Finding Auroville

In the ongoing series of posts under the title Uncovering Aurovillage I have been describing the cabal that is Aurovillage – a network of people in Auroville who have worked very hard and have been very successful in making sure that the project of Auroville remains a small, insular, parochial, tribalistic and nepotistic bubble. They have at every turn actively blocked the growth and development of Auroville into what The Mother had envisioned, which is a township of up to 50,000 people who live lives inspired by and centered on the teachings of Sri Aurobindo. Much like an educational institution, Auroville is supposed to be engaged in the dissemination of Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual philosophy of Integral Yoga, and engaged in an exchange of ideas with the wider world in pursuit of a true human unity based on that spiritual philosophy. Instead of this, what we have got after more than five decades of its existence is an Auroville that currently functions as a self-styled “ecovillage” with less than 3000 adult residents, that is increasingly oriented towards becoming a space of consumption that focuses on the monetization of touristic, wellness, mindfulness and ecological products and activities for the enrichment of the Aurovillagers. Alongside this, Auroville is being turned into a gated retirement and semi-retirement community for people who want to run away from the lives they had been leading in the outside world. Aurovillage, as the dominant, controlling and bullying faction in Auroville since its inception, and which in many ways has functioned as the de facto establishment in Auroville for the past five decades, has been orchestrating this hijacking and derailment of the project for its own benefit right from the beginning. The fact that this has been allowed to happen for so many decades is a testament to how proficient Aurovillage has become in its ability to be duplicitous and manipulative in its interactions with the outside world. Taking all this into account, if one wants to understand the history of Auroville and what has been going on here since 1968, it is essential to gain an understanding of what Aurovillage is and how it has functioned till now. This ongoing series of posts is aimed at doing just that.

Even though Auroville has throughout its history been a comparatively small community, it is still very layered and complex. Key to this layering is the fact that an elaborate facade has been created for the consumption of outsiders by Aurovillage to promote Auroville as a liberal, ecological and spiritual space. This facade hides a very different reality underneath, which is the much more negative, insular, racist and abusive bubble that Auroville actually exists in. All this layering and complexity needs to be uncovered, which is why there is a requirement for not just one or two but an entire series of posts to expose Aurovillage and the reality of what has been happening in Auroville. Because of the layering and complexity, each post in this series focuses on a different aspect of Aurovillage. Each post builds on the previous ones and adds on another layer of the puzzle. The first few posts, of which this current one is a part, lay out the broader themes that are foundational to understanding Aurovillage. The first post in this series titled The Packaging of Auroville laid out the idea of the facade. The second post briefly defined Aurovillage in relation to Auroville. The third post described the duplicity, insincerity and manipulativeness at the heart of Aurovillage, and the fact that the dominant atmosphere created by Aurovillage has attracted people to Auroville who are at ease with living lives of duplicity and insincerity. This has not just created a vicious cycle in which duplicity and insincerity is being constantly exacerbated and reinforced, but has led to Auroville becoming a haven for people with the kind of psychological disorders that allow them to thrive in duplicitous and insincere environments. The fourth post traced a brief history of Aurovillage, from its inception during the hippie era of the 1960s and 70s to the present times when Auroville is being turned more and more into a space of consumption as mentioned above.

The current post delves into another foundational aspect of Aurovillage, which is that behind the facade, Aurovillage has been able to run Auroville, for all these years, and for all intents and purposes, as a colonial enclave. The insular, parochial, racist and nepotistic bubble that we have been discussing above and in previous posts is in fact this colonial enclave. The continuing colonial nature and atmosphere of the space is an essential aspect of the insular bubble, of this isolated enclave and sanctuary that Auroville has existed as since the beginning. And a crucial reason why Aurovillage has been so duplicitous and manipulative is so that it can maintain the facade to hide the colonial nature of the insular bubble. This has been quite a feat to perform. The maintenance of the colonial enclave is one of the central objectives of Aurovillage, as will be laid out in this post. This colonial enclave is not just hidden in plain sight in the middle of modern, independent India, but has actually been supported by the Indian government, and would never have been able to survive without that support. The Indian government has been aware of this problem for a while, and one of the main reasons why it is now in the process of bringing about changes in Auroville is to bring an end to the colonial enclave and the derailment of the project of Auroville that it entails, and to bring Auroville back on track towards it intended purpose. What is going on in Auroville now is basically a process of decolonization.

To understand how Auroville has been run as a colonial enclave, and how the colonial enclave came about, we have to first step back and understand the wider global sociocultural, historical and socioeconomic contexts in which Auroville was started and in which it has existed for the past few decades. So lets dive right into the deep end of the sociocultural realities of the world. Racism by white people is a very real problem throughout the world. The only people who deny this are white supremacists themselves, or people who are benefiting from the racism. In the deranged bubble that is Aurovillage, racism by Westerners and white people is denied completely, and in fact the mention of it is itself considered to be racist (against white people) and considered to be an act of rhetorically separating and segregating the population of Auroville along the lines of skin color and place of origin. The narrative is that we have all come here for “human unity”, and are all supposed to be one, so no discriminatory language should be used, and to mention “white people” is itself racist and discriminatory. In this way, to mention racism and colonialism is considered to go against the idea of human unity in Auroville. This is a clever tactic used (all over the world) to disallow any criticism of the actions of white people, who then flip the script and say that they are the victims of racism and discrimination at the hands of Indians. Of course Westerners here have absolutely no reservations in critiquing and disparaging Indians and India, and chalk that down to “telling the truth” and exposing reality.

People who study racism and understand what racism actually is will already comprehend from the paragraph above just how racist the situation is in Auroville. This denial of racism and the blaming people who point out racism of being racist themselves is part of the playbook of racists and white supremacists all over the world.

