Auroville, a spiritual commune in Southern India, is grappling with marrying spiritual ideals with the material realities and colonialist history of the area
By Aditya Bharadwaj
Introduction
Auroville, a commune in Southern India, was founded in 1968 by Mirra Alfassa, known as the “Mother”, in hopes of furthering the world vision of Sri Aurobindo, a mystic and philosopher who was her spiritual companion. Alfassa aimed to synthesize Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual teachings in space, deeming Auroville a “city ofthe future”, a space where the collective could overcome the sufferings and shortcomings plaguing humanity. The intention of the communeis summed up in the Auroville Charter(1968):
1. Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But to live in Auroville one must be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.
2. Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress and a youth that never ages.
3. Auroville wants to be a bridge between thepast and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within. Auroville will boldly spring towards future realizations.
4. Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of anactual Human Unity.
However, through its integration of spiritualism with city-building, Auroville illustrates the conflicting rationalities between reason and spirit, West and the East, and the future and the past, pointing to important considerations of dualities of spirit and materiality in international planning practice. Through its idealist community planning, Auroville ironically perpetuates a nuanced form of colonialism through exclusion, but at the same time, the community also serves as a hub for social experimentation. By analyzing the effects of spiritualist ideals on the sense of inclusivity in the community, the case of Auroville illuminates broader societal struggles over freedom, equity, and voice.
Analysis
The notion of Auroville as the “city of the future” impacts its relationship with surrounding villages, as it assumes an inherent superiority through “evolutionary linearity” (Jazeel, 2023) while surrounding villages are constructed as inferior and ripe for transformation. The Auroville sentiment of superiority relates to Roy’s concept of a “benevolent empire”, where institution-expanding actions are rationalized by deeming them as net good for all actors (Roy, 2006). We can track this discourse to the origins of the commune when the founders imposed their own names on the local villages. This can be seen in the recollections of an early settler of Auroville where the original village names are presented in parenthesis: “‘We visited three groups of villagers which surrounded the following areas: Promesse (Tiruchittambalam; Mortandi), Auro-Centre (Irumbai), Auro-Plaz … (Bommayabalayam)’” (cited in Jazeel, 2023). Another community report from 1972 further illustrates the founders’ view of the villages: “Kuyliapalayam is an insanitary, unhealthy, under-privileged and neglected village—one among hundred [sic.] of such other villages, with a population of about 1,500 emaciated, illiterate, uncared for people. The environmental conditions are primitive to the point of making life there as dirty as can be imagined.”
This imposition of a concept of modern development continues today, with Auroville forming a Village Action Group with the aim to “improve the life of people in 60 local villages” through the creation of schools and business units, most of which are enterprises where natives make handicrafts that are exported to the West. These initiatives further intertwine the villagers financially to Auroville, while failing to address the fundamental lack of inclusion and acknowledgement that they are struggling for.
However, while Auroville has perpetuated many of the ills of colonialist power structures, its political emphasis on ideals of “humanity unity” and “unending education” within the commune has also led to innovative governance structures. Auroville recently has experimented with forming a Citizens Assembly, a randomly drawn group of Aurovillians, to address important challenges facing the commune. Human unity is strived for by incorporating random representation of the population, fostering small group work, and pursuing relationship-building activities via the structure of the Assembly. During the Assembly deliberations about water access, for example, the participants heard from over thirty different water experts crossing disciplines, including “a geomatics expert, a water conservationist, a wastewater expert, an urban planner, a forester, a farmer, a botanist…” (Clarence-Smith and Branagan, 2024). The principles governing the Assembly have also been introduced in other procedural processes in Auroville, such as the selection process for Auroville’s administrative bodies and Auroville’s community budgeting process.
Implications
The basis for experimentation in more democratic ways of organizing political structures in Auroville was not the traditional conception of political rights as understood in the West, but rather a view of spiritual equality from the perspective of the divine. However, the cognitive dissonance created by the conceptualization of a concrete urban utopia based on spiritual premises made Auroville’s founders oblivious to an important paradox. By combining their spiritualist intentions with city-building, the founders of the city unwittingly perpetuated colonialism through their relationship with natives in the area, leading to the exclusion of natives who were seen to be immersed in the “political present” (Namakkal, 2012) and who therefore did not have the means for spiritual awakening. Instead of empowering neighboring villagers to self-actualize, Auroville’s founders imposed their worldview on them, thus perpetuating a long-standing legacy of colonialism in the region, with Auroville itself being located on the outskirts of the former French colony of Pondicherry.
Throughout its history, Auroville has been a tale of two cities: the perceived “city of the future”, free from conflict, but also the material and social reality of the space itself. As Jazeel (2023) highlights, as a city that is not yet realized, Auroville illustrates a perceived potential of development and thus perpetuates “anticolonial colonialism” (Namakkal, 2012). This anticolonial colonialism can be understood as a product of the “development discourse” (Escobar, 1995), whereby Auroville is presented as model of development and progress in contrast with the backwardness of local communities.
In explicitly making spiritual evolution the polestar of progress, Auroville has illustrated the dualities of theory and praxis in planning. Auroville’s praxis of implementing spiritual idealism has inherently “othered” neighboring villages but has also offered hope within Auroville itself of more democratic systems of participatory planning.
Aurovillians gather around the Matrimandir, the spiritual center of Auroville. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/16/bulldozers-violence-and-politics-crack-an-indian-dream-of-utopia.
An early Aurovilian, Deborah, with a local, Selakannan. Source:https://www.memoriesofauroville.com/en/the-villages.
Auroville center, in relation to surrounding greenscape and villages.
Source: https://auroville.org/page/land-and-nature.