I knew I was in for a rough ride when Delphine looked directly at me, supercilious smile spread across her face, refusing to return my hello. Sixteen hours it had taken to get there. Sixteen hours! The trip onto Auroville was several more hours still on a rickety bus which wound around narrow roads, up and down hill, in the pitch-black of night, so I had plenty of time and reason to rue my decision, to put it mildly. She’d told us doing the course was essential to our development as teachers but when the course started all the attention was lavished on the Aurovillians, who had paid precisely nothing to take part. Auroville was allegedly a ‘paradise’, Delphine’s ‘spiritual home’ (though she actually lived in Surbiton), but moreover it was the axis of ‘integral yoga’. Delphine assured us of the extraordinary nature of the native Aurovillians, but all I saw at our first visit to the supermarket on the way in, were grumpy-looking hochdeutsch types in tie-dye shirts, unprepared to let me pay for my one bottle of prana water (especially charged with prana by Aurovillians) over their weekly shop. This was the early noughties, before the internet had really taken off and Auroville’s own website gave scant information, adding to the allure Delphine had spun around the place.
Auroville itself was the brainchild of The Mother, who wanted Sri Aurobindo’s followers to have a place to be around him, her and with each other. Sri Aurobindo was famous for his vision of a divine superman race, remarkably close in some ways to Nietzsche’s. Sri Aurobindo and The Mother were a spiritual couple in a platonic relationship, acting out the roles of Mummy and Daddy to their needy followers, with Satprem, a Nazi concentration camp survivor, their sort-of spiritual son (though at least he did write some readable provocative prose). Its epicentre was, and is, the Matrimandir, which was still being painstakingly covered with real gold leaf at the time we visited, a huge globular structure made out of concrete. It’s popular with Hindu pilgrims far and wide, as Sri Aurobindo was rated a proper Indian savant, despite his English public school upbringing. We visited too and you aren’t allowed to speak at all, even on the approach, which had been impressed upon us by the Indian guards and Delphine herself (though I noted as we walked through the Matrimandir’s gardens she and her girlfriend had had a long furtive conversation). The inner sanctum looked just like a Hollywood set. ‘Are Superman’s mum and dad’s home?’ Paula hissed, as we approached the huge crystal which sat in the centre of the shrine room. Everywhere else was fitted out in white drapes, bright white walls and crystals everywhere. Seeing Marlon Brando in my mind’s eye, I let out a snort. She giggled. Then a soppy white woman in a white Punjab suit rushed forward to shush us with a big dopey smile on her face.
We were taken around by Robbo for our orientation tour. Robbo was a fake jolly Aussie who Delphine had characterised as ‘a guy who really had sorted his shit out’ and facing the difficult decision that, if he didn’t return to Oz soon, he would have to forfeit his right to a state pension. So you see what I mean, don’t you, when we weren’t exactly impressed? Robbo also, when he thought we weren’t listening, referred to us as ‘sand diggers’ to a fellow Aurovillian. Most disturbing of all though was a visit to a primary school which was just for the local Tamil children. It was a free education at the generosity of the Auroville community but they had to accept visitors like us traipsing through on a daily basis. When we arrived the children readily jumped and cuddled us (us, being mostly young women) but then there was Robbo too, enjoying the cuddles, and something didn’t sit right about that.
The orientation tour also included wandering around half-finished buildings in fake awe of the rawly hewn concrete blocks. These ruins presented to us as brave and noble projects which had run aground through of lack of money, though it occurred to me that such a small community had no need of a theatre or a library, and people simply couldn’t be bothered to finish off what they’d started. The in-joke for the community was that they were all architects. Architects who, if they got the approval to stay, could build whatever ridiculous structure they liked to live in half a year, whilst they lived in Manhattan (or wherever) for the other half. One man proudly told us he had fortressed his one-man shepherd-hut from ants by building a moat around it. Looking down I noted that the ants were busy burrowing away on the wrong side of his ant-proof moat (as if ants could be deterred by one foot of water).
Other uncomfortable facts unfolded during our stay. For example, the day I came back from the beach (just for Aurovillians and pass holders) in a rickshaw, we were stopped on our way by three uniformed Aurovillian Indian guards who told my driver he couldn’t take me any further. A violent argument erupted in Tamil. Summoning up all my spirit, I finally demanded with my chest: ‘I must be taken back and this man must take me!’ The guards looked at each other nonplussed. I repeated my demand, slightly more hysterically. The driver was absolutely ecstatic.
‘They’re bloody idiots,’ said the driver with feeling as we drove off.
‘So, you’re not allowed to go to Auroville then?’
He batted away the idea: ’You want, I take.’
I paid him 70 rupees for the trip, he was keen to hang around.
‘You want to go to beach, I wait.’
‘I won’t want.’
‘It’s fine, I wait.’
‘I’m not going back to the beach today.’
‘You call me, I come,’ he said, shaking his block-shaped Nokia at me.
‘I don’t have a mobile,’ I told him.
‘It’s okay, I wait,’ he shrugged.
‘I don’t want to go back to the beach though.’
I finally managed to persuade him it was pointless to wait.
I can well imagine what he said to the two Aurovillian lackeys in Tamil, when 70 rupees was probably about a week’s wage. We were serious business for the rickshaw drivers and Auroville had put an invisible ring around itself. Whether it was legal or not I have no idea, but I then found out we were only supposed to be using the Auroville taxi service (I got a marriage proposal from the driver of one, when I did).
Things finally came to a head though at the end of the retreat. Delphine wanted a ‘pow-wow’, wanting to know how we felt about the place. It turned out people had very strong feelings. Roisin who had lived in South Africa for ten years during apartheid, said it reminded her of that.
‘It disgusts me to see how the local people are treated, living at the side of roads in the dirt. Kept out of the local shops and that they’re “okay” to work in the fields in 40 degrees, because “they’re used to it”,’ said Roisin angrily.
It was Aoife though who was most stirred up, having had memories dredged up from forty years before.
‘I literally had to run away from them,’ she started, tears running down her face. She had been 18, the youngest of a large Catholic family, given away to the Church, a common tradition at the time. She hadn’t wanted it. Leaving the nunnery also meant cutting ties with her family and the nuns from the convent had literally chased after her as she left, putting hands on her and telling her they loved her and wanted to save her. Literally love bombed. This is what Auroville had reminded her of; a controlling cult squeezing the souls out of people.
Delphine’s response to such criticism was clever: It was a strong place and bought up strong emotions, using the analogy of a disturbed seabed and the unconscious. Clearly we, her students, were not sufficiently evolved enough to understand the higher plane Auroville was operating at.
However, it was me who floored Delphine with a final hard ball, one she couldn’t bat away so easily.
‘Why did you make Rebecca pay £400 for bringing her toddler along when the pension doesn’t charge for children under five?’ I’d asked, more wondering than anything, little realising the response it would provoke. Delphine made her eyes big, like a startled cat, and put herself into a tree pose to ward off the evil now before her. Despite her words it’s fair to say the spell she’d had over us was forever broken.
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The Lies They Tell 
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