To be sure, bigotry and discrimination exist everywhere on earth and in many different forms. Sexism and classism are widespread throughout the world. In India, casteism and communalism are enormous social problems. Xenophobia, nationalism and nativism exist everywhere, including in India. All of these are social ills that need to be addressed and ultimately eliminated. But they cannot be addressed and eliminated by turning a blind eye to them. Identifying bigotry of any kind is not itself bigotry, it is the first step in the process of eradicating it and moving on to a better world without it. And so to identify, analyze and point out the racism practiced by Westerners in Auroville is not itself discrimination. The human unity that Auroville aims for can never be attained by ignoring racism or sweeping it under the proverbial rug, as has been done in Auroville since its inception. Nor can it be attained by ignoring any other form of bigotry here. Human unity is not simply the existence of people from different parts of the world in close proximity to each other without engaging in analysis of the social problems that arise from the resultant interactions, which are part of the societal problems that exist throughout the world. The human unity that Auroville aspires to can only be achieved by deeply understanding and acknowledging all forms of bigotry that exist here (as well as having the emotional intelligence and sociological intelligence to be able to understand bigotry as it exists in all its forms all over the world), understanding the reasons why they exist and working through them so that they are all eliminated. And since Auroville is an experiment in Integral Yoga, it is imperative to understand that bigotry of all kinds can ultimately only truly be eliminated by the dissolution of the ego, because all bigotry resides in the ego. No solution in material nature is going to be able to remove bigotry completely, because some form of self-centeredness will always remain in the individual and in the collective. A true pursuit of intellectual humanism can go a long way in reducing bigotry in the world, but ultimately it is only spiritual humanism that will be able to eradicate it completely from its root.

Jnana Yoga, the yoga of knowledge, is a part of Integral Yoga, and is the contemplative and observational practice that leads to knowledge of and understanding of the true nature of the self and of humanity. It is the experiential understanding that leads to the realization that the material vital ego is the root cause of all the negativity in the world, and that identifying with the Divine within us leads us away from this vital ego in a radical and fundamental manner. The process of jnana yoga allows us to see clearly that the root cause of all the collective and individual problems of humanity lie in the vital ego, and the root cause of all bigotry also lie there. And just as the contemplation and observation in jnana yoga has to be completely objective and truthful to be able to qualify as jnana yoga, the identification of racism and all other bigotry in Auroville (and everywhere else) has to be done in a completely truthful and objective manner. The aim has to be to identify true bigotry so that it can be eliminated. The aim cannot be the misidentification, exaggeration and creation of false bigotries for the sake of claiming false victimhood.

While the true elimination of bigotry from humanity will happen with spiritual humanism and the dissolution of the ego, the mental and intellectual understanding of bigotry acts as a precursor to this movement, or as the initial steps. Truthfulness and sincerity are just as important in this initial intellectual, sattwic mental understanding of bigotry. Therefore in Auroville the aim has to be the gaining of as objective, truthful and sincere an understanding of bigotry (and all other ills of humanity) as possible. The aim is not to reach an understanding of things that is beneficial and convenient to us as individuals or as a collective, but an understanding that is radically truthful. This requires emotional strength, internal courage and selflessness, which are indeed the objectives of Yoga and of Auroville. Bigotry has to be understood for what it really is, no matter where that may lead.

A fundamentally important aspect of bigotry and discrimination in any form is what can be called social structural advantage. Bigotry of any kind, including all of those mentioned above, only has teeth and only works if the group practicing it has structural advantages of one kind or another in the society or group in which it is practiced. So while studying bigotry and discrimination in any situation, it is necessary to understand where the structural advantage lies, and in what way that structural advantage is practiced and enacted. Structural advantage is any kind of advantage or power that one group of people have over another. To be structural, this advantage and power has to be baked into the social system and social structure that is under consideration. In the case of Auroville then it is also essential to understand what the social structural advantages are, where they lie, and who has possession of and access to them. If we look at the history and social life of Auroville, we see that Western racism has been the predominant form of bigotry that has shaped and affected life within the Auroville bubble, more than any of the other bigotries that exist here. And therefore it is the most important form of bigotry that needs to be addressed as of now.

Westerners in Auroville have two main structural advantages, and these two advantages are interlinked. The first is economic, and the second is sociocultural. Because Westerners come from countries with stronger economies, the exchange rate between the currencies of their home countries and India gives them a lot of financial power here, much more than they would have back in the country they come from. Even a little bit of money from their home country translates into a lot of money here. This economic advantage has existed for many centuries now, and has (along with other structural advantages) led to an ingrained sense of superiority among Western people, and a corresponding sense of inferiority among people from countries such as India. This attitudinal inequality is the sociocultural advantage that Westerners have, and it is a sociological reality that is well documented in various scholarly fields.

Both the economic and sociocultural advantages, as well as Western racism as it exists today have their origin in the colonial past of the modern world. The colonization of the world by Europeans began as early as the fifteenth century and lasted in most part till the middle of the twentieth century, though pockets of colonization exist till today. While the British left India in 1947, the French left Pondicherry in 1956. So colonialism was fresh in the minds, memories and outlooks of people when Auroville was inaugurated in 1968 and started getting populated. If you study the literature, journalism and other global popular cultural products of the 1960s and 70s, it is clear to see that Western racism was much more prevalent and publicly expressed than it is now, as were other bigotries such as sexism. For example, the travel literature written during that time was often openly racist and sexist. The world has gone through a process from then till now that has made racism and sexism much more unacceptable in general global society, though they are of course very far from being eliminated. Western racism was much more prevalent and overt during those times. That was the atmosphere in which the hippie trail and hippie culture existed, and it was in that context that Westerners began settling in Auroville. These were people who had grown up in a time when colonialism was still a very recent thing, and when racism was much more acceptable and out in the open.

Alongside this, India was a nation that had just emerged from the ravages of colonialism, was engulfed in extreme poverty and material backwardness, and Indians were on the whole lacking in education, exposure and confidence. Most Indians were materially and socially disadvantaged. Only a relatively small percentage had access to good quality education and exposure to the wider world. Non-fictional accounts of India such as VS Naipaul’s Indian Trilogy give us a very good sense of what India was like at that time and how India has changed over the decades. And even though India is a very different country now than it was in the 1970s, many of these material and social disadvantages persist into the present day. India is only slowly growing in economic strength, education, exposure and confidence. The sense of inferiority to the West has only slowly been eroding as Indians gain exposure to the world and realize that at a psychological and emotional level all of humanity is in the same boat.

