Joe P. L. Davidson
Rescuing Hope
A review of Akash Kapur, Better to Have Gone: Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville (Metropolitan Books, 2021).
The arc of utopian experimentation is familiar. It goes something like this: a sense of dissatisfaction with society as it exists prompts a desire for a world characterised by liberation and fulfilment. The exuberant hope that initially powers the project, however, quickly founders on the reality of constructing an alternative social order. Petty disputes over everyday life give way to profound disagreements over the direction of the utopia, eventually resulting in fractures, recrimination, and breakdown. All the frustrations and failures of the old society come to haunt the utopians, who begin to lose faith not only in the particular project at hand but, more profoundly, in any attempt to build a better world.
Utopias, it seems, begin with hope and end with disappointment. This was certainly the case for the Owenite and Fourierite communities of the nineteenth century, where the initial yearning for social equality, political freedom, and seas filled with lemonade ended with a handful of hungry, bickering settlers stuck on an isolated piece of stolen land in North America. The communist revolutions of the twentieth century recapitulated this movement on a grander scale, with 1989 putting the brakes on the torrent of utopian cravings unleashed by 1917 and 1949. The communal experiments of the radical 1960s suffered a similar fate. By the 1980s, demands for spiritual enlightenment, the abolition of the family, and detaching from Western development were seen as, at best, whimsical and, at worst, dangerous.
Is failure intrinsic to the utopian endeavour? Or is there wiggle room for liberation, alternative pathways for utopian desire to forge? These are the questions at the heart of Akash Kapur’s Better to Have Gone, which offers a finely grained account of the history of Auroville, a utopian community located in the state of Tamil Nadu in India. Kapur grew up in the community and returned to live there as an adult in the 2000s with his wife, Auralice. The book, while not exactly a memoir, is a personal one, with Kapur grappling not only with the complexities of the development of the community but also his own ambivalent feelings towards Auroville.
Indeed, in some respects, the story told by Better to Have Gone is Auralice’s, who was also born and brought up in Auroville. The pulse of the book is the mysterious deaths in 1986 of Diane Maes and John Walker, two long-standing members of the community. Diane is the mother and John the adoptive father of Auralice, who was fourteen when they died. By placing Diane and John at the centre of the narrative of Auroville, Kapur sheds light on a tragedy that has loomed large over his family’s life and highlights some of the contradictions of the community.
Before moving to the particulars of Diane and John’s story, Kapur reflects on the origins of Auroville. The community was founded in 1968 by the Mother (1878-1973), a follower of the yogi Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), as a place of peace and harmony free from the corruptions of money, nations, and power. It is tempting to see it in terms of the radicalism of 1968, with the utopian settlement making concrete the demands voiced by students and workers in Paris, Prague, Mexico City and beyond. However, Auroville was the product of a distinct series of struggles. The origins of the community can be traced to the Indian independence movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sri Aurobindo, who was born Aurobindo Ghose, was one of the leading proponents of Indian freedom in this period, most famously leading the Swadeshi movement against the partition of Bengal in 1905. After repeated harassment by the British authorities, he settled in Pondicherry, a French colonial outpost in south-east India, in 1910.
It was in a British colonial prison in the late 1900s that Aurobindo began to develop a distinctive spirituality. Aurobindo’s philosophical system, called Integral Yoga, promised both individual and collective transformation. On the one hand, individuals could gain spiritual truth by withdrawing from the world, renouncing the desire for wealth and power and adopting a range of spiritual exercises, from meditation to physical labour. On the other hand, Aurobindo declared that humanity would evolve into a new species via these ascetic practices. Alex Wolfers posits that Aurobindo promoted a form of revolutionary ascetism that ‘infused traditional Hindu metaphysics with an original emphasis on universality and revolutionary futurity’. The Integral Yoga promised a liberated world in which the pain and suffering of the present has been overcome by the emergence of a supramental being.
