Prefiguring Utopia: The Auroville Experiment

As humanity faces a mounting polycrisis, the convergence of mutually reinforcing social, political, economic, and environmental crises, it is becoming ever more apparent that sweeping change is not only necessary, it is inevitable. In this context, the micro-experiments of intentional communities take on new meaning not only as idiosyncratic curiosities but potential harbingers for a new world—or at least new possibilities. In other words, intentional communities can serve as laboratories for prefiguring alternative futures in response to the polycrisis. What, then, can we learn from Auroville, the world’s largest intentional community, a spiritual community in south India with approximately three thousand residents from sixty countries?In Prefiguring Utopia: The Auroville Experiment, Suryamayi Aswini Clarence-Smith grapples with this ambitious question in ways that are simultaneously theoretically rich, empirically grounded, and at times deeply personal. Her autoethnographic inquiry into the cultural, political, and economic dimensions of Auroville as a prefigurative utopia is grounded in both scholarly research and the lived experience of an Aurovilian who was born and raised there. The book is a treasure trove for anyone wanting a deeper understanding of the inner workings of Auroville, which is inherently fascinating, but also of potential value to understanding other emerging social experiments in response to the mounting polycrisis. Equally important is her theoretical contribution to the rapidly growing scholarship on prefigurative and utopian practices.Not surprisingly, given the pioneering quality of Clarence-Smith’s research, the potential for bias inherent in autoethnography, and the enigmatic nature of Auroville itself (which she is quick to acknowledge), the book has its limitations. These, however, are easily offset by the author’s intellectual humility and the trailblazing nature of her work—both as a scholar and as an Aurovilian. Clarence-Smith has a unique story to tell and she does so in a way that elucidates emerging research on prefiguration and utopian practice while helping to answer a pressing practical question for our turbulent times: What might Auroville teach the world?Auroville was founded in 1968 by The Mother, the French spiritual collaborator of Sri Aurobindo, with support from UNESCO and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Together, Sri Aurobindo and The Mother pioneered Integral Yoga, a world-embracing spirituality that understands physical, social, and psychological reality as an evolutionary unfoldment of the Divine. Rather than seeking the individual practitioner’s liberation from material reality through ascetic withdrawal or solitary practice, Integral Yoga aims toward the progressive spiritualization of subjective and objective reality—including the transformation of society itself. Thus, besides being named after Sri Aurobindo, Auroville derives its meaning from the French aurore (dawn) and ville (village or city). As The Mother declares in The Auroville Charter, “Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future” and “a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual human unity.”1 In other words, while Clarence-Smith never says so explicitly, we can surmise that her research is grounded in an understanding that prefiguration is built into Auroville’s purpose. Prefiguration inevitably entails research and experimentation, both of which are built into The Auroville Charter.True to The Mother’s vision, Auroville has been a site of material and social research for over fifty years, even if embodying human unity remains very much a work in progress. Arriving on a severely eroded plateau in Tamil Nadu in 1968, for instance, the first order of business for Auroville’s pioneers was to revitalize the land. Three million trees later, Auroville is one of the few places on Earth where biodiversity is increasing. Its world-renowned ecological projects include compressed-earth building technologies, water conservation, plant-based sewage treatment, and renewable energy. Consequently, we might easily conceive of Auroville as ecologically prefigurative, which of course it is.The point however, as Clarence-Smith would remind us, is that Auroville’s material and social experiments are first and foremost corollaries to its spiritual purpose. Auroville was founded as an international township with a spiritual objective: to embody the ideal of human unity through the progressive spiritualization of its members. For this reason, rather than simply documenting Auroville’s alternative practices, Prefiguring Utopia focuses on the subjective and intersubjective origins of those practices in the inner lives of the community’s members. The aim is not so much to explicate the minutiae of Auroville’s practices and institutions, although the book’s level of detail is daunting at times. Rather, the author’s aim is to understand how and why these practices emerge, what light they can shed on the theory and practice of prefiguration, as well as their relevance to the larger world.Because