Another Day In Paradise

To mark 50 years of Auroville, Bazaar takes an excerpt from author Akash Kapur’s introduction to his new book

- Akash Kapur

There’s a reason so much of the best utopian literature is fiction. Utopia is by definition unreal, unattainable. Non-fiction accounts of utopian communities descend quickly into sordid exposés, or memoirs of troubled childhoods. They have difficulty reconciling the soaring ambition, the noble impulses, with messy reality. Ambition and impulse are the stuff of dreams; this is territory better traversed by the capaciousness of fiction.

Auroville is not a utopia. It is a complex, lived, and very real community of some 2,500 people nestled above the Indian Ocean, on the Bay of Bengal. Dotted with schools and restaurants and shops and sports centres, it is enveloped in the uncertainties and ambiguities of humankind. The community is, as we Aurovilians like to say, a living laboratory: A not-quite-yet defined experiment, an incipient society searching for new models of economy, politics, aesthetics, culture.

Yet there are no doubt uptopian aspects to the community. It is founded on and structured—however loosely—around certain ideals. Its residents and institutions are unabashedly aspirational, their existence predicated on the premise that alternatives are attainable, that a better world is realisable. Although lacking a formal constitution, the community is guided through the precepts set out by its founder, the Frenchwoman Blanche Rachel Mirra Alfassa, known as the Mother, in the Auroville Charter.