The Westerners who came to Auroville in the 1960s and 70s came with a sense of superiority, entitlement and privilege that was much more pronounced and prevalent at that time. It was in this atmosphere that, when The Mother passed away in 1973, a section of Aurovilians led by and mostly constituted of Westerners, rebelled against the Sri Aurobindo Society (SAS), which was the trust, run by Indians, that was technically running Auroville and owned its common assets. As discussed in the previous post, this group of Aurovilians constituted the beginning of Aurovillage. Such a rebellion would have been unthinkable in any Western country. Imagine a scenario where a group on foreigners who had come to France in the 1970s to be part of a spiritual “intentional community” had suddenly decided to claim autonomy from the organization that had founded and governed that community, and demanded administrative autonomy from France in the running of their own affairs. There is absolutely no way that would have been allowed. However that is exactly what happened in India in the case of Auroville, and much of it has to do with where India was as a nation at that time. The notion of demanding autonomy from the SAS is in itself an example of the sense of entitlement and privilege that the Westerners carried with them. The fact that they had chosen to come and live here in a rustic environment devoid of many basic amenities does not negate this privilege, since that was a personal decision they had made. This sociocultural advantage of the Western Aurovillagers played a sizeable role throughout the crucial events of the 1970s and 1980s, when the Aurovillagers were fighting with the SAS and when they had to convince various Indians in positions of power and influence to side with them against the SAS and give them autonomy in the running of Auroville. This privilege and entitlement, and the actual material and physical manifestation of it on the ground in Auroville in the form of Indian authorities acquiescing to the demands of the Aurovillagers for administrative autonomy, was the beginnings of the colonial enclave. The emergence of this colonial enclave mirrors the emergence of Aurovillage in the 1970s after the passing of The Mother. This is not surprising, because Aurovillage is the controlling heart of the colonial enclave, the entity that worked to establish the colonial enclave, and so their histories run entwined with each other.

In the 1970s, the position of Aurovillage and the fledgling colonial enclave was precarious, because the SAS was constantly trying to take over the reins of Auroville. With the help of their political connections, the Aurovillagers was able to convince the Indian government to temporarily take over the assets of Auroville in 1980 via the Auroville Emergency Provisions Act. With this, the authority of the SAS was removed, and the Indian government allowed Aurovilians a lot of freedom to administer Auroville themselves. This began the process of the effective legitimization of Aurovillage and the colonial enclave, behind a facade of spiritual rhetoric, allusions to human unity and the performative universality of a supposed international intentional community. A key aspect of the autonomy that was given to the Aurovilians at this time was the ability to decide who could become an Aurovilian and who could not. This control over the entry process is a vital part of the power and control that Aurovillage has over Auroville as an institution. It allows them to choose who becomes an Aurovilian, and they use this authority to ensure, to the best of their abilities, that only people who conform to the diktats of Aurovillage are let in to Auroville. By only selecting people who will either support Aurovillage or allow it to continue, and weeding out people who will seriously question and resist it, Aurovillage is constantly reinforcing and strengthening its hold over Auroville. This entry process is also key to maintaining the colonial enclave. Only those Indians who support the colonial enclave or those who will not seriously oppose it are let in. Any Indian who is suspected of being a threat to the colonial enclave is rejected during the entry process. This is the formal and technical part of the selection process to become an Aurovilian. Along with this, the atmosphere that exists in Auroville itself acts as a very effective selection process. Beneath the facade, the atmosphere is so passively toxic, abusive, racist and full of negativity that most people who actually come here with sincerity towards the pursuit of spirituality and progressive humanist values become increasingly disillusioned over time, till they reach a point where they cannot take it anymore and they leave Auroville. The atmosphere of negativity ultimately trumps the positivity with which these sincere people originally came to Auroville. Those who stay on in Auroville are people who are either okay with the toxicity and negativity, who are able to turn a perpetual blind eye to it, or those who thrive in it and perpetuate it themselves. Most of the Indians who are confronted with the racism of the colonial enclave leave, while some stay on for different reasons. A few of them become active participants in the colonial enclave and become a part of Aurovillage. This group of Indians will be dealt with later in this post. This two-pronged selection process is among the main reasons why there are so few people here, whether Indian or non-Indian, who are willing to stand up to and oppose Aurovillage and the colonial enclave.

It is not that the hippies and Westerners who came to Auroville in the 1960s and 70s came with the intention of establishing this insular colonial enclave. Instead, they were people who had come here for a variety of reasons that included the pursuit of spirituality, the pursuit of a new kind of endeavor, a sense of adventure, and an escape from their regular lives. What they all brought along with them were the social structural advantages discussed above. And they found themselves, after the passing of The Mother in 1973, in a very specific and very peculiar situation in Auroville, which has been discussed in the previous post. This situation included the possibility of establishing a community that was administratively autonomous. The justification for this administrative autonomy was the establishment of a spiritual community that had the freedom to make its own rules and regulations. A few of these early Aurovilians, including a few Indians, recognized in this situation the potential to create an institutional enclave that would be administratively isolated from India and the wider world, within which they could lead lives isolated from the outside world, and where they could exert administrative power and control. Cloaked with the narratives of spirituality, human unity and internationalism, this group of early Aurovilians, the pioneering Aurovillagers, were motivated by the possibility of creating a permanent sanctuary into which they could escape from the real world, and within which they could obtain and exercise administrative power and authority in a way that was much easier than in the outside world. What happened in Auroville at that time is just another example of the age old problem of humanity, where a well-intentioned endeavor is hijacked by a handful of egotistical, self-centered and power-hungry people. This power and control in an isolated enclave was the main aim and motivation of Aurovillage, and has remained so until today. In fact it has now metastasized into an existential imperative for them. They have become so accustomed to life in the insular colonial enclave that their emotional survival now depends on the continuation of it. As mentioned before, the duplicity and manipulation required to maintain the facade of spirituality and progressivism that hides this actual motivation is the reason why Aurovillage is full of duplicitous and manipulative people, and full of people with the type of psychological disorders that allow them to function and thrive in duplicitous and manipulative environments. The fact that this isolated bubble took on the nature of a colonial enclave was basically a natural outcome or outgrowth of the fact that it was mainly these duplicitous Westerners who thrived and held power in the Auroville of the 1970s and 80s. The inherent atmosphere of racism and Western superiority in the nascent Auroville meant that the people who settled here were either racist themselves or were okay with settling into the atmosphere of racism. Since this was the dominant atmosphere in Auroville, most of the people, both Indian as well as non-Indian, who were not in agreement with it simply left after spending some time here, allowing Aurovillage to continue its control and consolidate its grip on Auroville, and allowing the racism and colonialism to continue and consolidate. The SAS, which had an idea of what was actually going on in Auroville, were sidelined with the help of the Indian authorities. The pioneering Aurovillagers thus became the pioneering colonialists, the pioneering covert racists of Auroville. And since that time the atmosphere and structure of racism and colonialism has been an inherent part of the insular enclave of Auroville. The story of Aurovillage since then has been one of constant effort and success in maintaining this duplicitous insular colonial enclave behind a sophisticatedly constructed facade. Even though India has been slowly and surely changing over the years and decades, and is a very different place now than it was in the 1970s, Aurovillage has managed to maintain this colonial enclave. This racist bubble is becoming more and more incongruous in a changing India. Auroville as a colonial enclave has been a lingering administrative aberration inherited from the twentieth century that has been allowed to exist till now, an aberration that thankfully is currently in the process of being rectified.

