The Universal Ideal of Auroville

IN 1963, A FRAIL French woman Mirra Alfassa who goes by the title ‘Mother’ decides to build an ideal city just north of Pondicherry. A follower of Sri Aurobindo, the intent behind her monumental and ambitious venture is to create a geographical centre, part urban part rural, where people from all over the world will live together to express ideas of humanism, self-reliance and integration, the likes of which were never practised before. Inaugurated in 1968 with participants from 120 countries, the new township’s progressive approach applies to every possible global challenge known: politics, ecology, agriculture, afforestation, education, health, conservation, public law, social behaviour—all setting a path to innovation and self-discovery.

Fifty-five years later, in December 2021, a set of bulldozers ram an authoritarian ambush into the peaceful community at 1AM. A midnight knock. They clear a path through dense plantation, uproot trees and demolish a section of the Auroville Youth Centre. Backed by the local development council, the destruction of the centre and the hacking of a thousand full-grown trees are meant to send a political message, that a new India is on the march and multiculturalism of the liberal kind would not be tolerated. In a community made up of multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-culturally diverse citizenry, the fear of the state’s single-minded commercial and political agenda seems justified. Peaceful protests are first ignored; later dozens of outsiders are bussed to intimidate the residents. So as not to leak legitimate news of the demolitions, a local media service is forcibly shut down. Only when the National Green Tribunal steps in, does the threat stop.

How does a minor defenceless community of seriously ambitious ideals protect itself from a bulldozing behemoth? Sadly, in India, the experimental quest for a utopic existence remains an unquenched thirst. Doubtless, there are all over India people and places on the brink of extraordinary discovery, research and invention. In Tamil Nadu, the concerted testing of agricultural strains may provide future bountiful harvests; northern research institutes test cloned and grafted vegetable and fruit varieties which will provide better yields with little water; a belt of solar panels in Gujarat is the largest renewable energy power unit in the world; a medical experiment in the mountains seeks to deliver aid and precious equipment to sites and villages inaccessible by road. An NGO in Odisha connects illiterate tribals to their government entitlements—access to banking, employment, free rations. It is hard to deny that at the oddest, often most unlikely of places, multiple acts of generosity and optimism are taking place.

But there exists the other less emancipated India, where churches and cathedrals are regularly robbed and idols smashed, and large parts of the local minority populations continue to live fearfully in ghettos. Children in village schools still trudge long distances to empty teacherless classrooms. In summer, malaria and waterborne diseases kill regularly. In the slums of Mumbai and Delhi, increasing unemployment is driving many to more audacious forms of crime. In the food warehouses of Maharashtra, while farmers face certain famine, rats and field mice are fed well and regularly. In some cities, 30 people with empty pots line up at a hand pump, adjacent to a house boundary wall concealing a swimming pool where water is on a constant filter for its two residents. How can the two diverging realities be placed in a common mixing bowl? Is it even possible to create a liveable reality out of such a contentious mess?

For that, the controlled experiment of a city becomes the only possibility. In its six decades, Auroville has gratefully thrown everything into the blender: ways of growing 100-year-old forests as well as quick-yield vegetable farms, a mix of people from 60 nations, and another diverse mix from their host nation; a religious pluralism as accepting of Hindus, Muslims and Christians as Mormons, Buddhists and Atheists; a clutch of people from the French White Town and more from the local Black Town; combination of Tamil rural expertise, and German inventiveness from the Ruhr valley; philosophies of Sri Aurobindo and the occidental logic of Martin Luther; plant knowledge of traditional south India; the irrigation practices of the American Southwest; construction techniques that utilise steel as easily as mud; ways of cooling houses through inexpensive and passive local methods adapted to the efficiencies of Western mechanical systems; visual and practical ways of primary schooling, and barter community service as a form of local currency. The whole premise relies not on some continual practice of conventional reform, but a complete and explicit rejection of all existing norms.

At Auroville, the difficult path of achieving such lofty—and always contradictory—goals had to tread a careful structured plan, a stipulated four-step approach.

PLACE: First and foremost was the establishment of a visible entity, a physical place for the active application of ideals. It started on 22 square kilometres along the northern edge of Pondicherry. A barren site for constructing a settlement close to the city and to the coastline that took its inspiration from Sri Aurobindo’s hope that humanity is a form of transience moving and aspiring to a better world. As a universal township, Auroville would be a physical manifestation of that goal. The presence of citizens from 120 nations on Inauguration Day attested to the strength of the idea that the city belonged to humanity as a whole.

COMMUNITY: Next came the structure of common living, the setting up of a home base where people reside, engage and work together. The city as a perennial resource to a natural life surrounded by an extensive greenbelt, farms, botanical gardens, seed banks and newly planted forests. Within the perimeter come new ways of harnessing energy, creating water catchment areas and natural dams. Cooperative farming and shared skills of home construction take the experiment into a new lived reality.

