Finding Auroville

In the ongoing series of posts titled Uncovering Aurovillage I have been describing Aurovillage, the loose network of Aurovilians who want to maintain Auroville as a small, isolated, insular bubble. Aurovillage has controlled the autonomous administrative structure of Auroville to make sure that it remains a restricted, parochial, nepotistic, colonial enclave behind a constructed facade of spiritual and progressive activities and intentions. Aurovillage became the dominant bullying force in Auroville during the 1970s, and has held sway over Auroville ever since then. In previous posts I have briefly defined and situated Aurovillage within Auroville, and have been discussing how Aurovillage has been able to dominate and control Auroville for so long. In this post I go a little further in discussing the power dynamics in Auroville, especially regarding the situation between Aurovillagers and regular Aurovilians.

As part of this discussion, it is interesting to look at the voting patterns in the so-called collective decision-making process of Auroville. This is the much vaunted community-based collective decision-making mechanism that is used as a propaganda tool to depict Auroville as having a model progressive, inclusive and participatory self-governance structure. There are roughly 2700 adult Aurovilians at the moment, who together make up Auroville’s Residents Assembly. Over the past three years of conflict between Aurovillage and the Indian government for control of Auroville, the number of Aurovilians who have voted in any of the various voting procedures conducted by the Residents Assembly has almost always been under 1000, and has often been much below that number. We can infer from this that the total number of Aurovillagers is below 1000, because these are the people who are actively and vocally resisting the Indian government’s recent interventions in Auroville, and who are fighting to retain administrative control over Auroville. For the sake of mathematical convenience, lets say that a third of Aurovilians are Aurovillagers. This would mean that regular Aurovilians, who would not be considered Aurovillagers and who do not have strong vested interests in keeping Auroville small and insular, make up two thirds of Auroville’s population. The vast majority of these regular Aurovilians have not participated in these voting procedures over the past three years. In fact the majority had stopped participating in them a long time before the current conflict began. Over the years and decades these Aurovilians have become completely disenchanted with this purported community-based democratic process, after having repeatedly experiencing how farcical the process is, and the extent to which it is controlled and manipulated by Aurovillage. The rules of these processes are constantly rewritten and altered so that the results ultimately suit the aims and wishes of Aurovillage, and the voting process itself is controlled by Aurovillagers.

Currently, roughly half of the Aurovilians are Indian, and half are non-Indian, and there has always been a concerted effort by Aurovillage to make sure that the ratio of Indians does not go above half. An examination of the voting patterns, if we will ever be able to see their details, will show that the vast majority of people who have been voting over the past three years to maintain control of Auroville’s administration are Westerners, meaning that the vast majority of Aurovillagers are Westerners. The majority of regular Aurovilians who have not even bothered to participate in the voting processes are Indian, with a high number them being Tamil. It is not at all surprising that Westerners comprise the majority of Aurovillage as well as the majority of people voting against the Indian government’s interventions in Auroville’s administration, since the majority of Westerners are coming here to lead cheap, laid-back lives in a permanent backpacker tourist colonial enclave, and not at all to be part of an institution that is dedicated to Integral Yoga.

As mentioned in the previous post, which described the colonial enclave that Aurovillage has turned Auroville into, the Westerners coming to Auroville have two structural advantages: economic and sociocultural. While these structural advantages are still at play today, they were more prominent during the 1970s and 80s. At that time the Western Aurovillagers leveraged these advantages to take control of the functioning of Auroville. The passing of the Auroville Foundation Act in 1988 by the Indian government had the effect of legitimizing, enshrining and locking in these advantages into the governance structure of Auroville. The Western Aurovillagers, along with the much fewer Indian Aurovillagers who allied with them, grabbed hold of the administrative autonomy that the Act legally gave to the Residents Assembly, and have been using it to wield power and control over Auroville ever since to maintain it as an insular colonial enclave. There can be discussions and analysis about the details of how these structural advantages have in the past and into the present allowed Western Aurovillagers to gain and retain power and control in Auroville. Some of them have used these advantages to become prominent players in the economy of the Auroville bubble, and have leveraged that prominence to gain influence over the administration of Auroville. Many Western Aurovillagers do not need to earn money here, and so are able to spend their time engaged in Auroville politics and propaganda. And once the dominance of Western Aurovillagers in the administration of Auroville was established, it became easier for other Western Aurovillagers and their Indian allies to enter into the administrative structure and play the political games they have been playing over these past decades, all with the ultimate aim of maintaining Auroville as a small, insular, colonial enclave.

