Whither utopia?

The universal township called Auroville, a few kilometres from the erstwhile seat of French rule in India, Pondicherry, has been much in the news since 2021. Internal squabbles over ecology and governance have claimed all recent attention, but prior to these upheavals, 2021 was marked by publication...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inContemporary South Asia Vol. 30; no. 3; pp. 435 - 439
Main Author Reddy, Deepa S.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Abingdon Routledge 03.07.2022
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects
Attention
Auroville
Decolonization
Ecology
French colonization
Governance
News
spirituality
utopia
Utopias
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Summary:The universal township called Auroville, a few kilometres from the erstwhile seat of French rule in India, Pondicherry, has been much in the news since 2021. Internal squabbles over ecology and governance have claimed all recent attention, but prior to these upheavals, 2021 was marked by publication of two major books on Auroville: the first, a memoir of growing up through Auroville's early years by journalist Akash Kapur, and the second, a conventional academic monograph on the process of decolonization and the creation of 'French utopias' by Duke University's Jessica Namakkal. This article is a critical review of these two very different texts which are united nonetheless by their treatment of Auroville as a kind of 'utopia.' The review raises questions about the typically rationalist biases that undergird such works on communities with avowed spiritual goals, and reflects on the consequences of superimposing extant frameworks onto contexts which outline their own alternative epistemologies. It also draws attention to the authors' respective positionings vis-à-vis Auroville, and reflects on the implications for each narrative as it is constructed.
ISSN:0958-4935
1469-364X
DOI:10.1080/09584935.2022.2099815