SOCIETY: Third is the move towards further cohesion as a society, the creation of a public life in the city. The ambitious agenda can be daunting at an urban scale but the wider civic plan envisions a series of radials that divides the land into pie-shaped sections for education, recreation, industry, culture, etc. Within the clustered groupings of buildings are activities for baking and pottery, schools and health services, community centres, parks, recreation and society offices. Slow to develop over 20 years, the area acquires essential services where residents meet regularly, contribute labour or goods to the community and in turn collect basic needs for daily life.

CULTURE: Finally, the philosophical centre of the township is a monumental magnificence, the Matrimandir, a golden metallic structure, its spherical shape designed in earthly measures to be entirely directionless, without any cardinal orientation and rising heavenwards to celestial connection. As the Mother explained: “[A] symbol and space that aspires to man’s aspiration for absolute perfection”.

SO OPEN AND idealistic in its conception, it was hard to contest the view in any rational terms. Human drives in vastly different forms and historical eras have pursued life’s possibilities beyond the scope of realisable limits. Following from Thomas More’s Utopia—an exploration of 16th century English society where people learn to live a common life, without private property, abolish caste and class, avoid war, disparage all show and finery, and tolerate all religions. Utopia’s very basis was economic and political.

More recent returns to the ideal society came shrouded in varying forms of architectural megalomania. Italian American architect Paolo Soleri’s dream began at Arcosanti in Arizona, a massive concrete megalith that grew in an uncontrolled additive process based on Soleri’s ideas of urban planning, with the eventual aim of creating a city for 5,000 residents. Within the magnified raw concrete structure, Arcosanti was envisioned as a hyper-dense neighbourhood, self-sustaining, designed to maximise human interaction while conserving ground space. “A city in the image of Man”, never finished, always ongoing.

Then came other more enduring failures. Barely a short ride north into the American state of Nevada, Michael Heizer began building the world’s largest earthwork called ‘City’ in the late 1960s. For 50 years, he has treated ‘City’ as a personal quest, using earthmovers to shift dirt and cement across miles of bleached emptiness in the Nevada desert. Vast concrete ramps, earth pits and mounds appear in the landscape creating geometry so monumental, lunar and alluring it is visible only from the air. At 77, the mad artist and architect has driven himself to the brink of death building it. But, like Arcosanti, his structure remains incomplete.

So too are many ideas of the world’s most ambitious 20th century engineer—the inventor of the geodesic dome, Buckminster Fuller, who created the hexagonal Dymaxion House. Contained within 100 square metres, pre-packaged in aluminium, shipped and to be assembled by the buyer, it grouped utilities around a central core, leaving the rooms in a radial formation. The bathroom shower functioned on one cup of water in a condensed stream, located as it were, above a toilet that consumed no water at all. Fuller abandoned the project in 1944 when the US government’s post-war housing priorities forced quick production of housing units. Instead, he directed his energies into combating the overheating of cities in the summer. Long before dire implications of climate change even appeared on the horizon, Fuller had begun researching ways to shield the Earth’s surface from excessive sun through a system of orbiting shades. In a controlled orbit around the Earth, the vast moving plates would not only provide a moving shadow but also seed the clouds into producing more rain for the parched areas below.

Bucky, as he came to be known by friends, appeared for a guest lecture at my university in Philadelphia, where I was studying architecture. Almost 90 years old then, he walked about on stage staring myopically at slides of his own inventions, and trying to explain as coherently as possible his outrageous ideas to an entirely unbelieving sceptical crowd of students. It was impossible to connect to his baffling designs, so monumentally off the earth and quite literally in the clouds. His rambling tone and shambling gait across the far end of the vast auditorium seemed so brief, frail and insignificant against the backdrop of his enormous intellectual and innovative life, it was hard to connect this tiny speck of white hair with the audacity of his thinking. He ended the lecture with a picture of a transparent dome over New York City, a clear glass structure that stretched from river to river and covered the extended island of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, Central Park, and the rest in a controlled hermetically sealed environment. The talk ended, and everyone filed out of the auditorium in absolute silence, shuffling back to the studios to design small suburban houses.

In our own time, few if anyone in India think in terms so broad and far-reaching as Fuller. The dome over Manhattan never even came close to being realised, even though, it had been carefully lab-assessed, studied, and had sound reasoning for its engineering and potential fabrication. Called at the time as “the world’s most successful failure”, its provocative concepts have gone on to influence a host of inventors. The biggest take from the ‘What If’ phenomenon is undoubtedly Elon Musk, whose gravity-defying work may not have yet contributed to a new civic vision on Earth, but like Bucky, sets brash standards for electric transport, renewable energy, and hyper-travel between cities. Even if, one day some of these cities may be on Mars.