All these are pertinent and important factors that have contributed to the dominance of Aurovillage in Auroville’s governance, and these details will need to be investigated by anyone who wants to study the power dynamics of Auroville’s governance structure. However, at a broader level of psychological understanding, the main difference between Aurovillagers, especially the core Aurovillagers, on the one hand and regular Aurovilians on the other is the Aurovillagers’ attraction to power and authority, and their dire motivation to maintain their hold over Auroville’s administration. Firstly, Aurovillage has a vested interest in holding on to power in Auroville because they want to keep Auroville small and insular. In fact keeping Auroville small and insular has been their raison d’etre since the 1970s, and was the motivation behind the network of people who came to be known as Aurovillage to coalesce together in the first place. From then till now this motivation has metastasized into an existential necessity, since many of these Aurovillagers have spent decades within the bubble of Auroville without the foresight or ability to change with the changing times, and now many of their progeny are also stuck within the bubble. What had started off as a craving to live lives of material freedom, power and control within an isolated bubble has now morphed into a desperation to maintain the bubble. The central attraction of the bubble has always been to get away from the complexity of the outside world, which included its constantly changing nature, and so the bursting of the bubble was always going to be a traumatic experience for the Aurovillagers, the more traumatic the longer the bubble was allowed to exist. This bubble should rightly never have been allowed to have been created in the first place. Secondly, the toxic, abusive atmosphere that has formed within the bubble because of these toxic motivations has attracted people to Auroville who by their nature are abusive and attracted to power and control, and are adept at leading the duplicitous and manipulative lives needed to maintain the facade that is used to hide this toxicity. In this way, the toxic and duplicitous motivations of Aurovillage constantly attracts more toxic and duplicitous people to it. This is the network of people who are constantly manipulating, bullying and dominating the autonomous administrative system of Auroville to suit their agenda of isolation and insularity. If we look at Aurovillage as having a periphery and a core, we can say that peripheral Aurovillagers have a motivation and vested interest in intervening in the administration of Auroville because they want to keep Auroville small and insular, whereas core Aurovillagers crave to assert themselves in the administration for these same reasons, but also to satiate their desire for power, control and authority. Both the core and periphery of Aurovillage have an existential need to keep Auroville insular, isolated and autonomously administered. However the periphery provides more passive support towards these aims, while the core is actively and dynamically engaged in working towards them. These aspects of the psychology of Aurovillage have been discussed in previous posts and will continue to be discussed in future posts, because they are central to understanding Aurovillage.

In contrast to all this, the motivations for regular Aurovilians to come to Auroville are quite different, and are quite varied. Some of them come on a spiritual quest, some as devotees of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo, some to be a part of a progressive and experimental project, and then for a variety of material reasons. Whatever other shortcomings this group of regular Aurovilians may or may not have, what all of them have in common is the absence of the overwhelming desire to keep Auroville small and insular. This is what differentiates them from both the core as well as the peripheral Aurovillagers. The regular Aurovilians are not interested in the power games and continuous politicking that the core Aurovillagers are constantly engaged in, nor are they interested in passively supporting the aims of insularity, isolation, administrative autonomy and control like the peripheral Aurovillagers. Since the beginning, the Aurovillagers, both the dynamic and active core as well as the more passive periphery, have had strong, covert and toxic motivations to control the administration of Auroville, while the motivations of regular Aurovilians to govern have been much softer and more benign. This differential in the potency of motivations has made Aurovillage the most cohesive and dominant political grouping in Auroville, which is why and how they have been able to control Auroville for all these years.

