Tuesday 18th November 2008

]

“Where are you staying in Pondicherry?” asks a friend of mine on Facebook. In the last few weeks, facebook has been my contact with a) bored friends with office jobs, and b) people giving me accomodation suggestions. After all, it seems 50% of ex-students have found themselves in India at some point, and most of them wish to help me on my journey to inevitable spiritual epiphany.

“I’m staying in Auroville,” I reply. The answer confuses some, and disgusts others.

Auroville is an artifical community first opened in 1968. It was built on the orders of a French woman known only as ‘The Mother’ and still referred to in reverent, hushed tones by Aurovillians. She had a vision based on the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, that a city should be built, made of international peoples of all races and creeds living together in harmony. It would be an experiment in ‘human unity.’ In The Mother’s own words: “Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.”

Now Auroville stretches out over 20 kms. There are currently around 2,000 Aurovillians from 38 nations. A third of them are Indian but the majority of Westerners are French. The eventual vision is to create a city of 50,000, and constantly buildings are cropping up: handbuilt, architecturally futuristic, a mix of asymetry and sharp lines and mostly topped with solar panels. The design, orginally envisioned by The Mother, included four zones, though at the moment it is a collection of settlements, each with names such as ‘grace’, ‘serenity,’ ‘surrender’. We are living in New Creation, where the school is based. It is on the outskirts near the Tamil village of Kuilapayam.

Auroville is a hive of vision and research. You must apply to be an Aurovillian, which involves promising to be ‘a willing servitor of the divine consciousness.’ Not that all Aurovilians are seeking to find their inner consciousness: some are dragged by husbands or wives, or born into the community, and some are well-wishers believing the vision. In any case, becoming an Aurovillian is a two-year process, and each individual must promise to bring something of themselves to the community. Thus, there are urban research offices, organic farms, educational research, medicinal plants production. Auroville has its own schools and kindergarten, its own hospital (including a refrigerated glass box where bodies can be kept for seven days in according to the guidelines of The Mother), supermarkets, solar power stations, tailors, shops and handicrafts. Auroville produced its own crops, milk, cheese, chocolate, even jam. There is a lovely French boulangerie down the road, which does a mean pain au chocolat, opposite the shop that sells tye dye tshirts and elephant beaded bags. Auroville’s taxi service, its travel agency, its street signs are branded with what looks like a Star of David but it in fact Sri Auribindo’s sign, and with a five-sectioned circle with a dot in the middle, which is the sign of The Mother.

To some outsiders, Auroville is just a hippy paradise. And indeed there is something of Southern California about it. Old men with beards and ponytails scoot around on motorbikes while women in floaty linen trousers with long plaits carry organic carrots in their hemp woven bags. But there is something about Auroville that takes its vision a little further than the fading vision of Woodstock.

Drive Auroville’s road for a while and you might come across a golden golf ball, 360 metres in length, glinting in the sun. If so, you’ve found the Matrimandir. Also envisioned by The Mother, it’s covered in a million tiles of gold leaf smelted between pieces of glass, given by a wealthy donor. It’s a spectacular – and some might say spectacularly ugly – sight. It’s built next to an ancient Banyan tree, which marks the dead centre of Auroville, and where Aurovillians still gather in times of world crisis to ‘channel energies’.

Entering the Matrimandir is something like climbing into the Millennium Falcon – or as Eva suggested, being zipped up by something in Strange Encounters. You must descend downwards on a ramp, to then walk upwards into the base of the ball. The Mother’s philosophy was to strip away your outer self and find within yourself the person you really are. Inside the ball, complete silence is demanded. You must, as in any temple, take off your shoes. In this one, it is also imperative that you don white socks to prevent Auroville’s red earth from staining the white marble. Inside, the sphere is truly unbelievable. Some might even believe they had landed on the planet Krypton. The inside surface of the sphere glows in pink, while huge concrete spirals lead upwards to the meditation chamber. The concrete, I am later told, contains remnants of Aurovillians’ former lives left behind, thrown into the wet mix, including pieces of the Berlin Wall. Around us, water trickles from the ceiling along golden mosaic furrows. A light shines down through the centre – a beam of sunlight, reflected off a motion and light-sensitive reflective mirror positioned at the top of the structure.

We pass into the meditation chamber, which is dark except for the white mats, upon which we sit, and except, of course, for The Mother’s pièce de resistance: a perfect glass globe, through which the sunlight passes and into the chamber below. It is here that Aurovillians can meditate. At the base of the Matrimandir, water trickles peacefully over dozens of marble petals which create the shape of a lotus flower.

What the mother taught is not another religion, though it’s an all too easy target for the word ‘cult’. But its self-declared non-religious status doesn’t mean that Auroville has escaped the cattiness of church politics. Arguments over doctrine have stretched to everything, from whether or not Aurovillians should be deemed ‘ready’

Auroville has been a controversial topic in India, even more so in the last few months. Most Aurovillians here remember Rachel White (***), the lovely young journalist who came to stay, and chatted to them, enjoying their hospitality. Little did they know what their openness might lead to. A little later, a documentary made by the BBC accused Aurovillians of exploiting surrounding Tamils, and even of cases of paedophilia inflicted on Tamil children by white Aurovillians. The latter is an exaggeration of the truth; but the two cases referred to by the documentary did exist, and were cleared up years ago. My mother herself, though not an authentic ‘Aurovillian’ had to deal with some of them while running her school on the outskirts of the community. But when the documentary was aired, the small community fell apart. Emails dashed around the intranet and message boards of Auroville, through the settlements of Peace and Unity and Solitude, like red alarm bells ringing. Many recall thinking that this would be the end of Auroville.

But today’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper, and Auroville lives on, more babies are born to Aurovillians, and more newcomers fly in from all over the world to build their houses here and grow the community.

Post-BBC, Auroville goes back to its squabbles among architects and arguments over administration, as well as pushing on with its vision which can be seen as either admirable or naïve, depending on your level of cynicism. The biggest stalling block for the community are the locals who live here in the surrounding Tamil villages. They refuse to sell their family’s land to the Westerners who wish to buy it at a decent price; whereas Aurovillians see the Tamils as deliberately trying to hike up their offers. The local Tamils rely on Aurovillians to give them and their children the opportunities for education, employment and development they otherwise would not have. And yet the Aurovillian presence, which has often proved demanding, can sometimes lead to a sentiment of living on Western Occupied Territory encroaching from all fronts. As with all communities – giant golden golf ball or no – warring over differences can be a serious stalling process. Even those seeking universal human unity are not exempt.