Reviews

Book Review #3

Auroville: A Dream Hijacked

Dr Nirmalya Mukherjee • Published: 2019

Auroville in the 1970s and 1980s was undergoing a revolution—perhaps premature, perhaps ultimately unsuccessful, but a revolution nonetheless. As with every great revolution in history, the enduring question is not who was right or wrong, but what the movement was striving to bring into being. Only by understanding the deeper evolutionary impulse—the IDEAL struggling to manifest through imperfect people and turbulent events—can one truly grasp its significance. Everything else, however valuable as historical context, remains secondary to the movement's essential direction and meaning.

Unfortunately, the book neither intends nor is able to engage seriously with this larger discussion. Instead, it presents a reactionary narrative steeped in bitterness, concealed beneath a mass of documents in an effort to portray the SAS as victims and Auroville as master schemers. In reality, it was a battle of strategy played out on a vast political chessboard, in which BOTH sides played their cards as skilfully as they could. One side lost—and decades later has written a book to chronicle that defeat.

The SAS may not have been particularly villainous, just as Louis XVI was not. Yet Louis lost his throne—and ultimately his head. The SAS may well have been guided by sincere intentions, just as countless honest, well-meaning, and devoted members of the French or Russian bourgeoisie were. Good intentions, however, do not determine the verdict of history.

Nor were the rebels required to be saints. Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Lenin were no angels—yet they prevailed because, for a time, they embodied and carried forward the force of a historical revolution. France eventually descended into the mediocrity of the Second Empire, Russia into the Stalinist regime, and Auroville itself may well have proved unworthy of the adventure that had been offered to it. Yet none of these later outcomes invalidate the original revolutionary impulse.The greatness of the Revolution prevails over its crises. 

History did not favour the SAS. The destiny of Auroville was simply meant to unfold along different paths. The matter is, in the end, no more complicated than that—with or without the web of intrigue the book claims to expose.