Apart from the voting processes of the Residents Assembly, the administrative setup of Auroville includes various working groups that look after different administrative functions. The membership of these working groups is time-limited, and the process to select members goes through the same voting process as described above, which is once again heavily manipulated and controlled by Aurovillage. The Residents Assembly also holds general meetings, the attendance numbers for which are also generally abysmal. These general meetings have a reputation of having such a toxic and bullying atmosphere, as well as usually being quite ineffective, that hardly anyone attends them anymore. However for the past three years since the conflict began, these general meetings have had a new though sombre lease of life, being attended almost exclusively by Aurovillagers to discuss aspects of the conflict and their fight to maintain control. Photos of these recent meetings clearly show that an overwhelming number of Aurovillagers are Westerners.

Utilizing all these compromised means, as well as appeals to the government-appointed Governing Board of Auroville and appeals directly to the Indian government, the regular Aurovilians have time and time again raised concerns regarding the administration of Auroville and the direction that Auroville has been heading in. Some of them have been pointing out, in whichever way they can, that the project of Auroville has been derailed. The Indian government and the Governing Board have only recently over the past three years started to take concrete action against this derailment. The reasons for this delayed action will be discussed in an upcoming post. However internally within Auroville, it has been the stark differences between the motivations of the Aurovillagers and the regular Aurovilians that has resulted in Aurovillagers always getting their way. Aurovillage has always had much more potent, visceral and self-centered motivations behind their actions. And Aurovillage has a concentration of people who are malignantly manipulative and duplicitous, and have a lust for power, control and authority that they hide behind masks of congeniality and even spirituality. On top of this, Aurovillage is in general much better resourced than regular Auroville. Aurovillage is the malignant representation of the collective ego in Auroville, and this ego has been supercharged by the insular nature of Auroville that is the result of the administrative autonomy that was bestowed onto Aurovilians by the Auroville Foundation Act of 1988. In the face of this supercharged and duplicitous collective ego, the regular Aurovilians, who have come here for much more benign motivations than to fight, intimidate and manipulate, ultimately cannot stand up to Aurovillage. The calls of the regular Aurovilians for directional change in Auroville are almost completely ignored, their voices drowned out. Many of them have been biding their time here with the hope that conditions will ultimately fall into place for change to come about in Auroville.

When The Mother said that we have not come to Auroville to do easy things, part of what she meant was that the victory of the spirit over the material ego is not going to be a passive or easy task. We can retreat into ourselves and wait for the ego of humanity to recede, happy in the thought that we are at least not contributing too much to the degradation of humanity, but as Sri Aurobindo has said, that retreat is the old yoga, and it will always be an incomplete yoga. That method will indeed also finally lead to harmony in humanity, but it will do so after a very long and convoluted journey. And if that is the path that one is taking then there is no real usefulness in coming to Auroville, and there is indeed no purpose for Auroville. In the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, the transformation of humanity is to be hastened, by each one of us orienting ourselves towards the Divine in full sincerity and honesty, and dedicating our lives completely to the spiritualization of ourselves and of humanity, with all our actions working towards that aspiration, and everything else in our lives being peripheral to that aspiration.

The fact that the manipulativeness and toxicity of Aurovillage has infiltrated into and has controlled Auroville for so long is an interesting occurrence to ponder about. But perhaps it was and is inevitable for such malignant forces of the vital ego to be attracted to a place that aspires to the truth and light of the Divine consciousness. The fight in Auroville will for a long time to come be for the truth and light to constantly attempt to dethrone the negativity and toxicity of the manifestations of the vital ego in whatever forms they appear. In this fight, the more we as Aurovilians commit completely and absolutely to be on the side of the truth and light, to be in the words of the Auroville Charter the willing servitors of the Divine consciousness, and work ceaselessly and wholeheartedly to understand what that means and how to inhabit that role, the faster humanity will have the chance to move towards harmony and unity. As individuals, this is the commitment we have to make, instead of remaining stuck in the endless bewilderment of the material world and material nature. As such, our task is to actively stand up to the negativity and toxicity of the vital ego, and to work incessantly for its dissolution within us and from the world. It is not our task to just to wait for the ego to dissolve in its own natural due course. This is indeed an audacious dharma that is set before us, and in its totality is out of reach for the vast majority of us. However, each of us can work to orient ourselves towards this dharma as much as possible in our lives, as much as our lives permit, so that each of us can make our contribution to humanity slowly with haste orienting itself towards the Divine consciousness. This is the dynamics of power that should be at play in Auroville.