Urged on by the powerful political connections of the Aurovillagers, and perhaps somewhat convinced by the facade that Aurovillage had already started to refine, the Indian government in the 1970s and 80s actually helped in the consolidation of the colonial enclave. While the Auroville Emergency Act of 1980 was a temporary provision, the Auroville Foundation Act of 1988 provided a more permanent solution to the administrative battle between the SAS and Aurovillagers. The 1988 Act removed the SAS from the picture completely, and converted Auroville into a legal Foundation, putting all the assets of Auroville into that Foundation. It gave a legal footing and legitimacy to Auroville and its activities. The Act established a Governing Board selected by the Indian government to oversee the project, with a Secretary to the Governing Board stationed in Auroville as their on-site representative. Slowly, the government started to channel funds to Auroville for specific projects. One would think that these changes would have lead to the demise of the colonial enclave, but they only helped to strengthen it and give it an indirect legitimacy. One of the main reasons why this has happened is that despite the fact that the Indian government is ultimately in charge of Auroville, it has till recently kept a hands-off and laissez faire attitude towards Auroville, allowing Aurovilians, and so in effect Aurovillagers, to run the project. The Act created the Residents Assembly as part of the Foundation, which gave a legal standing to Aurovilians as a collective group within the Foundation. The activities of the Residents Assembly were to be organized by various working groups. The Aurovillagers had already been the dominant bullying faction of Aurovilians through the 1970s and 80s, and were the ones who had pushed the Indian government to pass both the Acts. The Aurovillagers now began to control the working groups that had been formed, and began to dominate the Residents Assembly. From its beginnings till today, the Residents Assembly’s supposed collective decision making process has been manipulated by Aurovillage to ensure their continuing control over Auroville. Successive Governing Boards have raised serious concerns regarding the administration of Auroville by Aurovilians, but for reasons that will be dealt with in an upcoming post, nothing much had been done till recently to rectify these problems. And so, in effect, the Act handed over to Aurovillage the legal legitimacy to dominate, manipulate and control Auroville, and to ensure that Auroville remains a small, insular sanctuary and colonial enclave. After the passing of the 1980 Act the Aurovilians, and so in effect the Aurovillagers, had already been allowed to decide who could become an Aurovilian. The 1988 Act enshrined this capacity in a legal document, thus handing over to the Aurovillagers one of the most powerful weapons in their arsenal that they have used to maintain their control over the insular colonial enclave. In the currently ongoing battle between Aurovillage and the Indian government over the administration of Auroville, all the court cases filed by individual Aurovilians, all of whom are part of the network of Aurovillagers, have been filed with the 1988 Act as their bases. These court cases have been filed so that Auroville can be kept insular and so that Aurovillage can continue to maintain its control over the colonial enclave.

The uncertainty and precariousness of Aurovillage and the colonial enclave during the 1970s and 80s gave way to much greater security and legitimacy from the 1990s onwards. The passing of the Act gave a level of confidence and an assurity to the Aurovillage racists and colonialists that they could continue to run the insular colonial enclave as long as they maintained the facade and kept the Indian authorities hoodwinked. Materially, the development of Auroville gradually restarted. Institutional and residential buildings began to be built. Auroville’s economy began to grow slowly, mostly in the direction of catering to the increasing tourist demand. The hippie trail that had helped populate Auroville in its early years had petered out, but its spirit and legacy continued in many ways in the form of the backpacker tourist circuit. It is the atmosphere of a backpacker tourist destination that the developing Auroville adopted, directed by the controlling grip of Aurovillage.

The backpacker tourist circuit is quite extensive in India. This is a circuit that caters to mostly Western tourists on a budget, much like the hippie trail of the past. There are also similar claims of interest in Eastern spirituality of various types, along with the added interest in hatha yoga in recent decades. This backpacker circuit includes destinations such as Goa, Banaras, various locations in Himachal Pradesh and Kerela, to mention just a few. In some of these locations Westerners come back repeatedly, staying multiple months every year, for as long as their visas and budgets will allow. Auroville has become a destination on this circuit, with the added attraction of handing out renewable five-year visas and the ability to stay here on an almost permanent basis, if one joins the community. Just as the majority of Westerners coming to live in Auroville in the early years were hippies, the majority of Westerners coming to Auroville since the 1990s are the kind of people who frequent the backpacker circuit. Many of these are people who don’t have enough money to live back in their own countries, and are not interested in or are incapable of working to earn that money. However they do have enough money to live reasonably comfortable lives in India. The majority of Westerners who have been coming and settling in Auroville over the past three or four decades have been from this category. All they have to do is pretend to be spiritual and believers in The Mother and Sri Aurobindo for the duration of their entry process, and they are able to obtain the coveted Aurovilian status. Aurovillage does its best to ensure that these people have an easy time in joining Auroville, since they need to maintain the percentage of Westerners amongst Aurovilians. Once they are Aurovilians, these Westerners can basically live however they want, and they have a vested interest in making sure that Auroville remains the insular, isolated, sparsely-populated, sylvan gated community that it has turned into, oriented towards catering to them. They have come here to live easy, laid-back lives, and that is what the current Auroville gives them, behind the duplicity of the facade. They have absolutely no interest or motivation in supporting the growth of Auroville into a township of 50,000 people that is seriously focused on Integral Yoga. On the contrary, they have a very strong vested interest and desire to make sure that the development of Auroville is blocked, and that it remains a private club, an exclusive gated community. In other words, the majority of Westerners who come to Auroville come here to become Aurovillagers. In this way, Aurovillage, which controls the entry process to become an Aurovilian, to the best of its ability only allows in people with agency who will become Aurovillagers, i.e. people who are supportive of Auroville as an insular, isolated sanctuary. And the more such people come and settle in Auroville, the stronger the insular sanctuary becomes. Many of these people come here to live among other Westerners and white people, and they do everything they can to keep it that way.