Action was key to Aurobindo’s philosophy; his turn to spirituality after 1910 was not a retreat from protest but rather its translation into a new form. Kapur notes that: ‘This [supramental] being will not simply emerge on its own. It must be willed into existence, through a conscious process of self-cultivation and spiritual rigor.’ The seeds of Auroville can be seen in Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga, which encourages its followers to actively work towards a better world in the here and now. Yet Aurobindo was not the driving force behind Auroville. This task fell to the Mother, who was one of Aurobindo’s closest disciples and worked tirelessly to realise the promise of Integral Yoga in the world.
The Mother was born in Paris as Mirra Alfassa in 1878 and first met Aurobindo in 1914 after travelling from France to Pondicherry with her husband, an official of the French colonial system. The Mother’s sense of alienation from European society resonated with Aurobindo’s spiritual revolution aimed at overcoming the degradations of colonial rule. As Leela Gandhi suggests, the two worked together to produce a ‘hybrid admixture of theism and ethics, belief and social justice’, with politics and faith bound together in an intimate embrace.
From the 1920s onwards, the Mother was pivotal to the spread and development of Integral Yoga. She was the de facto leader of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram founded in Pondicherry in 1926, worked to disseminate the ideas of the movement across the globe via her writings and translations, and acted as a liaison between the reclusive Aurobindo and key figures in the Indian independence movement like Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore.
The Mother also began to articulate a vision of a utopian city, Auroville, rooted in Aurobindo’s philosophy. As she declared in a document titled “A Dream” (1954): ‘There should be somewhere 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.’ More concretely, what Leela Gandhi calls the Mother’s ‘anticolonial socialism’ shines through the document, especially when it is declared that ‘in this ideal place money would no longer be the sovereign lord’.
Despite the spiritual and social radicalism of Integral Yoga, the Mother was also a pragmatist; she was aware that, for the new community to be a success, it needed the support of powerful actors in both the newly independent India and beyond. By the time the community was launched in 1968, the Mother had successfully gained the backing of the Indian government and UNESCO for the project. Moreover, renowned French modernist architect Roger Anger was commissioned to plan the new city. His blueprint, which had the suitably evocative name of the Galaxy, imagined neighbourhoods spoking out from the Matrimandir, or the Mother’s Temple.
The inauguration of Auroville, however, set in train a process that disrupted Anger’s plan for the city. In the years that followed 1968, travellers from around the world, including many members of the counterculture that had developed in the 1960s (here, Auroville begins to chime with the distinctive set of political struggles that came to a head in 1968), began to settle in Auroville. They did not, however, keep to the blueprint, instead building small communities in an anarchic fashion. The call to action at the heart of Integral Yoga, that liberation was the product of people’s active struggle, threw a spanner in the Galaxy masterplan, giving license to the settlers’ desire to find their own path to the supramental being.
The tension between order and anarchy in Auroville came to a head after the Mother’s death in 1973. The Committee for the Yoga (CFY), the body that formally controlled the project and owned the land for the new city, attempted to push through the original plan, even if that meant evicting the new arrivals and destroying their settlements. This was resisted by those resident in Auroville. A radical group – who cemented the coming together of political action and spiritual enlightenment of Aurobindo and the Mother – declared the settlement independent of the CFY. In the process, this group sought to enact a new beginning, a process that included the burning of books associated with the old world, the closure of schools, and the intimidation of those who sympathised with the CFY. Eventually, the war over Auroville ended with a victory for the settlers. An Indian Supreme Court decision in 1981, and the subsequent Auroville Foundation Act of 1987, resulted in the land being taken from the CFY and transferred to state ownership, with the community itself granted effective self-determination. This has provided a stable foundation for the community, which has continued to grow since the 1980s and now houses around three thousand residents.
