Auroville

Part of Alan’s project was a search for a “religion with no gods”. Hence the request to look at the community based on the place they called Auroville in India. Maureen came with me.

An Indian Road is a space shared by animals, the little gas-driven carts called auto-rickshaws, cars, trucks, bikes, motorbikes and people. The sidewalks are usually broken or impassable. Every vehicle sounds its horn all the time. Somehow it works. Cows do not panic or step in front of cars. All the inhabitants of the teeming space share some sort of mutual understanding.

We flew from Mumbai to Chennai, formerly called Madras, and then took a car to Pondicherry, the former French enclave. This is where many Westerners stay.  In the morning we visited the ashram founded by the French woman known as “The Mother”. 

At the ashram, I selected books about the cult and its key figures. “The Mother” had become a follower of a sage called Aurobindo.

The next day we packed our things and a taxi took us to Auroville, which was about 20 mins out of Pondicherry, to a lodge in the community. The first signs of the community were the villas among the trees off the roadways and Europeans on bicycles.

In the afternoon we went first to the main offices of the community and then walked to see the famous dome. (At the offices we secured a ticket enabling us to go inside the dome the following day).

The inside of the dome is completely white, with a huge white carpet on the floor. In the centre of the floor is a glass globe which suffuses light from a sunbeam directed down from the roof by a system of mirrors, which adjust to the sun’s position.

Around the side of the dome are recesses. In the design plan for the dome the recesses have names like Fortitude or Patience.

I was struck by the fact that Aurobindo himself had retired into solitude and delegated the management of the ashram and of Auroville to the Mother. Aurobindo had written: “A movement in the case of a work like mine means the founding of a school or a sect or some other dammed nonsense.  It means that hundreds or thousands of useless people join in and corrupt the work or reduce it to a pompous farce from which the Truth that was coming down recedes into secrecy and silence.

“That says it all,” said Maureen. “He disses his own followers.”

In its programme Auroville talks of synthesising the religious and the scientific, but the net result is an undefined “religious” culture and no science to speak of. 

The place appeared static. There were about 2,500 “Aurovilians” living in a space run on “ecologically sound” principles. (It was originally anticipated that there would be 50,000 inhabitants). The “industries” in the park were soft arts-and-crafts activities,  like making traditional musical instruments.

“The great dome is an overblown structure.” I wrote.

 I took pictures and video and pulled together  information and statistics.

This may be good for some, but it is not what Alan is looking for.