Clarence-Smith is primarily interested in the subjective and intersubjective origins of Auroville’s prefigurative practices, it makes sense that her three core chapters are “Culture,” “Polis,” and “Economy.” Among the prefigurative practices she explores are the following: soul-based “Integral Education,” as expressed in Auroville’s schools; “Dream Catching” gatherings to spark visionary planning and architectural ideas for town planning; “silent presence keepers,” who serve as meditative witnesses during meetings; playing recordings of The Mother during a potentially contentious meetings; the Auroville Maintenance system for collective provisioning, which has resonance with universal basic income; and smaller-scale decentralized experiments in a “no money economy.” While these practices might be viewed as forms of cultural, political, or economic prefiguration, Clarence-Smith is far more interested in what she calls spiritual prefiguration. This is because Auroville is first and foremost an experiment in transforming society through the spiritualization of every dimension of its existence.It is important to bear in mind that Auroville’s prefigurative practices emerged during a period when its population grew from a few hundred to 3,000. This growth entailed a shift from direct democracy to representative democracy, along with increasing routinization and bureaucratization. While Clarence-Smith acknowledges the potential pitfalls of this shift, she is adamant that institutionalization itself can be prefigurative. This is because, as she puts it, the essence of Auroville is its “spiritually prefigurative utopianism.” In other words, Auroville’s spiritual vision can be applied to every dimension of community life. Indeed, this is what it means to become what The Mother referred to as “a true Aurovilian.”2 Clarence-Smith points to the centrality of this injunction in the self-understandings of Auroville’s members. As she reports, Aurovilians on the whole seem to have a sense of humility, aspiring to become “true Aurovilians” rather than presuming to have already achieved that status. Consequently, what Auroville might become cannot be predicted: It is contingent upon the progressive spiritualization of its members (57).As a response to the many-tentacled polycrisis, “spiritual prefiguration” is simultaneously appealing and disconcerting. Serving as the book’s conceptual linchpin, “spiritually prefigurative utopianism” evokes alternative futures that are at once radical, visionary, and inscrutable. These ambiguities are evident throughout the book. For instance, Auroville’s schools are grounded in a model of Integral Education that aims to foster “free progress” guided by each child’s soul (40). Two questions naturally arise: How do teachers recognize and teach to the child’s soul? And, What are the results of Auroville’s pedagogical experiments? While Clarence-Smith does not answer the first question directly, she offers one clue that also speaks to the second question.One of Auroville’s most successful programs, Awareness Through the Body (ATB), helps both children and adults to understand and manage their own inner complexity and therefore become more self-directed from their inmost being. As the ATB website states, “The study of oneself is a subject that is rarely included in a school syllabus. ATB is a practice that addresses that need through a personal body felt experience.”3 According to Clarence-Smith, a survey of alumni from Auroville’s schools singled out ATB as the single most meaningful aspect of their educational experience (49). Many adults also practice ATB and find it helpful in their everyday lives. As we learn in subsequent chapters, some residents (including Clarence-Smith herself) employ ATB practices to help themselves manage their thoughts and emotions during political meetings.While ATB offers an exciting window into the possibilities of Integral Education, the larger questions of what a spiritually prefigurative educational system would look like and how it would interact with the outside world remain unanswered. As Clarence-Smith acknowledges, some of the more radical experiments in the past, including closing the schools, were harmful to some children, while others are criticized for being too conventional. Like all of Auroville’s spiritually prefigurative practices, Integral Education is very much a work in progress. What Clarence-Smith says about Auroville’s schools applies equally to its political and economic institutions: They are in a continual “search for balance between experimentation and stability” (42).One conceptual distinction relevant to this search for balance is Clarence-Smith’s delineation of predetermined versus prefigurative conceptions of utopia. The former, which the author associates with older “blueprint” models of utopia, aim toward some end-state of perfection. Since the 1960s, which happens to coincide with Auroville’s inception, utopian projects have adopted a more open-ended and experimental prefigurative approach, aiming toward perfectibility more so than some preconceived ideal of perfection. While both predetermined and