John and Diane, who are the focus of Better to Have Gone, were intimately entangled with these political developments. It would be wrong to say that the two were leaders in the events that engulfed Auroville in the 1970s and 1980s; they were positioned at some distance from the Mother, and expressed ambivalence toward the excesses of the anti-CFY forces in the community. Nevertheless, Diane and John embodied the utopian spirit that underpinned the foundation of Auroville. They were willing to travel thousands of miles - from Belgium in the case of Diane and the United States in the case of John - to help build Auroville from the ground up. Alienated by the restrictions of everyday life in the post-war West and enraptured by the Mother’s call to action, Diane and John were doggedly committed to the task of social and spiritual transformation.
They were willing to undergo great hardships to pave the way for the supramental being; a better world was built through the sweat of the settlers. Auroville was, when Diane and John arrived in the early 1970s, more dream than reality, the promise of a society of equality and freedom instantiated in nothing more than a few ramshackle buildings. Whether it was the exalted task of building the Matrimandir, a sublime geodesical structure that is the spiritual centre of the community, or more mundane matters of daily life, like digging wells and baking bread, it was partly through the work of people like Diane and John that Auroville took shape.
The combination of exulted dreaming and practical construction is captured in John’s letters to his family in the United States, which are one of the primary source materials used by Kapur in Better to Have Gone. John used the letters to proselytize to his sceptical family, attempting to capture a fragment of the dream of a new world. As John wrote to his father: ‘You sit very quietly and wait. Then you catch a fragment of what is to be, of the dream, and slowly you pull it down to earth and reality – carefully, not to tug too abruptly, as it will dissolve in your hands and you will be left under a pile of rubble.’ At the same time, just as the Mother combined the desire for revolutionary transformation with the practical task of building support for Auroville, John’s letters often have an instrumental purpose: requesting funds from his wealthy family to help with various tasks in Auroville. The dream, in the instance above, was a new house for John, Diane and Auralice, which required hiring tens of labourers and buying expensive materials. The house, which preoccupied John throughout his final years and remained unfinished on his death, was one route towards the realisation of liberation.
The dedication of Diane and John to the Auroville project also played a pivotal role in their deaths; they continued to strive for the realisation of the supramental being even at the cost of their own well-being, and that of Auralice. In 1976, Diane suffered a severe accident while assisting with construction work on the Matrimandir and was paralysed. The accident marked the beginning of the end for the naïve hopefulness that had underpinned the Auroville project. As one contemporary of Diane and John comments in an interview with Kapur: ‘When Diane fell, it was like the bubble went out of utopia.’ The boisterous energy that initially defined Diane and John’s life in Auroville was obliterated, to the point where the family was living an increasingly strained and withdrawn existence by the 1980s.
Satprem (born Bernard Enginger), a French survivor of the concentration camps of World War II, one of the Mother’s most devoted disciples and a key force in the anti-CFY protests, played a pivotal role in their demise. For Satprem, Diane’s accident at the Matrimandir was filled with spiritual and political significance: it was retribution for the corruptions visited on the community by the CFY and a sign that efforts needed to be redoubled to return to the true path of Integral Yoga. As Kapur ominously suggests, Satprem’s influential interpretation of Diane’s accident ‘sets her – and John – on a radical, severe course that will culminate catastrophically’. Diane and John began to believe that their lives were bound up with the fate of both Auroville and humanity as a whole. Any deviation might have disastrous consequences.
More concretely, Satprem advised Diane to avoid the medical care provided by the public hospital in nearby Pondicherry. The statements “no hospitals” and “no doctors” is a consistent feature of the final part of Kapur’s story. Diane and John grew steadily weaker in the 1980s but resisted the assistance of doctors, even those resident in Auroville. Kapur, in not revealing the causes of Diane and John’s deaths until the final stages of Better to Have Gone, imbues their story with tension and pathos. It does not give too much away to mention that the rejection of medical care played an important role.