There are many different type of Westerners who travel along the backpacker tourist circuit. Some of them are racist and some are not. Anyone who has intersected with or partaken in the backpacker tourist circuit while traveling in India will be familiar with this. And racist bubbles exist on this circuit, in certain locations in Goa, Himachal Pradesh etc. These are spaces that cater to Western tourists and exclude or marginalize Indians. The Indians who own and control such spaces allow them to exist in this way solely for monetary reasons. And everywhere on the backpacker circuit Westerners encounter Indians – restaurant and hotel workers and owners, shopkeepers, hanger-ons etc etc – who are deferential to Westerners, once again primarily for monetary reasons, but also for the sociocultural reasons described above.

In the minds of the Westerners who come to live like permanent tourists in Auroville, the insular bubble that exists here is simply one such space that is meant for Western occupation and consumption. They see Indians as providers of services, and as hanger-ons who have come here to live with Westerners. And ironically since this is the environment and atmosphere that has been created here, some Indians do come here to live like hanger-ons. An Auroville that is focused on being an institution for the pursuit of Integral Yoga would attract a completely different profile of people, whether Indian or non-Indian, than the permanent backpacker enclave that it has effectively been reduced to now attracts.

This is a natural consequence of the hippie colonial enclave that was allowed to be established in the 1970s and 80s. The continuation of the hippie colonial enclave led naturally to the backpacker colonial enclave that we have now. This permanent tourist colonial enclave is what Westerners experience when they come here. The ones who want to live in a place like this stay, and the ones who do not leave. Anyone who might have heard of Auroville as an experiment in true spiritual living that aims at the attainment of an actual human unity would come here, see what it is actually like on the ground, and would run back to where they came from. Anyone with sincerity who continues to live here does so only if they have truly decided to dedicate their lives to these goals and to Integral Yoga, and as part of that are ready to fight the system that has developed here. And there are very few people who would dedicate their lives to such an effort. So what we have are Westerners coming here to live easy lives in a racist enclave, where they can partake in their Western entitlement and white privilege with impunity in a space that requires very little money, comparatively speaking, for them to exist in, and which has an administrative structure that actually supports and promotes their life of entitlement and privilege, behind the pesky facade of spirituality and progressivism that they have to maintain.

Most of the Westerners who are living in Auroville are living like permanent tourists in a cheap touristic destination. That is what Auroville is for them. Spirituality is something that they have to pretend to be interested in whenever needed. And the Aurovillage system that protects them within the enclave is so strong that they barely need to pretend. Many of them do not work at all, or do bare minimum amounts of work. When asked, they claim to be doing something or the other. Whenever needed, the Aurovillage system will back them up and claims that they are working for Auroville, as long as that individual backs the Aurovillage system. Some engage in work, but the nature of the work is nothing compared to the rigor, effort, consistency and discipline that would be required of them to earn even a subsistence wage back in the West. When they work their motivation is either the preservation of the enclave, or personal monetary and material benefit. Some of them take on roles in the administration of the enclave. They are periodically called upon to protest and block any activity that threatens the colonial enclave, and that threatens the administrative autonomy and insularity of the enclave. These people constitute the periphery of Aurovillage. They are the ones who are benefiting from the maintenance of the colonial enclave, while they sometimes themselves partake in its maintenance. This peripheral group constitutes the majority of Western Aurovillagers.

Then there is the core group of Aurovillagers, which is a smaller group than the periphery. These are the people who are seriously and dedicatedly involved in the protection and administration of the enclave. If tamas is the dominant attribute of the Aurovillage periphery, the dominant attribute of the core is rajas. Their motivation is power, control, authority and social standing within the enclave. These people are constantly involved in the administration, in the working groups, in producing propaganda through the various media outlets of Auroville, in outreach and lobbying. These are the people who do the racist yeoman’s job of maintaining the facade, and are masters of manipulation, duplicity and dishonesty. They are constantly working to maintain the facade and the colonial enclave behind the facade. It should be remembered that during the colonial era, many Westerners dedicated their lives to the colonial project. The benefits of maintaining a colonial enclave outweigh the effort needed to maintain it.

So, over the decades, even though the entitlement and privilege of Westerners has been slowly waning across the world, the Westerners who continue to be attracted to come and live permanently in Auroville have been people who are unhappy and frustrated with their lives back in their home countries, have no problem in taking advantage of their entitlement and privilege here, and are ready to lives lives of permanent insincerity, dishonesty, duplicity and manipulativeness. As individuals and as a collective, they can embrace a sense of fictitious superiority here that hides their actual deep insecurities and sense of insufficiency.

