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India is a magnet for planned communities, from the spiritualist Auroville
to the capitalist New Oroville.
By Michael Sorkin
Photography by Robert Polidori for Metropolis
July 2002
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A Modernist ashram: followers of Sri Aurobindo, creator of Integral
Yoga, founded the planned utopian community of Auroville ("city of
the dawn") in 1968.
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Long the scene of journeys to enlightenment, India has been friendly and
revealing to seekers--both internal and external--for centuries. As an urbanist,
my own pilgrimages have been to New Delhi and Chandigarh, to Jaipur and
Fatehpur Sikri. Spanning centuries, this is as impressive a collection of
intentional communities--of "planned cities"--as exists anywhere
on the planet. Each is also in its way the harmonious mixing of otherness
with locality. Sixteenth-century Fatehpur Sikri is a ghostly masterpiece
of invading Moghul urbanism, abandoned after a mere 14 years. Jaipur, the
eighteenth-century creation of Jai Singh, is gridded in thrall of European
rationalism. In the twentieth century, Lutyens offered the neobaroque axiality
and scrupulous segregation of New Delhi, and Le Corbusier the apotheosis
of Chandigarh, his madly hierarchical garden city. These places are the
scene of an unfolding and long-standing negotiation between the ideologies
of perfection and the exigencies of living in a society thick with tradition.
I am always eager to add to my utopian life list. The major stop on a pilgrimage
I took earlier this year was the town of Auroville, an intentional community
founded in Tamil Nadu in 1968 by followers of Sri Aurobindo, the legendary
avatar of Integral Yoga, a kind of post-Nietzchean Hinduism pursuing the
evolutionary creation of a spiritual superman, in touch with the "supermind"
of the cosmos. In this conception of the integrity and interconnectedness
of the earth, Aurobindo found his ethics, becoming an important progenitor
of today's environmentalism. His own route to spirituality came via the
experience of a particular kind of colonial subjectivity. Educated at Cambridge,
following with a trajectory through government service and revolutionary
politics, Aurobindo founded his ashram at Pondicherry in 1926. His teaching
had a particular appeal to the Indian educated classes and drew large numbers
of disciples from abroad.
Of these the leading light was the Mother, a Frenchwoman (born Mirra Alfassa
in 1878) who first met Aurobindo in 1914 and was instrumental in the
founding of the ashram, becoming Aurobindo's collaborator and directing
the enterprise from his death in 1950 to her own in 1973. It was the Mother's
idea to found Auroville ("city of the dawn") as the realization
of, as one biographer puts it, "an old dream of hers to create a place
where seekers from all over the world could live a progressive life in the
service of truth on a city level." The decision to begin was taken
in 1964, and the city officially inaugurated in 1968. It was to be,
in her words, "the city the earth needs."
For the city plan, the Mother turned to her son-in-law, French architect
Roger Anger. The original master plan--still the emblem of the town--is
indelible, a brilliant period piece. From a still center the city radiates
in spirals, meant to evoke a galaxy. Each of the big spiraling arms was
intended to be a megastructure, curving to a greenbelt. Imagined for an
ultimate population of 50,000, the town was zoned conventionally into cultural,
industrial, residential, and international districts. A spray of smaller
structures was to have surrounded the giant scale of the spirals. The spirals
remain unbuilt, and the current population hovers at about 1,500.
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Auroville, a planned international community of "seekers" in
the Tamil Nadu region of India, is an unlikely hybrid of Western
utopianism and Hindu spirituality. Rather than employing traditional
Hindu forms (like those of the nearby Amman Temple, below left),
Auroville residents--a large number of whom are architects--live in
Modernist houses (above and below right) and send their children to
school in futuristic buildings like the Centre for Further Learning
(bottom).
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Although little of the original plan is legible on the ground, its monumental
central structure has been built. An enormous sphere made of numerous golden
disks, it looks not unlike a gigantic, slightly compressed golden golf ball.
The Matrimandir--a monument to Shakti, the universal mother, Mother Earth--is
an iconic ready-made, inseparable as image from the Perisphere or the Bucky
dome at the center of Disney World (with which Auroville shares both a radial
organization and a certain aspiration to the materialization of happiness).
A visit to the Matrimandir is moving--and clarifying for the nature of spirituality's
relationship to architecture. The experience is strong because of its artful
harmonization of ritual and space rather than for the expressivity of the
pure form of either. To enter the sphere is to join a file of pilgrims
and to successively shed baggage, shoes, and speech, approaching in silence.
The orderliness is antithetical to the churning traffic and noise of
the typical Indian street, with its buzz of negotiated cooperation and compromise,
its resistance to pure formulations of movement. Everyone here has a single
direction.
The sanctum sanctorum of the sphere, found at the end of spiraling ramps
lined with silent beckoning disciples, is a luminous white space with a
ring of scenographic columns and a 30-inch crystal sphere at the center,
illuminated by mirror-directed sunbeams. As a place for contemplation, the
room is impressive for its pared "universal" spiritual iconography--an
armature for emotional involvement, if a tad 2001. It works, though,
because of its involving processional, its way of making all visitors into
pilgrims, and its reproduction of a familiar, recognizable, and nonspecific
idea of solemnity.
Auroville is a hybrid, a high European utopianism as well as a vessel for
Hindu spirituality. That the community has had its difficulties is
emblematic not just of values in conflict but of the difficulty
of reading similar values--peace, solidarity, love--from multiple perspectives.
The charter of Auroville is ringingly postnationalist: "Auroville belongs
to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole."
Enlightenment, however, is the precondition of citizenship: "To live
in Auroville, one must be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness."
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