prefigurative approaches are at play in Auroville, Clarence-Smith (along with most Aurovilians, it appears) clearly favors the latter.Nowhere is the tension between predetermined and prefigurative approaches more evident than in Auroville’s conflicts around town planning. The Mother, possibly influenced by “blueprint” models in the 1950s and 1960s like Brasilia, commissioned what came to be known as Galaxy Model for Auroville, which she envisioned would eventually be home to fifty thousand residents. At the center was the Mantrimandir, a large spherical meditation chamber considered “the soul of Auroville” (completed in 2008), with four urban zones spiralling outward and the entire city surrounded by a circular greenbelt. In the decades after The Mother’s passing in 1973, Auroville grew organically according to the Galaxy Model—but not rigidly so. Over time, a schism developed between Aurovilians who support a more rigid interpretation of the Galaxy Model and those promoting a more flexible approach that takes into consideration ecological concerns and existing land use patterns. Despite being a minority, advocates of the predetermined blueprint approach (many of whom were on Auroville’s town development council) were able to obtain the support of the government. As Clarence-Smith observes, the blueprint approach is attractive to government authorities because it offers a degree of clarity and simplicity that the more exploratory and open-ended prefigurative approach lacks.Auroville has a unique and puzzling relationship with the state dating back to its early days. When The Mother established Auroville, she registered it under the Sri Aurobindo Society, a nonprofit research institute that she founded in 1960. Following her death in 1973, the Society illegally withheld funds donated to Auroville as part of a bid for power over the fledgling community. This led to a series of court cases and legislative initiatives, culminating in the Auroville Foundation Act of 1988, which established the Auroville Foundation as a statutory body under the auspices of India’s Ministry of Education and laid out the community’s tripartite authority structure. Without going into the arcane details, suffice it to say that while the day-to-day management of the community was delegated to the Residents’ Assembly, the Governing Board and Secretary of the Auroville Foundation have a significant amount of power to intervene in the community. Clarence-Smith also notes that the fact that Auroville receives “substantial funding” from the national government for its schools and its infrastructure is celebrated by some Aurovilians and troubles others (67). Whatever else we might say about Auroville as a prefigurative utopia, we must acknowledge that it is an exceptional case.Nonetheless, we can follow Clarence-Smith in asking what Auroville might teach the world. With the rise of anti-democratic regimes in much of the world, this question comes with some urgency. Hanging in the background of Prefiguring Utopia is what appears to be a mounting government takeover of Auroville, which has included threats of violence, bulldozing trees, and undermining the community’s consensus-oriented approach to decision making. The increasingly authoritarian government’s interest in Auroville arguably began with Prime Minister Modi’s high-profile visit honoring the community’s fiftieth anniversary in 2018. India’s ruling Hindu nationalist party has sought to portray Sri Aurobindo as a progenitor of Hindutva, an ideology that holds that India should be a Hindu rather than secular state.4 As this situation unfolds, and as much as we might wish otherwise, Auroville may also have something to teach the world about prefigurative utopian practice in the context of sectarian and anti-democratic regimes. While Clarence-Smith’s research implicitly raises this question, it mostly hangs in the background—and perhaps rightfully so because the situation is still very much in flux.Wherever things go from here, both in Auroville and elsewhere, we know that disappointments large and small are inevitable in the face of the unfolding polycrisis. It is here perhaps that Auroville has the most it can teach us. Building upon Ernst Bloch’s claim that utopian practice is about “learning hope,” Clarence-Smith calls in the dimension of disappointment. She goes so far as to extrapolate that it is the dynamic tension between hope and disappointment that serves as a goad for concrete utopian practice. Auroville, she suggests, takes this a step further by contextualizing disappointments and limitations as symptomatic of humanity’s current stage of spiritual development. The evolutionary worldview of Integral Yoga therefore serves a crucial function in framing disappointment and enabling Aurovilians to not only weather the inevitable frustrations of prefiguring utopia but also grow inwardly. Whether or not we think of ourselves as engaging in spiritually prefigurative utopian practices, our ability to engage this creative tension between hope and disappointment will likely shape both the subjective quality of our lives and our effectiveness in the world.