As I had mentioned in the previous post, the facade itself has a lot of positives going for it in terms of alternative, progressive, ecological, wellness and mindfulness practices, and many Aurovillagers are involved in these activities. The facade also allows many Aurovillagers to profit financially via these practices, as well as through commercial units such as restaurants, cafes, guest houses, boutique products etc. The contents of the facade are themselves not really the central problem, though they do have their own problems. If the facade was what Auroville was through and through, Auroville would be a very different place, and we would have some of the ingredients of what is necessary to move Auroville in the right direction. The problem resides in the reality of Auroville that is hidden by this facade, the hiding of which is the purpose of the facade and has been since the 1970s. The facade has many sattwic attributes, but these sattwic attributes are utilized to hide the tamasic and rajasic reality that lies beneath. And this reality is the racist, toxic, abusive, conformist, negativity-filled atmosphere of the insular, parochial, tribalistic, nepotistic colonial enclave that Aurovillage has run for five decades.

Once again, for people who have experienced the positive sattwic qualities of the facade, the deep negativity of the reality behind the curtain might be hard to believe. We only begins to understand this reality if we spend time in Auroville and attempt to go beyond the facade and engage with Auroville at a deeper level. As soon as we do this, we begin to experience the much more negative reality of Auroville, and it actually takes a lot of time, months and even years, to start to comprehend the depths of the negativity that exists here. And a major part of that negativity is the colonial and racist nature of the enclave. The facade is an imperative for the existence of the enclave that exists behind it. The facade has to be maintained because that is what the outside world expects from Auroville. Aurovillage maintains that facade and wants the world to believe that the facade is the reality of Auroville. If the facade didn’t exist, it would be impossible for the insular, racist, emotionally abusive colonial enclave to exist. This is why so much energy is expended by Aurovillage on the facade. And because the facade has to be maintained, the racism and colonialism cannot be direct and overt. Even within the enclave behind the facade, the racism is mostly indirect and covert. If the racism and colonialism was overt and direct, the enclave would be exposed for what it truly is quite easily. And so the racism is direct enough to deter sincere Indians and even sincere non-Indians, but indirect and covert enough for it to be deniable and dismissible. And whenever someone raises the issue of racism, the entire network and system of Aurovillage is activated to marginalize, censure and malign that individual. The atmosphere in Auroville is extremely emotionally abusive, and anyone who tries to point out any of the ways that it is so ironically faces the emotional abuse of the Aurovillage network and system. Most sincere people who come to Auroville leave sooner or later in the face of this deeply abusive atmosphere.

Of the roughly 2700 adults who are currently registered as Aurovilians, at the most a third could be considered Aurovillagers. The remaining majority of regular Aurovilians are busy leading their lives, and mostly do not partake in the farcical collective decision-making voting procedures of the Residents Assembly of which they are a part. In contrast, the Aurovillagers are active and enthusiastic participants in these voting procedures, and so all the community voting results favor what the Aurovillagers want to happen. While the overwhelming majority of Aurovillagers are Westerners, there are also many Indians who are part of this network and system, making them culpable in the maintenance of the colonial enclave. There are three main reasons why an Indian would support the racist system that has been in control of Auroville over the past five decades. The first is that they are benefiting economically and monetarily from the system, which is a story that is familiar in other backpacker tourist destinations in India. The second is that, much like the Western Aurovillagers, these Indians have run away from the lives they were leading in the outside world and have found an emotional and psychological refuge in the insular enclave of Auroville. And they are so desperate to maintain this insular emotional enclave that they are willing to support and defend its racist and colonial atmosphere. Then there is the third reason: Indians who are “coconuts”. Coconuts is a pejorative term used for people who are “brown on the outside, white on the inside”, referring in this case to Indians who look up to white people and who want to emulate them. Many of the Indians who come to Auroville and become a part of Aurovillage are such coconuts. They have come here to live with the Westerners. These coconuts can actually be considered to be white supremacists themselves, who look down upon Indians and India. Once they become part of the Aurovillage system, many of them assume the arrogant, bullying and chauvinistic attitudes of the racist Western Aurovillagers. There is a very large overlap between this third group of Indian coconuts and the second group who have come to the sanctuary of Auroville because of their emotional and psychological dysfunctionality. This then forms the group of Indian Aurovillagers who are co-participants with and enablers of the Western Aurovillagers in the running of Auroville as a colonial enclave.

I have written above about how Aurovillage controls who becomes an Aurovilian, controls the working groups and administration of Auroville, and controls and manipulates the Residents Assembly’s decision-making process. Along with this, Aurovillagers, especially Western Aurovillagers, are usually put in charge of services, units, activities and projects. There is a narrative, mostly only indirectly articulated, that Westerners are better than Indians at management, administration and other such activities. This is a narrative shared by both Westerners and the Indian coconuts. This colonialism in Auroville has a French flair, since nearby Pondicherry has a French colonial history, and that is where The Mother, who was French, came to live with Sri Aurobindo and expanded and managed the Sri Aurobindo Ashram for many decades. While The Mother was very far from being a colonialist even back then, the Aurovillagers even now constantly stress that Auroville has a French influence or lineage. After Indians, French nationals constitute the largest number of Aurovilians, and their nexus within Aurovillage is strong. French people are given charge of various important activities and projects as a means of retaining their influence and control. The fact that it is the aim of Aurovillage to keep Auroville functioning at a very small-scale, and to make sure that the scale and scope of activities of Auroville does not expand or expands very slowly under the direction of Aurovillage, means that the scope and scale of the work that these Westerners and French nationals have to do is often quite limited, while they can still be shown to be in charge and actively participating in the workings of Auroville. In these ways, Western Aurovillagers and their supportive Indian coconuts maintain their grasp over the colonial enclave and make sure that they are the dominant voices in the enclave, while generally maintaining a small scale of activity. The coconuts who are in positions of prominence in this system perform the added function of showing to the world that it is not just Westerners who are running the show, whereas in actuality these Indians are a vital part of the functioning of Auroville as a colonial enclave.

So the racism in Auroville is not just an occasional happenstance the occurs once in a while. It is systemic and structural, part of the system that has been established and is controlled by Aurovillage. Racist attitudes are a fundamental part of life in Auroville, and anyone who protests against this racism is marginalized and censured. The atmosphere and environment itself is colonial here. Western Aurovillagers (and a few Indian coconuts) often live in bungalows surrounded by literal acres of fenced-in land, and treat this land as their private property. The land and bungalows are even handed down from generation to generation. Behind the facade of friendliness that is shown to outsiders, the arrogance and sense of entitlement of Westerners is plainly evident in their attitude and demeanor. Sometimes this arrogance and racism cannot be contained seeps out onto the facade as well, but it is mostly reserved for those Indians who show signs of wanting to join Auroville. There is a group of Western Aurovillagers who have mastered the art of presenting a friendly and convivial face to Indian visitors and guests and Indians in influential and prominent positions, while having extremely racist attitudes behind that facade.

