Auroville’s Crown of Thorns

Is the crisis over going ahead with the Crown Right of Way project merely dissent among residents over how to expand the physical township further, or will this polarisation cast a long shadow over the future in this City of Dawn created by The Mother?

A sense of existential crisis pervades what should have been a celebratory time in Auroville. It is passing through a special phase of commemorating its founding by Mirra Alfassa, or The Mother, on February 28, 1968, in a year that also coincides with the 150th birth anniversary celebrations of her spiritual mentor Sri Aurobindo.

Nearly five decades since an acrimonious power-ideological feud plunged the township in turmoil in the days following the Mother’s passing in 1973, the community once again stands bitterly divided over the path to the future.

Back then, the crisis would culminate in a government takeover of Auroville in 1980 through the promulgation of the Auroville (Emergency Provisions) Ordinance — it later became the Auroville Foundation Act (1988) — and the subsequent failed challenge in the Supreme Court by Sri Aurobindo Society. And, perhaps the roots of the new crisis may also lie in that denouement which took away from Auroville a critical part of its self-governing autonomy and vested the Union with a larger oversight of the township and its guided growth.

As the Mother envisioned it, Auroville (City of Dawn) would be a place “on earth a place which no nation could claim as its own, where all human beings of goodwill who have a sincere aspiration could live freely as citizens of the world and obey one single authority, that of the supreme Truth; a place of peace, concord and harmony where all the fighting instincts of man would be used exclusively to conquer the causes of his sufferings and miseries...”

Those exalted ideals of harmony and human unity were to be upended by a series of rapidly turning events in December when the administration began work on the Crown project under a Master Plan (Perspective 2025) in December last year.

Since it took over in October, Auroville’s new governing board — which has Tamil Nadu Governor R.N. Ravi as chairman, Puducherry Lt. Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan among its members and senior bureaucrat Jayanti Ravi as Secretary — has signalled a clear intent to expedite the Master Plan, which had been in cold storage for over two decades, with a fresh impetus to completing the Crown Project.

The Master Plan evolved from French architect Roger Anger’s concept for a galaxy-shaped township that was approved by The Mother for the experimental city that would position the Matrimandir as the soul force.