Finding Auroville

The fact that this question has to be asked at all is ridiculous, but the narratives in Auroville are so perverted that it needs to be addressed. For anyone unfamiliar with Auroville, it is a non-question – of course Auroville is in India. But within the bubble of Auroville, things are different. When I was newly arrived in Auroville (around 5 years ago in 2018), I often heard the sentence “Auroville is not India”. There was stress laid on the idea that Auroville is a separate entity from India, and that the Indian government has (or needs to keep) minimum influence and interference in Auroville affairs. There has been in the past as well as recently the idea touted that Auroville should become like Vatican City, which is an independent tiny country based on a religious purpose.

To bolster their claim/notion that Auroville is not (in) India, people usually use various quotes by The Mother. An example is her essay published in 1954 titled A Dream, which I’m quoting in full:

A Dream

There should be somewhere upon earth a place that no nation could claim as its own, a place where every human being of goodwill, sincere in his aspiration, could live freely as a citizen of the world, obeying one single authority, that of the supreme Truth; a place of peace, concord, harmony, where all the fighting instincts of man would be used exclusively to conquer the causes of his sufferings and miseries, to surmount his weakness and ignorance, to triumph over his limitations and incapacities; a place where the needs of the spirit and the concern for progress would take precedence over the satisfaction of desires and passions, the search for pleasures and material enjoyment. In this place, children would be able to grow and develop integrally without losing contact with their souls; education would be given not with a view to passing examinations or obtaining certificates and posts, but to enrich one’s existing faculties and bring forth new ones. In this place, titles and positions would be replaced by opportunities to serve and organize; everyone’s bodily needs would be provided for equally, and in the general organization, intellectual, moral and spiritual superiority would be expressed not by increased pleasures and powers in life, but by greater duties and responsibilities. Beauty in all its art forms – painting, sculpture, music, literature – would be accessible to all equally, the ability to share in the joys it brings being limited solely by one’s capacities and not by social or financial position.

For in this ideal place, money would no longer be the sovereign lord; individual worth would have a far greater importance than that of material wealth and social position. There, work would not be for earning one’s living, but the means to express oneself and develop one’s capacities and possibilities, while at the same time being of service to the group as a whole, which would in turn provide for everyone’s subsistence1 and field of action. In short, it would be a place where human relationships, ordinarily based almost exclusively on competition and strife, would be replaced by relationships of emulation in trying to do one’s best, of collaboration and real brotherhood.

The earth is not ready to realize such an ideal, for humanity does not yet possess either the knowledge necessary to understand and adopt it or the conscious force indispensable for its execution. This is why I call it a dream. Yet this dream is on the way to becoming a reality, and it is what we are endeavouring to do at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, on a very small scale and in proportion to our limited means. The achievement is indeed far from being perfect but it is progressive; little by little we are moving towards our goal, which, we hope, we shall one day be able to show to the world as a practical and effective means of emerging from the present chaos to be born to a new life, more harmonious and truer.

A Dream was written before Auroville itself was conceptualized, but we can see that The Mother already had the idea for a location where a collective could live in pursuit of the supreme Truth. The Mother’s first message to Auroville, before its inauguration and when its conceptualization was still at a very nascent stage, is below:

Auroville wants to be a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony, above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities. The purpose of Auroville is to realize human unity.

And then in 1968 in she wrote the Auroville Charter for the township’s inauguration ceremony:

Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But, to live in Auroville, one must be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.

Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.

Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future realizations.

Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual human unity.

So quotes like these from The Mother are used to justify the notion that Auroville should be free from India’s jurisdiction, or that India should have minimal influence and control over Auroville’s affairs (“There should be somewhere upon earth a place that no nation could claim as its own”, “Auroville belongs to nobody in particular”). There has been over the decades an incessant demand that Auroville remain administratively autonomous from India.