One aspect that needs to be reemphasized is the mostly passive and indirect nature of the racism in Auroville. If the racism and colonial attitudes are too overt and direct, it will threaten the colonial enclave and the system that Aurovillage has set up. So the racism is covert and couched in indirect and rhetoric and action. This rhetoric includes narratives that claim that Westerners have come here to “help” and “teach” India and Indians, that Indians are not ready for certain tasks and activities, and the general disparagement of Indians in various situations. The attitudes of superiority are couched in narratives of being here to guide Indians and help Indians prosper materially, something that they are unable to do otherwise. Indirect action includes making it much more difficult for Indians to join Auroville than Westerners, excluding Indians from certain positions and activities, and even having separate sets of standards for educating Indian children and Western children in Auroville schools. The prevailing attitude of arrogance, entitlement and superiority creates an environment that is rife with passive emotional abuse and microaggressions. There is an expectation of meekness and docility from Indians, and anyone who does not conform to this expectation is ironically branded as being bigoted against Westerners. The only Indians who are permitted to be aggressive are the coconuts who support and are a part of Aurovillage. The passive mask sometimes slips and the racism then becomes overt, but the Western Aurovillagers have in general trained themselves to live behind these masks of passivity and duplicity. The selection process of Aurovillage and the atmosphere that exists here mostly attracts pathological liars and people who live delusional lives that are divorced from reality, which has led to a concentration of Westerners who are able to live lives behind such masks. Many of these Aurovillagers actually live in the self-delusion that they are highly spiritually developed people who have been selected, by The Mother and the Divine, to come to Auroville. For them, this mask of passivity that they put on is a sign of spiritual development, without them having the ability to understand that it is only because the system that exists here is completely geared in their favor, and because of the bubble of entitlement, privilege and power that they exist in, and not because of any spiritual superiority, that they have the ability to live the lives they do here. In their delusion of spiritual superiority and exceptionalism, many of these Aurovillagers have for the past decades mistaken their Western entitlement and white privilege for The Mother’s blessings and protection. This means, in effect, that Aurovillage believes that its racism and colonialism is approved and ordained by the Divine. This is how perverse Aurovillage is. Once the bubble of power and control that they exist in is popped, these masks of passivity and passive arrogance with shatter immediately. It is for this reason that they are currently fighting tooth and nail to maintain their authority over Auroville.

A mention has to be made of a special category of people in Auroville who are known as “Children of Auroville”. These are people who were born in Auroville, or who came to Auroville at a young age and grew up here. Some of these people are now in their 30s, 40s and even in their 50s, and some of them are very actively involved in the current protests and resistance against the Indian government wresting power from Aurovillage. Interestingly, it is overwhelmingly Western children of Auroville who are actively involved in these protests, which in itself is an indication that what Aurovillage stands to lose in this fight is a colonial enclave. I will discuss the case of these children of Auroville in a later post, but what needs to be mentioned here is that one significant and grave reason why Aurovillage is so desperate to ensure the continuation of the colonial enclave is so that this group of Westerners who were born and/or raised here can continue to have this insular enclave in which they lead sheltered, entitled, and privileged lives, where they are given preferential treatment and handed whatever they need and want on a silver platter. Many children of Auroville go back to the West and make their lives there, but some find the ease, convenience and privilege of Aurovillage too tempting to pass over, and decide to settle down here. As they grow older here, this group finds that they are only able to function and live in the few square kilometers of land in India that is Auroville. They cannot work in India without constantly going through inconvenient hoops because they don’t have Indian citizenship, and they do not want to go back to their country of citizenship because their lives here are too convenient and easy here. And if Auroville starts to shift from being an insular colonial ecovillage towards a township of 50,000 people, their easy, privileged and entitled lives will come to an end. So it becomes even more imperative for Aurovillage to strive to protect the colonial enclave that they have created.

In this way, Aurovillage has become an albatross around the necks of Aurovillagers. The colonial enclave is a beast of their own making that they have now become beholden to, that they are desperate to keep control of. India and the world has changed all around them as the decades have passed, but their attitudes and ethos are in many ways still stuck in the 1970s. People have been living in this isolated, insular colonial bubble since the 1970s, and are basically stuck in the bubble that they have created because they cannot now function anywhere else, and they have myopically refused to adapt and change with the times, foolishly betting on the assumption that they would be able to forever maintain their colonial enclave stuck in the past. And now many of their children are either stuck in the enclave with them, or find life in the enclave so much easier than the alternatives that they are all frantically and desperately trying to maintain control over the enclave. The hijackers of Auroville have now been hijacked by their own creation, and by their inability to think in the long term. In a sense the Indian authorities are also culpable for the dire situation that Aurovillage finds itself in, due to the free hand that they have given to Aurovillage for so long. They have allowed Aurovillage to dig the hole they have been living in deeper and deeper, to the point where the Aurovillagers cannot climb out of it now. However the responsibility for their situation lies completely with the Aurovillagers. The colonial enclave has been and will continue to become more and more incongruous vis-a-vis the changing India that exists all around it, and the desperation of Aurovillagers to maintain their hold on it will continue to become more dire.

