads Thomas Merton, becomes a member of Portsmouth Catholic Community, builds a Zen stone garden in a monastery and even joins the army but is fortunate to be spared of being transported to Vietnam and ultimately from the infamous MY Lai massacre that the regiment he was a member of committed.
Among the first settlers or ‘Forecomers’ of Auroville were Robert and Judith originally from New York. They were artists and loved and admired in the high culture circles. In one of their visits to New York, they narrated their experiences in Auroville to John and he arrived in Pondicherry in late 1969. One year back in late 1968 one of the entries in his diary read – “Do I have the least chance of success to achieve the finality of answer that I seek? So the decision is to eschew a guaranteed comfort for an occasional flash of ecstasy. And the equipment I possess – a capacity to suffer? For discipline? Negligible… God, direct my steps”.
Diane Maes
As John was dying, Diane, his companion of many years, was sitting beside him crying. Her misfortune has been singular in the story of Auroville. She has been the only person who has met with the only ever near-fatal accident at the site of the Matrimandir that had rendered both her legs paralytic. Soon after John was declared dead she asked to be shifted to the garden and will be swallowing a fateful dose of datura seeds from the plant she had grown and will be declared dead in the hospital the same evening.
Born in a small town in Belgium in 1950 from her early age Diane, unlike John, was exposed to poverty as her house painter father had died early. Escaping the Catholic reform school she accompanies a man five years older than her, a hippie with flowing brown hair and a long beard on his way to India hitchhiking through Sweden, Germany, Yugoslavia, Turkey and Iran. While in Lahore someone speaks to them of Pondicherry and they arrive there after a few days. It was in 1968. However, circumstances compel her to return to Belgium. But within a few months, a pregnant Diane returns with her companion determined to give birth to her child in Pondicherry. And she was ecstatic as both of them were accepted into Auroville. “She is convinced that this new city is ‘the promised land,’ a refuge for all the troubled souls of Europe, the lost people living in that cold, indifferent money-mass”.
The Auroville Revolution
Although ‘Better to have Gone’ is work of non-fiction but with its greatly agile narrative movement as it follows the inherent aspiration of the place and its inhabitants it seems to have transcended the strict divisions of time and the very geographical presence of Auroville as if being transported to an inevitable mythical existence. The book as it brings in a great number of characters from all possible corners of the earth, revealing their uniqueness and idiosyncrasies it succeeds in magically accentuating the central objective and their unwavering faith in it on the face of terrible hardships in everyday life.
This faith in the principal objective became further steady and strong as the construction of the Matrimandir, the Soul of Auroville, commenced in 1972. Matrimandir an architectural wonder, a massive sphere covered with 1, 415 sparkling golden disks that rises like a sun from the flat earth, with the estimation of $2.6 million while the Aurovillians were struggling for their two ends to meet. But not a single Aurovillian had any doubts “that this ‘divine mystic ship’ (as one man called it) must manifest, and that its completion is vital to Auroville’s spiritual purpose”.
But on 17 November 1973 the Mother left her body. She was 95. A foreboding gloom sets in the minds of the Aurovillians. And within a few months of her passing a conflict engulfs Auroville. The management, assets and development policy of Auroville were claimed to be owned by Sri Aurobindo Society and the majority of Aurovillians became progressively convinced that SAS presided by Mr. Navajat not only was mismanaging, but also engaged in criminal activities. SAS wished to see materialize a township with grand schemes quite irrelevant to existing realities of Auroville which have followed the ideas and directions of the Mother. (The same SAS and Navajat had also reached the Supreme Court claiming that Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga be given the status of a separate religion.)
Most of the Aurovillians had come together to resist the dictatorial dealings of Mr. Navajat and his SAS. SAS had adopted such ugly things like cancelling the visa applications and thus forcing many to leave India. Even cutting off the monthly allowances that the Mother had arranged and thus disrupting the work at Matrimandir and agriculture farms and pushing many to the brink of starvation. Also instigating local rogue elements to manhandle the Aurovillians and implicating them in false police cases. It was a long drawn bitter struggle that continued for more than a decade. By the end of Seventies, journalists reported to the public: “Doomed Utopia fails”.
But the Aurovillians came out of the struggle as victors and their resolution to be physically present there and their willingness to undergo the process of experiment persisted. ‘The issue was technically resolved by a Supreme Court decision in 1980 that led to an Act of Parliament in 1988, establishing the Auroville Foundation to guarantee that Auroville and its assets “belong to humanity”.
Although we find the detailed reportages of the ‘Auroville Revolution’ in other publications of Auroville, like ‘The Dawning of Auroville’ (1994) in the chapter ’The Battle’ discusses it extensively, but for the first time Akash Kapur has been able to bring forth the reality of the decade long physical, mental and vital churning that the inhabitants went through and finally arrived at a great spiritual synthesis.
Yet another achievement of the book is a clear and balanced portrait Satprem who was at the helm of the Auroville Revolution. Originally Bernard from France, a member of French Resistance and a survivor of Nazi Concentration Camp, Satprem had first come to India in 1950. While working as the secretary to the Governor of Pondicherry he had his darshan of Sri Aurobindo. Soon after, a copy of Sri Aurobindo’s ‘Life Divine’ left for Amazon jungle.
Upon his return to India in 1953 at the age of thirty became a mendicant sanyasi, finally to abandon all these paths to put himself at the service of the Mother. He stayed beside the Mother for 19 years becoming her confidant and witness. The recordings of his conversations with the Mother, later he published as ‘Mother’s Agenda’ in 13 volumes. He has been author of some sixty books including the seminal biographies of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
Epilogue
The complexity of his life events and his uncompromising intense character often has been the sour controversies of such unresolvable nature that even today they are debated over and often heatedly by Aurovilians and followers of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
The Epilogue of the book is titled as ‘Birthdays’ as in the same month Auroville and Akash were born. “It is February of 2018 and I find this hard to believe, but Auroville is turning fifty. Fifty years old, half a century! How did this new world, this blank slate for a reinvented society economy polity – how did the baby get to middle age? One thing is certain…… all the possibility it contains, and all that might yet happen here”. And “where ever I go, whatever I do, however much I may buck and protest, I am privileged, humbled and blessed to call Auroville my home in the world”.
(The writer is a poet, spiritualist and development professional)
