History is believed to never happen by chance, but it was an accident that created and shaped this mesmerising account of the past. Ten years ago, author and journalist Akash Kapur was looking through the contents of a drawer in a New York apartment when he came across a bunch of folders crammed with letters, pages from diaries, and old photographs. They were papers of John Walker, the adoptive father of Akash’s wife, Auralice.
The discovery of the folders, which were preserved by John’s sister, was at once painful and liberating. In 1986, when Auralice was just 14, John and Auralice’s mother Diane had died within hours of each other in Auroville under circumstances that were obscure and perplexing. John had grown up in privilege, born in a family of great wealth, an impressive lineage, “a pedigree he has to live up to”. Diane was a beautiful, sunny and flirtatious Belgian hippie who lived near Antwerp with a mother who relied on welfare checks. What these two unlikely partners shared was an itch to escape their lives and follow their dreams, a hankering that would lead them separately to Auroville, not so long after it was founded in 1968.
Akash Kapur and his wife, Auralice, near their home in Harlem, New York
Soon after John and Diane mysteriously died, Auralice would move to the US to live with the former’s family. In America, she would marry Akash, who also grew up in Auroville; the two knew each other as children. In 2004, the couple returned to live in the experimental city that manifested in the dreams of Sri Aurobindo’s foremost disciple, the Mother (Frenchwoman Mirra Alfassa). Their reasons for moving back, Akash says, were varied, and included such things as being homesick and wanting to try something. But the searingly tragic saga of Auralice’s parents — which included a fall that paralysed Diane’s hips for years and the death of an infant son (Aurolouis) by drowning — continued to hang like a fog over their heads. The diaries offered a forensic as well as a cathartic opportunity: to clear the mist and come to terms with the past.
Bringing up the divide
It is a journey that took Akash, now 46, almost 10 years to complete, a project that involved “tracking down old friends of John and Diane’s, their former lovers, fellow-travellers from Auroville… on six continents”. As he set out to write about the two, the scope of the book, perhaps inevitably, widened. The story of John and Diane would also become a social history of Auroville; their lives, after all, were inextricably twinned with the place they chose to live in.
The book cover
Delving into Auroville’s past meant dealing with a shadowy time when the utopia that was designed to be a place for “unending education, constant progress, and a youth that never ages” turned dark and almost dystopian. The passing of the Mother in 1973 was followed by deep divisions within the multi-cultural community. A part of the reason for this was the struggle for power and self-determination, one that pitted the Pondicherry-based Sri Aurobindo Society (SAS, which owned most of the land and assets in the expansive township) against residents of Auroville. There was an attendant ideological dimension, which cleaved Auroville down the middle. There were revolutionaries (loosely, those who wanted to break free from the SAS) and the Neutrals (a grouping that was attacked for its alleged lack of revolutionary ardour and their supposed softness towards the SAS).
The collective that dominated Auroville was revolutionary and there was a period in which there prevailed a climate of slander, threats, evictions, deportations, and arrests. Children were ‘liberated’ by the closure of schools and, quite astonishingly, a bonfire was lit of books pulled from shelves from its library. Akash says terrible though it was, the book burning was an “isolated incident”, a moment of madness. “The greater long-term damage was done by shutting down the schools. The ideology behind this and book burning was the same though. That the old forms of knowledge were unnecessary at a time when Aurovilians were going to reinvent the world.”
Beginnings of Auroville
Even children were infected by the polarisation. Akash recalls, with a stirring honesty and immense regret, that when he was about 10, some friends and he chased a couple of Neutrals down the road, sneering and throwing twigs and pebbles at them. “I am embarrassed about this and very ashamed. All kinds of things happened to the Neutrals at that time. They are now reintegrated into the community, but one of the revelations in talking to them for the book is that the pain still runs below the surface for many of them.”
Balancing the dark and the light
“Auroville walked to the edge of the precipice and back,” he says when talking of that period. Has it walked back too far? Hasn’t some of that early fervour, which saw the first few Aurovilians living simply in thatched huts with no money and few resources, vanished? “It’s fair to say that Auroville is middle-aged now, and with this comes a certain complacency,” he replies. “But there are still people here who are very idealistic, sometimes to a fault. As the book suggests, there is a darker side to idealism and extremism. If that has dimmed, maybe it is not such a bad thing at all.”
Auroville is also much bigger today, with about 3,500 people from almost 60 countries. And, of course, much more prosperous. “Yes, that is true. And then, there is the tourism economy. And the restaurants. But within the Auroville master plan, none of us owns a house,” he says. “My kids are in a school where it doesn’t matter whether your dad has a flashy car or the biggest house. None of the games that play out in big cities play out here.”
Snapshots of John Walker, Diane and Auralice
What sets Better to Have Gone (Scribner, ₹699) apart is Akash’s voice and approach. It would have been far easier to have pulled off, for example, what Peter Washington did of another new age movement (the Theosophists). In Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon , he panned the main players as eccentric founders of a cult, which claimed to receive divine wisdom in their visions and which encouraged all kinds of irrational ideas (which of course they did).
Notions such as immortality and talk of transforming cellular consciousness were very much present in the thoughts of the Mother and those close to her. But despite being someone who lives “closer to the side of reason”, Akash is empathetic to even those he disagrees with. There is a recognition, the kind that good novelists have, that everyone has a story and that the truth is often not in black and white, but shades of grey. “Auroville has so many different points of view. I decided that I was going to state things as they were, but also that I was going to step out of the frame.”
There are meditations on doubt and certitude, on the dangers that result when an imperfect species flirts with notions of utopia, and the virtues of fallibilism, moderation and incrementalism — values that lie at the heart of any true liberal project. The result is an empathetic non-judgmental work, written with a spare, almost frugal beauty, illuminating in its silences, and revealing in what is left unsaid.
Is Auralice in a better place now that she knows about the tragedies of Diane and John? “I think so,” Akash replies. Yes, it was difficult when the research threw up painful facts. But overall, if you have family members die in these circumstances and if you don’t understand why or how, it is liberating to see the bigger picture and what happened to them.”
In short, and to tweak the title of the book a little, it is better to have known.