The earlier hippie colonial enclave morphed naturally into a backpacker colonial enclave in the 1990s, and became a permanent version of the racist backpacker tourist enclaves that still exist in some locations in India and elsewhere in the world. However Auroville was never meant to be such a space, and India is now reappropriating the project to realign it, hopefully, towards the international institution focused on human unity and the propagation of Integral Yoga that it was always meant to be. A colonial enclave is the polar opposite of what an international community aiming for human unity should be. Aurovillage has been able to derail the project for the past five decades. It is clearly evident that the experiment of giving Aurovilians almost complete administrative autonomy has failed miserably, and the institution is currently undergoing a reset. The racism and colonial ethos in Auroville has become entrenched in the system, and is now a part of the administrative structure of Auroville, and so the change that is required has to be systemic. The extent of Aurovillage’s ongoing protest is in itself evidence of just how much it is clinging on to its power and control. An administrative autonomy grounded in true spiritual aspiration would have led to a very different Auroville than the toxic colonial enclave that exists now. It would have led to a completely different profile of people coming to Auroville, people who are fundamentally progressive, sattwic-minded, and humanistic, and who have understood that the attainment of harmony in humanity will only come about with the turn towards spirituality. In essence this is what Aurovillage is pretending to be, but the reason they are so averse to the opening up of Auroville to the outside world is because their pretense and facade will be exposed under the light of outside scrutiny, as will the obnoxious reality of what has actually existed underneath.

The words of The Mother that are vitally important to Aurovillage are when she talks about autonomy for Auroville. These sentences are completely removed from their context and are used as part of the facade to demand administrative autonomy. Behind these words of The Mother, behind the idea and ideal of an international township, and behind the demands for administrative autonomy for spiritual growth, Westerners exist here with a sense of ownership and a sense that they have the right to be here, without the Indian government having the authority to question their actions or motives to be here. What the spiritual facade hides is the reality of a colonial enclave where Westerners live with arrogance, entitlement and privilege. And they are supported in all this by their Indian coconuts and supporters. A Western colonial enclave is a space controlled by white Westerners, and that is exactly what they have achieved here in the name of a spiritual international community. The notion that a group of people can occupy the land of a country without that country having a say in what happens on that land itself reeks of arrogance, entitlement, privilege and a colonial mindset. This would not be possible in any Western country. The claim that Aurovillage makes that they are already in possession of the spiritual development that is needed to live in spiritual anarchy and practice self-governance in itself clearly displays their levels of delusion, arrogance and entitlement. Aurovillage is opposing the Indian government’s introduction of checks and balances to make sure that Auroville actually functions as a spiritual international township instead of a colonial enclave. Once this realignment towards an actual spiritual international township takes place, many Aurovillagers, with their insularity, power and authority removed, will have absolutely no interest in Auroville anymore. What they are here for is the colonial enclave, and without it they will have no use in staying here, though some might remain stuck here beyond the end of the colony. It will in many respects be a reenactment of the end of the British Raj, at a much smaller scale.

Aurovillage wants to pretend that the pursuit of human unity in Auroville implies that no one can question them from outside the Auroville bubble, while they have complete control inside the Auroville bubble. They want to pretend that The Mother bestowed onto them the authority to control Auroville however they want, without outside interference, when in actuality she never gave them any such authority. Her stress was on Aurovilians becoming willing servitors of the Divine consciousness, not on administrators of Auroville. Aurovillage’s insistence that The Mother’s words have authority over the Indian government can itself be considered to be another manifestation of Western entitlement and privilege. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that her words are sacrosanct to her devotees, but the demand that the Indian government follow Aurovillage’s interpretation of her words reeks of colonialism and entitlement, especially when the vast majority of people insisting on that demand are Westerners.

The pursuit of human unity in the context of Auroville and Integral Yoga is based on intellectual humanism and spiritual humanism, which means the pursuit of harmony in humanity using both sattwic and spiritual means, with the aim of attaining an increasingly pure sattwic nature and ultimately moving towards the spiritual beyond material nature, for both the individual and the collective. This includes a complete openness to the outside world, a complete openness to scrutiny and critique, because there is nothing to hide, and a constant striving towards greater and greater perfection in the context of the teachings of Integral Yoga. It also means a pursuit of jnana yoga, wherein self-observation and the observation and objective understanding of the world and of human society leads to a fundamental elimination of our attachment to our material nature, and the fundamental elimination of the root of all negativity. This includes the recognition and elimination of bigotry in all its forms in each of us as individuals and as a collective. The project of Auroville is an absolutely audacious one, and it is aims such as this that makes it so audacious. Our knowledge becomes jnana yoga only when it is completely selfless and desireless. Our actions become karma yoga only when they are completely selfless and desireless. The hijacking of Auroville by Aurovillage and its conversion into a colonial enclave is the exact opposite of what should have happened here, and thankfully this phase of Auroville is finally coming to an end. Lets hope that what comes next is much more aligned to the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, aligned with Integral Yoga and with a true pursuit of inner freedom, human universality, egalitarianism and unity. It will not be an easy task, but as The Mother has said, we are not here to do easy things.

Backpacker Colonialism

This section has been added on the 27th of November 2025.

I have written above about the backpacker tourist circuit in India (as well as in other places such as Thailand and Bali) and how Auroville has been functioning as a backpacker colonial enclave. Since writing this post more than a year ago in September 2024, I have found it very useful to refer to the specific type of colonialism that exists in such backpacker spaces as “backpacker colonialism”. This form of colonialism does not require conquest, occupation by force, or permanent settlement. As described earlier in this post, it relies instead on socioeconomic and sociocultural disparities, which allows Westerners to enact and manifest their privilege and entitlement on the ground, and live lives of (relative) privilege and entitlement within these backpacker spaces in “third world” countries. This is a form of continuing post-colonial colonialism that relies exclusively on these socioeconomic and sociocultural disparities and inequalities, and exists in relatively small enclaves and spaces within a city, town or region. And a constant feature of these backpacker colonies is the new-age backpacker spirituality that thrives within them. This mostly transactional, performative and shallow spirituality is itself a form of Western privilege, but it provides legitimacy to these backpacker colonies, by giving them a reason to exist other than simply globalized socioeconomic exploitation and advantage-taking. Auroville then is a space of backpacker colonialism that has a more permanent nature than most other backpacker colonies. Westerners can settle here on an almost permanent bases with, till recently, their co-backpacker colonialist friends being the ones responsible for recommending them for 5-year visa extensions.

Backpacker colonialism is a much more fitting term for what is happening in Auroville than the term “settler colonialism”, since the mechanics of this colonial enclave has much more to do with how backpacker enclaves function than with forceful settlement and colonial occupation.