Searching for utopia.
We were on our way to Pondicherry in a Hindustan Ambassador, one of those classic 1950s-looking cars you see all through India. But this one had been modified, he said, so that it ran on recycled ayurvedic massage oil. He was taking me to a microbrewery in town, as if to show that this place had everything from back home and more.
Sometimes I wondered if Zuckman was stretching the truth a little. He was such an evangelist for this part of the world. He was older than me but looked more youthful; he glowed with a zealous optimism that I associated more with the corporate sector. But so far everything he’d said — about being a Sanskrit scholar, about leaving Muizenberg to come and run his software company from Auroville — had checked out…
An extract from Show Me the Place about a visit to the ‘living laboratory’ (residents don’t like the term utopia) of Auroville in Tamil Nadu, southern India. Sunday Times online, 30 April 2024. Pagecast interview with Mila de Villiers.
Earlier in this piece, I describe coming across a copy of Ursula Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed in the (beautiful) Auroville Library. A science fictional utopia embedded in a real attempt at living differently – this became a kind of touchstone. It seemed like an emblem of how imaginary and actual experiments with better worlds have always nestled within, always co-existed and co-created each other. How the literary and political imagination have always depended on one other for showing that things have not always been as they are (and so could one day be otherwise again).
‘For those who are satisfied with the world as it is, Auroville obviously has no reason to exist’ – so wrote Mirra Alfasa, the project’s spiritual figurehead, known to everyone in Tamil Nadu as Sri Ma, the Mother. On Anarres, Le Guin’s anarchist planet, the nuclear family has been reimagined, child rearing is communal and the rationally invented language of Pravic has no possessive pronouns. So people refer to ‘the mother’ rather ‘my mother’. And there were other echoes, I found, between Le Guin’s fiction and the reality of Auroville.
Solar kitchens and delicious plant-based food. A valuing of manual labour and dirty work. Places for borrowing things that you might need but didn’t need to own: a drill or suitcase, tent or sound system. An idea of contentment as coming not from the proliferation of goods but (as per Epicurus and Gandhi) the reduction of wants. A simpler, less wasteful life. No adverts, no fences. Silence.
Both Anarres and Auroville are anchored in a project of ecological restoration or (to use a better word) repair. Anarres is an arid, lonely planet where flowering plants and quadrupeds have never evolved: ‘Man fitted himself with care and risk into this narrow ecology.’ The Anarresti are engaged in a large-scale, inter-generational process of greening the desert, a vast area known as the Dust.
Starting their community on a barren, baking, red-soiled plateau in the 1970s, the early Aurovilians had to become ‘accidental ecologists’, as Akash Kapur writes in his remarkable memoir Better to Have Gone. Working with local Tamil villagers, they planted trees and created soil bunds to survive, to create shade, grow food and prevent runoff:
They are amateurs, informed by common sense and persistence rather than scientific knowledge. Because there are no seeds on the plateau, they must travel to nearby forests, places where the land is more fertile, to jump-start their efforts. They go by bus and spend days walking around with just a flask of water, maybe some peanut brittle for sustenance. They wear leaves on their heads to shield them from the sun, and they study the forests, trying to understand what grows, and when and how it grows. In the droppings of monkeys, pangolin, loris, and other wild animals, they forage for seeds, which they store in paper bags. Back in Auroville, they spread the seeds out and attempt to identify them, then set out to re-create the ecological matrices they’ve just seen.
This reads almost like a parable: a group of Adams and Eves grubbing around in animal dung for clues about how to reverse-engineer Eden. A load of naïve and unserious hippies (their critics charged), who didn’t stick to the plans; but it was the naïveté of these ‘idiot savants of endurance’ (supporters argued) that had produced this paradise of ecological restoration.
The tension between sticking to the original, disembodied blueprint of a better society and improvising / evolving according to local conditions on the ground – this would lead to a long-running schism between so-called ‘constructionalists’ and ‘organicists’, between Auroville and the Sri Aurobindo ashram out of which it grew. It is a tension that runs throughout utopian thought and history. And one being reactivated now as Narendra Modi’s Hindu-fundamentalist government tries to intervene in the community’s governance, to build new roads through the forest and market Auroville as a destination for ‘spiritual tourism’, with fences and entry fees.
Utopia is always and intimately connected with failure. Even so, I often find myself turning back to a passage in Kapur’s book, one that provides its title. An elderly father is writing to his son, one of the Auroville ‘pioneers’ of the 1970s who has left a promising life in America to go build the City of the Future in a faraway place:
I cannot thank you enough for your letter … I have read it twice and intend to read it again. It told me so much about your thinking. I admire you on your pilgrimage. May it have a good ending. But no matter, better to have gone on it than to have stayed here quietly. At the end of my life I realize that there is nothing worthwhile except love and compassion and the search, which I have not made, for reality.
