Auroville at 40

[Guest guest]

Auroville at 40

Australian Broadcasting Company

May 23, 2008

 

For forty years one utopian community in South India has

attracted people from around the world looking for an

alternative to a consumer society but now modernity is

creeping up on the community and threatening to

overwhelm it.

 

[Alana] ROSENBAUM, [of ABC]: A recital at Auroville,

an experimental township in the southern state of Tamil

Nadu. The musician fuses eastern and western conventions,

playing a contemporary tune on the sitar, a stringed

instrument traditionally used in classical Indian music.

 

Auroville itself is a fusion of east and west. It's a settlement

based on the teachings of the Indian guru Sri Aurobindo and

his French disciple Mirra Alfassa, known to devotees as the

Mother. More than half of Auroville's 1,700 residents hail

from abroad. The community's goal is nothing less than to

expedite human evolution. Hemant Lamba is a member of

the working committee.

 

[Hemat] LAMBA: Auroville symbolises the creation of an

environment which is conducive for that growth; Mother

named it the cradle of the superman, the superman being the

next stage of the human being.

 

ROSENBAUM: Sydney filmmaker Penny Fowler-Smith

settled in Auroville a year ago with her Dutch partner and

their young daughter.

 

FOWLER-SMITH: When I was pregnant I thought, 'If I'm

going to have a child I want to be around people, to raise her

around people who are more interested in leading with the

heart than with the head.

 

ROSENBAUM: Auroville is a small township built around

a temple known as the Matrimandir, a giant structure

resembling a gilded golf ball. This year the community

marks its 40th anniversary. Johnny Allen, who studied

architecture at the University of New South Wales, played a

key role in building up the town in the early 70's, after

following his wife to India.

 

ALLEN: I was married young at 22 and we had a small

child. Jan and I sort of lived as artists in Sydney; she had a

small printing press and I used to drive a taxi and it was a

pretty rough life for a while, and I think it got to a point

where it was so rough and so hand-to-mouth that she packed

up her baby and came to India.

 

ROSENBAUM: But many pioneering Aurovillians traveled

to India on spiritual questd. Gillian Chvat left Australia as a

teenager in the mid-70s. At Auroville, she helps provide

sanitation to the surrounding villages.

 

CHVAT: I have no idea what my life would have been in

Australia or some other place as an uneducated, unqualified

person what I would have done or how I would have found

that sort of self-expression.

 

ROSENBAUM: The region surrounding Auroville is

undergoing rapid change. Wealthy Indians are buying up

land near the township for holiday houses. Tourists are also

converging in greater number. The Indian government plans

to build a train station and airport near Auroville, but

residents discourage visitors and oppose the move.

Auroville itself is also rapidly evolving. In the early days,

the township was a series of huts. Today, although no one

actually owns real estate, many residents pay to build big

houses staffed by servants. Allen, who still sleeps in a mud-

brick house on the fringes of Auroville, envisaged a simpler

township.

 

ALLEN: I would have liked to have seen Auroville develop

with self-sustainability as its highest priority and it was, in

the beginning. The initial community that lived here was a

small group of people who were fired up by the 60s ethic of

build your own house, grow your own food, educate your

own children, we can do it, we don't need any restraints

from tradition, and so along those lines it would have been

great if Auroville had become a little organic village full of

mud huts.

 

ROSENBAUM: But for many, the real disappointment of

Auroville is the size of its population. The township,

intended for 50,000 people, has only 1,700 residents. But

Lamba says the social experiment is still in its early days.

 

LAMBA:The first 40 years have been establishment of a

base, now onwards the next stage has already begun, it's to

build a city and we will wait, there are certain

environmental or political catastrophes that are waiting to

happen, and around that time Auroville will become very

interesting to people.

 

http://www.abc.net.au/ra/programguide/stories/200805/s2254339.htm