IN THE PAST century, the American search for a utopic life has differed vastly from the ambitions of more earthbound societies like India. How can the euphoric visions of singular individuals—architects, engineers and inventors—ever compare with the wholescale battle of ideas deliberately condensed by thousands of contributing citizens into the finite acreage of a new city? Auroville grew from thousands of seeds planted on infertile ground, ravaged by dissonance, filled with hope, destroyed by arson and hurricanes, embroiled in local race battles, struggling to test new economics and barter systems, but in the end rescued by the promise of a new life. An urban experiment always on slow boil. Its nearest Western counterpart was an ambitious urban plan initiated in the US, parallel to the Auroville timeframe, called The Great Society. Then US President Lyndon B Johnson’s initiative was similarly linked to creating equity in American cities: reviving inner city education, eliminating drugs and poverty, enacting legislation on local services, setting standards for housing, clean air, establishing cultural centres and new acts for wild life and environmental protection. So wide was the scope, so solid the strength of its political reach, it even raised ideas on the role of beauty in urban life, the necessity of public art, and the quality of citizenship.

While The Great Society struggled within the marginalised framework of America’s inner cities, Auroville began as a whole new venture. Its imperfections grew from within, to make apparent to its legislative council that all was not well with the original idea. Originally, all physical assets of the city belonged to the Sri Aurobindo Society, but in 1980, under the new Emergency Provisions Act, the Indian government took over the city management. As of now, the city has only 3,000 residents, despite the original intention of making it grow to a sizeable 50,000. Living relatively peacefully the population from 59 countries is housed in neighbourhoods with names in Sanskrit, French, Tamil and English: Aspiration, Auromodel, Aarati to name a few. Its 50 years of active struggle to perfecting the Mother’s belief in the creation of a universal town of men and women from all countries that will rise above political, racial and ethnic differences, and create a place for humanity, perhaps will never be realised. But in the long stage of its practical experience as a township of perpetual learning and striving, it has gained enormous footholds in urban ideals: 1,300 acres of barren wasteland has acquired over 30 years of sustained cultivation, a lush forest.

The dry fallow ground has been restored into a finetuned balance with denuded sources of water now rejuvenated. Cultural and artistic traditions of craft and pottery have been revived. Several employment schemes for women in surrounding villages have been activated and are successfully run under a variety of activity centres like the Auroville Industrial School, Auroville Health Services and schools for local handicapped children. The search towards a shared economy and communal harmony continues in hope-filled programmes like Reach for the Stars—scholarships for higher education for village children. In retrospect, the larger picture has been formed in perennial optimism: the successful testing of sustainable architecture, creative farming, water purification and conservation, renewable energy application, community education and healthcare, art and craft revival, localised monetary exchange, and the political governance reduced to a simple amplified message: when humanity’s aspiration is perfection, the city belongs to no one and to everyone.

That Auroville still continues half-a-century since its inception is the surest sign that humanity desires inevitable and perennial movement towards that singular ideal. Throughout the early phase of locating a site, building, setting standards of community life, congregation commerce, schooling, and public engagement, there was bound to be confrontation. The dissimilarities between the new settlers and the old settled could not be more glaring; that the setting was an impoverished illiterate rural setting in south India, instead of a rich suburban commune in northern California, ensured that there would be racism, cultural unrest, and clash of ideals. Without these, the perfect community would remain either a pipedream or a walled project in isolation. Auroville’s most critical lesson is the only possible course for any future city in India: what we build now will dictate the difference between surviving alone, or living well together.

Any attempt to physically destroy the city now will be an erasure of 50 years of constructed imagination. India needs more Aurovilles not fewer… Instead, it gets Chandigarhs and Gandhinagars and smart cities; it gets facile makeovers of secondhand ideas; it gets token signatures of history and melodrama in Amravati and Raipur. The serious steps to questioning urbanism, architecture, soil ecology, greening, afforestation, and conservation have not appeared in 70 years of independent building. There is nothing radical in glass cities that evolve out of computerised efficiencies—but it is wholly so when 18,000 trees nurtured over four decades transform the ecology of an arid place. It hardly matters that utilities are on a power-sharing grid, but it does matter when electricity is made entirely renewable and often not needed at all. Such answers came not from a reform of existing structures, but a rejection of the old and replacement with an altogether new approach. For that reason India’s urban future needs multiple such experiments, numerous communities that can rise above the failures of current civic models and propose new ways of living.

Of the more than 60 nationalities represented there among a large population of Indians, the hope of continuity was echoed by 82-year-old German Frederick Buxloh as he stood watching the bulldozers noisily working into the night. Having grown up under Hitler’s Nazi regime, and a direct witness to the violence of war and racism, he spoke with sad and quiet eloquence: “After trying to understand what possessed the German race to commit such brutality,” he said, “I came to India. No other country had the wisdom and tolerance that I found here.” After living in Auroville for 54 years, in Frederick’s mind the country’s ancient vision is suddenly being questioned and put to test. “What’s happening right now is shaking me to the core.”