Pondicherry & Auroville

15th January, 2019 – A temple (of course), two churches and one of the more unusual places on earth.

In case anyone is wondering Val and I are currently in Thailand and have actually been here a whole week! Which explains how I am managing to spew out a post on the blog virtually every day as we are doing a lot less (other than yoga (!), swimming, table tennis, massages (needed after the yoga), reading, playing games and eating), but more on that when I have caught up with India!

Well, we had a wonderful breakfast at La Villa (I must write a review on TripAdvisor) and were picked up for a quick tour of Pondicherry, much of which is very manageable on foot actually. Lots of people were milling about enjoying the Pongal holiday (Happy Pongal!) and there was a distinct party feel about the place.

Locals out to enjoy Pongal and the street sellers are getting ready.

I am presuming he is selling these and doesn’t have the most elaborate cast on his broken arm ever!

Our first stop was the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and mausoleum. A few words on this as it will be very relevant when we visit Auroville. Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950) was a philosopher-guru and a leading figure in the freedom struggle in Bengal who had to flee to Pondicherry to escape the British and it was here he set up his ashram or centre of learning. By the by, he studied for the Indian Civil Service at King’s College, Cambridge. Also, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1943 and for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950. The ashram was founded in 1926, helped by his leading disciple, personal manager and mouthpiece, “The Mother” aka Mirra Alfassa (1878 – 1973) who was born as the second child of an Egyptian mother and a Turkish father, a few months after her parents had settled in France. She joined Sri Aurobindo in 1920 and never left. Sri Aurobindo went into semi-seclusion after this until his death in 1950. He and ‘The Mother’ are both buried at the ashram and we had the opportunity to walk, in silence and with no photography, through the very pretty garden and round the two graves, whilst a good 30 or so people were meditating in their own way in the space. Here is a photo of the outside of the ashram…

The gate to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and mausoleum.

More on this soon, when we visit Auroville, but first there was, inevitably, a temple to visit, though, to be honest, I cannot tell you its name and it was nothing like those we had visited so far on our travels.

To be honest, I cannot actually remember what this temple is called.

The Sri Aurobindo Society (or SAS) seem to have done well on the commerce front and there is a Sri Aurobindo Paper Factory and various other ventures as well as an Art Gallery, Library and school, all painted a greyish white, whereas all government buildings are usually yellow, as evidenced below.

Any building in yellow = government, any building in grey = Sri Aurobindo Foundation – the latter seemed to be in the predominance.

Like any good western colony, there has to be a church and we were lucky enough to visit two.

A church – you Latin scholars out there can probably say what it says below the triangle bit above the door (what is that bit called?)

The Sacred Heart of Jesus, built in the 1700s.

The inside – you could be back in France!

We then headed north, passing through the very attractive Muslim Quarter with some lovely houses, mostly maintained in very good order. An example below.

One of the buildings in the Muslim Quarter. The overhanging wordwork trellis thing rather reminds me of old British railway stations.

About 10 kilometres north of Pondicherry (back in Tamil Nadu), stands one of the more unusual places we have ever visited and that is the experimental town of Auroville or City of Dawn. It was founded in 1968 by Mirra Alfassa (known as “the Mother”) and designed by architect Roger Anger. As stated in Alfassa’s first public message in 1965,

Auroville wants to be a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony, above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities. The purpose of Auroville is to realize human unity.

It covers about 20 square kilometres and its four-point charter set forth her vision of integral living:

Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But to live in Auroville, one must be the willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.
Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.
Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future realisations.
Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity.

The township was originally intended to house 50,000 residents. In the initial 20 years, only about 400 individuals from 20 countries resided in the township. In the next 20 years, this number rose to 2,000 individuals from 40 countries. As of January 2018, it had 2,814 residents (2127 adults and 687 children) from 54 countries with two-thirds from India, France and Germany. This may also help…

You might have to zoom in on this to get all the facts and figures about Auroville.

There are a number of architecturally experimental buildings, but you don’t get to see them all on the tour, but what is included is one very stunning building, though somewhat appropriately, you have to pass one impressive tree on the way to view it.

A quite staggering banyan tree, with its aerial roots marching outwards and onwards.

And then you get to view the Matri Mandir or ‘dwelling place of the Mother’, a gigantic hi-tech meditation hall 36 metres in diameter. Unfortunately you only get to view it from a distance (not much meditation would go on with hordes of tourists taking selfies etc, which I suppose is fair). On the left is the amphitheatre which can seat 3,000 and has an urn containing soil from 126 different countries and all the states of India. I have included some diagrams to give you an idea of the inside.

The Matri Mandir and, to the left, the amphitheatre, Auroville, Pondicherry.

This concrete cone is an urn containg the soil of 126 countries and all the states of India in the amphitheatre, Auroville.

The amphitheatre, Auroville where a speaker can address 3,000 people without amplification.

The simply amazing Matri Mandir, Auroville, Pondicherry – started in 1970 and 36 metres across. You can see a person with a red shirt bottom right, to give a sense of perspective.

Close-up of the outside of the Matri Mandir, Auroville.

A cut-out of the Matri Mandir, Auroville, Pondicherry.

A drawing of the Matri Mandir, Auroville, Pondicherry. A bit tricky to follow, but I hope it helps.

The ball-like thing in the last photo is a 70 centimetre crystal ball made by Carl Zeiss, believed to be the largest of its kind in the world.

All in all, though decidedly New Age, it certainly was fascinating to see what is obviously a working community with no religions, no countries or nationalism – very John Lennon!

Back to Pondicherry and Val and I wandered about for an evening stroll as the locals enjoyed a bit of Pongal shopping.