However, if we look at the statements of The Mother quoted above, we realize that they are neither political proclamations demanding independent statehood, nor legal decrees creating an independent state. Instead, they are statements of spiritual aspiration. This aspiration is that with the transformation of consciousness, with the movement away from the ego and away from material attachments, and the movement towards complete selflessness, humanity will be able to reach a point where outer laws, rules and regulations will not be required anymore. This will be a point where the level of inner self-discipline will reach such a level that humanity as a whole, or at least a smaller collective of humanity, will be able to be self-governing. She termed this “divine anarchy”. When she was asked in December 1972 what kind of political organization she wanted for Auroville, she responded:

An amusing definition occurs to me: a divine anarchy. But the world will not understand. Men must become conscious of their psychic being and organize themselves spontaneously, without fixed rules and laws – that is the ideal.

For this, one must be in contact with one’s psychic being, one must be guided by it and the ego’s authority and influence must disappear.

Anyone who analyses and understands Auroville’s purpose with even a little bit of sincerity and honesty can only come the conclusion that, in this day and age, Auroville is not meant as a place where the most important factor is the administrative autonomy of its residents from India or the world. Instead, the central factor that Auroville’s residents should focus on is their spiritual development individually and collectively, so that they may work towards becoming free of “the ego’s authority and influence” and gain the ability for spontaneous organization that is at the heart of The Mother’s divine anarchy. This is why The Mother’s words are a spiritual aspiration, a spiritual manifesto that seeks to create a world (or an example for it) where people are free from the needs of claims of ownership or the desires of belonging. The Mother was not doing anything as trivial as asking for political autonomy. She was giving to the world a space to pursue the monumental challenge of a transformation of consciousness. The human unity that Sri Aurobindo and The Mother foresaw is not simply an enclave free from the administrative authority of any nation, but an actual unity and equality brought about by this transformation. Auroville is an international township, but it is one for a very specific reason, which is the universality of Integral Yoga.

Once again, anyone who analyses Auroville with sincerity and honesty will immediately see that humanity as it exists today is not ready for this kind of administrative autonomy, for divine anarchy, and that in Auroville we have to work out ways of getting to a point where we become ready for it. So the aim is not to immediately give Auroville autonomy, but to see how we can set the stage for people to move towards being ready for divine anarchy, and work towards it. And it is obvious that the road to divine anarchy will be a long one. We have to focus on moving in that direction, not demand autonomy when we are so obviously not ready for it.

And the last paragraph of The Dream (quoted above) says as much. In it The Mother cites the example of the Ashram, but it is equally valid for Auroville, unfortunately as much today as it was when Auroville was founded:

The earth is not ready to realize such an ideal, for humanity does not yet possess either the knowledge necessary to understand and adopt it or the conscious force indispensable for its execution. This is why I call it a dream. Yet this dream is on the way to becoming a reality, and it is what we are endeavouring to do at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, on a very small scale and in proportion to our limited means. The achievement is indeed far from being perfect but it is progressive; little by little we are moving towards our goal, which, we hope, we shall one day be able to show to the world as a practical and effective means of emerging from the present chaos to be born to a new life, more harmonious and truer.

It is of course much easier to demand administrative autonomy than it is to set oneself sincerely on this path towards the egoless self-perfection needed to be able to handle divine anarchy. And this is exactly the reason why the clamour in Auroville today is for the former and not the latter.

It is also quite obvious that anyone who interprets Auroville’s central criteria to be administrative autonomy is actually attracted to the potential power and control that can come with such autonomy within the isolated Auroville situation. These unfortunately are the type of people who have found the most fertile ground in Auroville.

A sadhak of Integral Yoga who comes to Auroville to help move the world towards transformation should hardly be bothered by what administrative system is governing Auroville at any given time. S/he will understand that the journey is a long one, that there will be different administrative systems that come and go, and that the role of the Aurovilians should be to help whichever administrative framework is currently prevalent to move towards the collective’s (and the world’s) transformation, instead of fixating on one or other form of administration and authority. The sadhak will understand that any and all administrative solutions are only temporary mental constructs which by themselves are destined to fail, because it is only the transformation of consciousness itself that can lead to the goal we are aiming for. Because Auroville’s journey is going to be a long one, we should look at it as a relay race, with one “generation” trying its best and then passing the baton on to the next, fixed on the final goal no matter what the specifics of the current situation are.