The question of commitment is at the core of Better to Have Gone. Kapur vacillates between admiration for the capacity of Diane and John to stick to the task of building utopia and horror at their unwillingness to adapt in the face of new challenges and problems. Ultimately, the fate of Diane and John is positioned as a warning by Kapur: ‘[…] if there’s one thing growing up in this town has taught me, it’s that too much commitment is often dangerous. It blurs judgment; it can even kill.’ Indeed, Kapur resists idealising the decisions of Diane and John: ‘“They died for their beliefs,” people say of Diane and John. I suppose this is true. You could just as well say they died because of their beliefs’ (emphasis in original).
This is a common critique of utopian endeavours. Cold War liberals of the mid-twentieth century, including Isaiah Berlin, Judith Shklar, and Karl Popper, regarded the drive to utopia as inherently dangerous; it results in the totalitarianism experienced in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. A perfect world, to borrow Berlin’s words in his essay ‘The Decline of Utopian Ideals in the West’ (1978), can only be achieved by violently straightening out the crooked timber of humanity: ‘[…] no perfect solution is […] possible in human affairs, and any determined attempt to produce it is likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment and failure.’ (Incidentally, as Better to Have Gone recounts, Berlin was a friend of John’s family in the United States and John attended private seminars with him – but his anti-utopianism appears not to have influenced John).
Given the tragic story recounted by Better to Have Gone, it would have been easy for Kapur to simply recapitulate the reactionary canards of the Cold War liberals. The desire of Diane and John could be dismissed as another episode in the long history of people attempting to build a world of complete liberation only to experience new forms of oppression and violence. However, it is testament to Kapur that he does not follow this well-worn path, instead unearthing the stubborn power of the utopian dream of Auroville. As he states at the beginning of the book, he and Auralice have ‘unfinished business’ in Auroville. In one sense, this refers to the opaqueness that surrounds the deaths of Auralice’s parents. However, there is also a feeling that Auroville has unfinished business for the world. The couple’s decision to relocate to Auroville at the moment of the outbreak of the Iraq war in 2003 was no coincidence: the peaceful, egalitarian, and searching way of existence in the community, for all its flaws, was a necessary corrective to the rambunctious imperial adventurism of George W. Bush’s neoconservative coterie.
As Kapur asserts, he cannot fully affirm the vision of liberation adhered to by Diane and John, but nor can he completely reject it:
Children of utopias, I’ve come to understand, are like exiles. We grow up with the promise, illusory though it may be, of an ideal society. We come into adulthood and we understand the impracticability of that vision, as well as the laws of the grown-ups who ordered it to us. Yet still we cling to the promise; a part of us never stops hoping, looking for a way back. It’s hard to eradicate the vision of a better world once it inhabits your dreams. I think it was always inevitable that Auralice and I would return to Auroville.
The naïve dreams of the founders of the community cannot be sustained; there is no going behind the deaths of Diane and John. At the same time, the experience of disappointment helps shape a critical form of hope, involving the ability to hold the vision of a better world and the catastrophes of the past in the gaze simultaneously. By the end of Kapur’s text, Auroville emerges as tattered but not hollow. It was not wrong for Diane and John to leave their homes for the community, and nor was it wrong for Akash and Auralice to return.
Kapur’s account resonates with Ernst Bloch’s notion of the ‘undischarged past’, as elaborated in Erbschaft dieser Zeit [Heritage of Our Times] (1935), or an old dream of the future that continues to haunt the present. Bloch, one of the most famous Marxist theorists of utopia in the twentieth century, never relinquished his commitment to utopia. The oppressed peoples of the world, in Bloch’s account, have the right to perfection; nothing is too good for the working class. At the same time, in the face of the horrors of the emerging Nazi regime, Bloch recognised that hopes for communism had, for a time, been disappointed. The ruling class, as it had done countless times before, quashed the nascent utopian desires of the working class. Yet, this did not mean that these dreams of socialist futures were entirely defeated; they continued to have a spectral presence that could be recuperated even at the midnight of the century. As Bloch comments in Das Prinzip Hoffnung [The Principle of Hope] (1955-58): ‘Even disappointed hope wanders around agonising, a ghost that has lost its way back to the cemetery and clings to refuted images.’
