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From Auroville, Tamil Nadu, India.
Summary
A few kilometers from Pondicherry, in South India, 2000 people from over 50 different nationalities have built a utopian city. Their program: tolerance, ecology, innovation and meditation.
Achievments of Auroville are impressive. In forty years, aurovillians gathered themselves into autonomous communities, made bold architecture buldings, planted two million trees, and explored many innovations, not to mention jobs and schools for the inhabitants of the region.
But because of its strict rules, and its desire to settle and build, Auroville can appear asa mutant religion on the edge of neo colonialism …
Auroville – an achieved utopia?
The road that leads to Auroville is typically Indian: dust, shops of all kinds, animals, buses honking, crazy bikers, rickshaw that stop and go anywhere … a chaos causing one death per day.
The arrival in Auroville offers a striking contrast: peaceful paths of red earth into the trees. The few modern buildings that were built are drowned into the two million trees planted by aurovilliens – 2000 dreamers from around the world that came to southern India to build a utopian city.
Auroville was founded in 1968 on a few simple principles:
1. Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But to live in Auroville, one must be the willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.
2. Auroville will be a place of unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.
3. Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future realizations.
4. Auroville will be the location of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity.
The reality? First, Auroville does not look like a city: it is a mix of vanguard architecture buildings and small communities living in bamboo huts, all that in the forest.
But Auroville is not an isolated place. A few kilometers from Pondicherry, it became a popular tourist destination, especially since the completion of the extravagant Matrimandir. Tourists are divided into two groups: those who come for a day to see the Matrimandir from outside and a small exhibition glorifying the “Mother”, Auroville’s founder, and those coming for a longer time, longing for a community experience, philosophic teachings or alternative holidays. The sea is not far …
More than an aurovillian community, there are many aurovillians communities, each following a different model, and each pretending to follow the teaching of Sri Aurobindo, who inspired the “Mother”. Revelation, Aspiration, Truth … They named themselves after concepts of his philosophy. Each has its particularity. “Sadhana” is thus known for its extreme environmentalism : solar energy, dry toilets, whashing dishes with ash, everything is organized to minimize environmental impact and fertilize the place. Young people from around the world come to spend one week, three months or two years to dig canals, plant trees and experience something different – but it is no hippy style : no alcohol nor drugs, and you’ll have to wake up at four.
Charlie spent a few monthes there, and ended up moving because Sadhana is isolated and she has no means of locomotion. She is a 19-year old French, with a permanent smile and a hair cut from the sixties. She just left Bordeaux after her exams to come to Auroville and teach French. She had decided at the age of 16… Now she now wants to settle permanently and get the aurovillian status. An old woman joins the conversation. She has been coming to Auroville for thirty years. She has now retired and left Switzerland, where she lived, to move here, where she teaches yoga and “water therapy”.
Auroville is a mixture of hippies from the sixties, one-month tourists and young newcomers. As you can find those who have retired, built a house or a hut and live there six months a year, to escape European cold. “These are bourgeois” says a hippy style aurovillian, who settled in the very first beginnings.
“When I arrived I was sleeping under a tree. Those came and took power. They want to build everything with concrete. Before, it was nature, there were only farmers with their herds. Now there are more and more motorcycles and cars … ” The aurovilliens argue about which direction to take: Should Auroville be kept as a big garden or follow the original plan of the “Mother,” which was a 50,000 people city?
Decision making is based on discussion: Aurovillians meet and talk until everyone agrees. Formally, Auroville has a special status, defined by the Indian government, which participates in the experience: it provides financing and representatives to the board of directors.
How to become Aurovillian?
Everyone can be Aurovillian. But you need to work for six months as a volunteer before asking. If you create a company, you will have to give 30% of your profits. Bruno, from Auroville’s financial services, says that many of the companies ignore this rule, Auroville has no mean to punish them. But this is not the primary resource, 60% of funding comes from donations of Auroville – which raises the question of the sustainability of the model.
These Aurovillians are from all the world, more than fifty nationalities are represented today. They live in communities or in houses and work in alternative massage, yoga, scientific research… The scientific research center of Auroville is renowned for his work on solar energy or ecological bricks and some Aurovillians companies thrive in this market.
It is also a place where social experimentation is welcome. Upasana is a company that employs women from the villages to weave clothes from home. The profit made on selling the clothes is used to fund various social projects in Tamil Nadu …
More than fifty nationalities, and the Indians?
Indians can of course get the aurovillian status, as is the case of the founder of Upasana. But there is also those who were there before the creation of Auroville. They live in small villages that Auroville is trying to buy to follow the plan drawn by “Mother”.
And there is all those who immigrate to Auroville to take profit from all those occidental people, “they make us build houses and roads, or planting trees … it’s an opportunity and we are happy” says a Tamil. Others come to open a grocery store or restaurant … “The Indians are invading Auroville” says a French woman – recently settled.
But it’s not just the unskilled workers who come: Dr Shaji, who drove me in his big air-conditioned car is an ayurvedic doctor and comes from Chennai to work. Snehal, an entrepreneur from Gujarat, crossed India to build a community to work on permaculture and biodynamic agriculture. He funds it thanks to a vegetarian restaurant. But he will never ask to get the aurovillian status or pay the taxes: “I am Indian, I’m already at home here.”
Snehal hosted me for free (thanks). An Aurovillian woman, to whom I was asking my way to go to his place, told me frankly “Do not go, they don’t pay tax to Auroville.” And I would not seat at the community restaurant – the “solar kitchen” : “you’re not staying with an aurovillian, you’re not a guest of Auroville.”
It is a limit of Auroville: Do they really think that India is a virgin land where anyone can come and make experiments? Auroville has a positive effect by planting trees, employing the locals and schooling their kids. But there is a real problem about the identity of the place. “Auroville is in India” told me the same French woman who was complaining about the “invasion”, at another point in the conversation. As if it was not obvious. As far as I know, it has no international status… Ramesh, an Aurovillian Indian, was born there and asked for the status, which he got. He was quite embarrassed when he explained that there is a reserved beach for aurovillians because Indians harass western women …
Auroville is that strange mix that finds its coherence in the desire to build. For over 40 years aurovillians have planted, built and explored alternative routes. One may have doubts on the merit of their achievements but we must recognize that they have managed to realize a crazy project, and to make it last.
More on the Mother, founder of Auroville
The philosophy of Sri Aurobindo
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For anyone interested in the darker underbelly of Auroville, the website http://www.matacom.com discusses the issue of the Mother’s Temple (the Matrimandir) not being built according to the Mother’s original vision/blue prints/sacred geometry. Aurovillians deny that there is anything ‘off’ and misleading about the Temple, but those who understand sacred geometry and its connection to the Earth, the Earth’s day and its 12 month Year, and who do not have a vested interest in what was already built in Auroville can see the distortion as detailed by Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet in ‘Chronicles of the Inner Chamber’ as seen on the Matacom (Matrimandir Action Committee) website. Aurovillians try to shrug off the controversy, and to discredit those who challenge the Auroville Temple’s authenticity so as to maintain the illusion of an enlightened or at least spiritually progressive community. From what I have seen, Aurovillians’ treatment of Ms. Norelli-Bachelet and her work (which includes defamation and actual book, burning), this community has a long way to go before it can be admired as a spiritually progressive place where Truth is valued over egoic/vested interests.