Sri Aurobindo

Decolonizing Auroville

Settlers

Auroville is a community setup for the "whole world", and the initial European settlers have done a remarkable job in greening the arid lands over fifty years of toil, building schools and income opportunities for the surrounding communities, impoverished through the previous wave of British & French colonialism. 

White Man's Burden

Over time though, the white man's burden seems to have cast a shadow over Auroville, with most of the executives of the governing body being expats who, with their comfortable western incomes, can act as noble, all-knowing, Senators, governing and employing the plebian population in the "propah" upkeep of this "fair" society !

Unfortunately many of the settlers themselves have become squatters, refusing to give up their multi-acre estates for development which they have cultivated over decades, and grown into multi-generational family abodes. Although they don't own the land legally, they practically are laying claim to do so by preventing development into the city that Auroville must evolve into. This, despite no individual ownership of land being a fundamental edict of the Auroville charter.

Criticisms of its excellent western food culture are not appropriate though, for native foods are available aplenty in many of the restaurants/cafes, albeit their management is largely driven by westerners too.

Bengali colonialism

It's not just western colonization, for even the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry has struggled with the influx of Bengali followers, and most of its otherwise excellently educated students, having a pathetic command over Tamil, while flaunting their fluency in French & Sanskrit.

Parroting the Mother 

Religion too, has taken hold of the followers of both Auroville and Ashram. 

Small but essential elements of worship, for example, the organ music, and the French incantations, are more apt to resonate with European church goers, which the Mother employed well to inspire & comfort the early settlers in this foreign land - but is distinctly out of place in the agrarian milieu of Auroville region.

The Mother, despite having been repeatedly exhorted by Sri Aurobindo as being both transcendant energy as well as living form, has been largely reduced to the latter only, worshipped in her limited form, her utterances memorized without contextualization to the current times. 

Nothing wrong per se, for "the masses", to keep them on a straight harmonious peaceful path, but the Yoga is limited in this model, and divine monomania has taken hold.

As a side note, the Sri Aurobindo meditation model discourages the third, and final dissolution of Samadhi state, just sticking to Dharana & Dhyana - focus & concentration on realizing a particular vision. The fear being that Samadhi state will lead practitioners to become aloof and disconnected to worldly upliftment like Advaitins of yore. The disadvantage is that this (merging with the Universe) discourages new Yogi's from attaining the levels of Sri Aurobindo  - which could lead to the adverse outcome of possibly branching the flock. There is precedence though,  in Sri Vaishnava literature where this fragmentation has been avoided, a notable example being that of Swami Desikan who could have easily branched off from Ramanujacharya - but chose not to. And worldly upliftment was still sustained in contrast to the Nirvana/Moksha seeking Advaitins.

Tamil Roots

It is ironic the Tamil roots of Auroville have been buried nearly out of sight despite :

• the Ashram, some claim, being purportedly on the same site as the fabled Agasthya Muni, who had commanded the Vindhya mountains, that separated the north from the south, to bend down and balanced the weight of the sub-continent, and

• Sri Aurobindo having learned deeply from Bharatiyar the most notable Tamil poet, in exchange for Sanskrit knowledge.

Indeed, the deep roots of the surrounding Tamil culture have hardly been given its full due - after all it too has deep historicity of wealth creation and Yoga, in equal measure, both of which we deem essential to human unity. It's not the language per se, for here we are writing primarily in English, but the deeper cultural aspects of which we are concerned.

With regards to the ownership of the land, it being donated to Auroville in order to be an Aurovillean, this is not an easy thing to swallow for the native Tamil who has huge responsibilities for their extended families, and land being their sole possession of wealth. It's far easier for relatively prosperous westerners to not fixate on personal land ownership as many of them have passive retirement/savings accounts and usually not bogged down with taking care of extended families as much as the native Tamil culture. 

Furthermore, the Yoga of the "natives" hews far closer to Tantra than its more modern sanitized Yoga forms, with deities literally being embodied in all physical embodiments possible - trees, rocks, rivers, mountains - and even the occasional spell-bound individuals who go spontaneously into mystic, transcendental states. Some may characterize this as primitive, but it's more apt to cast this as primal - going back deep into Nature without any baggage of industrialized thought.

In fact, this is exactly what Sri Aurobindo exhorted us to do - to "bring Divinity right down into the cellular consciousness" - not to merely preach Yoga, or to use it as an escape from worldly toil, but to use Yoga to transform our very inner core. Tantra is as hard core as it gets in Yoga - but of course, susceptible to abuse and thus discarded in the dust heap of modernization.

Time to Change

This entire site was started with the intent of Decolonizing Yoga through talks & writings, now it seems like a tangible goal would be to Decolonize Auroville.

And modernize it, while resurfacing its Tantric Yoga roots - all in alignment with our whole thesis of becoming Rishi's in the Age of AI.