Kapur, in describing himself as a child of utopia, is positioned at the heart of the dialectic of hope and disappointment. Better to Have Gone clings to the undischarged past as a life raft, a means of smuggling hope into an unpropitious present. The promises of Auroville have clearly not been fulfilled; the liberatory visions articulated by Aurobindo in the face of a colonial prison or Satprem when confronted with the concentration camp jar with the melancholia and desperation experienced by Diane and John in the mid-1980s. However, to borrow another phrase of Bloch’s, it would perhaps be more accurate to say that these dreams have not-yet been fulfilled. Kapur, whether reading John’s old letters to his family or strolling around his neighbourhood in Auroville today, can see the gaps and exclusions, but he also senses the glimmers of a new world. Or, as John wrote to his parents, utopia can be glimpsed in even the mundane details of life in Auroville: ‘So for the moment I don’t stand so much as squat, poised to take off, so full of the joy of soft breezes and soft sounds, bird calls and leaf rustles, and in the distance the workers starting to work – making a dream come true.’
Kapur’s tale is a complex one, both utopian and anti-utopian at once. There are, however, areas where this nuance runs up against hard barriers. Better to Have Gone anxiously skirts around some of the troubling political contradictions of the Auroville experiment. This becomes particularly clear in Kapur’s account of the relationship between the settlers of Auroville, many of whom migrated from the West or northern India, and the Tamil people of the surrounding villages and towns. The latter have an uncomfortable presence in Better to Have Gone. At best, they appear as potential converts but, more commonly, they labour in the background. Diane and John’s house was largely built by Tamil workers and their care during their illnesses was provided by a local man named Narayanan Samy. The material conditions that supported Auroville, explicit thematization of which is repressed in Better to Have Gone, call to mind Walter Benjamin’s famous claim in “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” [“On the Concept of History”] (1940): ‘There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism’. The beauty of the Matrimandir is predicated on a set of relations that defy the community’s claim to egalitarianism.
Indeed, Jessica Namakkal stresses that the Auroville project has produced settler colonial dynamics. Despite the anticolonial origins of Integral Yoga as a philosophy, the activities of the Mother and her followers were pivotal in displacing the original inhabitants of the land on which Auroville now exists. The land of Tamil farmers was bought up by the CFY in the 1960s and many of the same farmers became labourers in the new community. Simply put, in Namakkal’s words, Auroville’s ‘liberal discourse rooted in multiculturalism, spirituality, equality, and utopianism […] displaced local Tamil populations from land and history, time and space.’
Better to Have Gone reproduces this displacement at a textual level. Kapur repeatedly represents the land on which Auroville was built as a space outside of history and without people prior to the arrival of the settlers. It is presented as a barren wasteland that is simply waiting for the arrival of Auroville:
Centuries earlier, someone said or did something to insult a holy man, and he condemned the land to barrenness. It hardly ever rains now, and when it does, water runs off the plateau, carrying away topsoil and saplings, perpetuating a cycle of erosion and desiccation. What remains is moonscape: vacant, panoramic, the earth packed hard, and red from iron oxide in the soil. A fitting tabula rasa for the new world.
Certainly, Kapur admits that the relationship between Auroville and the Tamil people was largely ‘transactional, characterized by land purchases or employment, and often tense’, but we get little sense of the agency of the latter. The politics of the local people, the fact that they might have their own utopian projects distinct from that of the settlers, is not broached by Better to Have Gone.
This is not a problem unique to Auroville or Better to Have Gone. As studies like Jeffrey Knapp’s An Empire Nowhere (1992) and Amy Boesky’s Founding Fictions (1996) have traced, the utopian tradition is closely entangled with discourses of settler colonialism, something that goes back to Thomas More’s genre-inaugurating Utopia (1516). More imagined his utopia on an island in the so-called new world, using the colonial zone as a blank slate where fancy could build freely. Indeed, the founder of More’s utopia, King Utopus, is the leader of an invading army that subdues and enslaves the original inhabitants of the island, called the Abraxans. In More’s words, the ‘rude, uncouth inhabitants’ of Abraxa, once defeated in a war, are supplanted by the civilised Utopians.