The Mother herself kept insisting that the laws and regulations of the land need to be followed at all times. While she was in her body, she never even thought of giving Aurovilians administrative autonomy over the working of Auroville. She always had an overseeing administrative system set up to do so, even though Auroville was then at a very nascent stage. Earlier than that, in January 1937, Sri Aurobindo had this to say about how the Ashram was run:

The whole work of Aroumé, of the Granary, of the Building Department, etc. was arranged by the Mother not only in general plan and object but in detail. It was only after she had seen everything in working order that she drew back and allowed things to go on according to her plan, but still with an eye on the whole. It is therefore according to the Mother’s arrangement that people here are working. When it was not so, when Mother allowed the sadhaks to do according to their own ideas or nature, indicating her will but not enforcing it in detail, the whole Asram was a scene of anarchy, confusion, waste, disorderly self-indulgence, clash and quarrel, self-will, disobedience, and if it had gone on, the Asram would have ceased to exist long ago. It was to prevent that that the Mother chose X and a few others on whom she could rely and reorganised all the departments, supervising every detail and asking the heads to enforce proper methods and discipline. Whatever remains still of the old defects is due to the indiscipline of many workers and their refusal to get rid of their old nature. Even now if the Mother withdrew her control, the whole thing would collapse.

Aurovilians should understand that administrative autonomy is an aspiration that they need to become worthy of earning, instead of demanding it as a starting point for participation. When a statement like this is made in Auroville today, it is challenged with the question: who will judge what constitutes worthiness? The answer to that, for the foreseeable future is, ultimately, the Indian government. Anyone who finds this unacceptable faces an existential crisis in Auroville now. If the primary reason for someone to be in Auroville is in actuaity the attraction of its hitherto administrative autonomy (no matter what reason they give to others for being here), they will now face an existential crisis here.

For the past three decades or so, since the passing of the Auroville Foundation Act in 1988 (and its implementation in 1991), people in Auroville have enjoyed almost unlimited administrative autonomy in many respects. Unfortunately, this privileged has been thoroughly abused by some Aurovilians, who have used it to try and create an autonomous enclave where they have unrestricted power and control, and no one from the outside (or inside) is allowed to judge them. These are the political leaders of Auroville, politicians (with a small p) who constantly jump from one working group to the next and are always in power, lobbyists who keep running to Delhi to “manage” the central government and administration, and lawyers who have in the last two years filed more than 20 court cases to desperately try and make sure that their power and control of the Auroville enclave/bubble is not taken away from them.

And it is exactly because of this “abuse of power” over the past three decades that the Indian government has had to step in and take away some of the autonomy that it generously gave to Auroville in the 1988 Auroville Foundation Act. The role of the Auroville Foundation Office in Auroville was and is supposed to be one of overseeing the project, of assessors of the experiment. And the Indian government has assessed that the experiment has gone dreadfully off track. The 20+ court cases (with more to come), and outrage over the Indian government intervening to align things back to Auroville’s intended purpose betrays, frankly speaking, an outdated colonialist mentality, one that is still stuck in the 1970s, and views India though that prism. It is time for people to realize that we are now well into the 21st century, and India and the world are a very different place.

It has to be pointed out that throughout the history of Auroville since The Mother’s passing, the Aurovilians who have been vociferously fighting for autonomy have done so by repeatedly going to the Indian authorities, either the governments or the courts, to maintain the power and control that comes with that autonomy. It is the most ironic way to prove that Auroville is, of course, ultimately in India.

There will come a time in the future when the world will be a much more equal and peaceful place, when national borders throughout the world will be much less entrenched and much less meaningful. At that time, it will be able to imagine Auroville, and indeed the many Aurovilles that will exist at that time, as being administratively free from the nations that host them. For now though, our focus should be on realizing that it is only through the transformation of consciousness that this future will be achievable, and on training our energies on figuring out how to proceed in that direction, instead of the absurd demand of continued unquestioned administrative autonomy from India. This demand itself betrays a complete lack of understanding of the purpose of Auroville.