That these dynamics were replayed in Auroville does not mean that utopianism should be rejected. Tom Moylan, in his landmark study Demand the Impossible(1986), suggested that utopias should be critical in two ways: both critical of the dominant tendencies in the society in which they emerge and critical of the previous manifestations of utopian desire. Better to Have Gone certainly stands in this tradition. Kapur’s interrogation of the failures of Auroville is designed precisely to enrich the hope that originally spurred its foundation. Of course, Kapur is aware that Auroville might be a false start, another mistaken dream that will join the pantheon of past failed hopes, but he is also open to the possibility that something can be recuperated from the experience.
Still, this self-critical impulse in Better to Have Gone is limited. This is clearly not, or at least not-yet, a utopia for everybody and, certainly, not for the Tamil people. It is, at best, what science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson calls, in his novel Pacific Edge (1990), a ‘pocket utopia’, or an island of privilege nestled in a sea of inequality and exploitation. A question can thus be posed to Better to Have Gone: is it possible to bring Auroville into the orbit of the struggles of oppressed people in both India and beyond, such that the community advances their interests rather than undermining them?
My sense is that this question must be answered in the negative. It is difficult to believe that any form of genuine utopianism will emerge from a project predicated on the dynamics of settler colonialism. Instead, what is needed is a counter-Auroville, or a project concerned with unearthing the desires and dreams of those people displaced by its emergence. As China Miéville comments in his essay “We Are All Thomas More’s Children” (2016), a vision of a ‘New Abraxa’, or an account of a liberated world that is informed by those vanquished by past utopias, is required: ‘A start for any habitable utopia must be to overturn the ideological bullshit of empire and, unsentimentally but respectfully, to revisit the traduced and defamed cultures on the bones of which some conqueror’s utopian dreams were piled up.’ So, for utopia, look to the demands of the Palestinians, not the Israeli kibbutz movement; the Indigenous people of Americas rather than Henry Ford’s utopian city in the Amazon; the maroon communities of escaped Africans above the Fourierite and Owenite experiments in the United States – and the Tamil people, not Auroville.
Speculative fiction writer Vandana Singh, in her recent Utopias of the Third Kind(2022), offers one possible way in which utopias can respond to colonialism. Rejecting the ‘kind of utopia that […] depends on the coexistence of dystopias for multiple others’, Singh affirms utopias that ‘are grounded in the local, in its geography and social-cultural-ecological surround, but locate themselves in a planetary context’. These utopias emerge out of the concrete struggles of oppressed groups against the dominant logics of the world but are also open to adjustment and change as they come into contact with others. Rather than coming from the outside in, as in the case of the settlers of Auroville, Singh posits a movement from the inside out, with particular struggles concatenating into a global impulse away from the degradations of the present and towards liberation in the future.
Auroville, it seems, is very distant from this form of utopianism. Given this, what is the point of reading Kapur’s Better to Have Gone? One might think that the purpose of reading utopian texts is to gain inspiration, an affirmation of the sense that another world is possible. This is certainly one function of utopia; we need them to guide everyday acts of political contestation. Yet another purpose of reading utopias must be to finesse and refine the vision of the new. To quote Bloch’s Erbschaft dieser Zeit again, ‘socialism may pay respect to the dreams of its youth, it sheds their illusion but it fulfils their promises.’ It may be that, if we go back far enough, there is something of Aurobindo’s revolutionary ascetism that can be refunctioned for the contemporary moment. Equally, a counter-reading of Better to Have Gone may prove that there are no promises to redeem in Auroville; it might be illusions all the way down. Jettison the muck, if need be, to make room for the utopian gold.