AUROVILLE, India. A bulldozer arrived one December night, waking up Ganga Park in her treehouse and sending her down the trunk.
When its operator stopped the threatening car that was supposed to clear a path through the surrounding forest, Ms. Park clung to it. Their confrontation continued until the driver gave up and turned back.
When the bulldozer returned a few days later, Ms Park ran into it again, but this time she was joined by dozens of her neighbors in Auroville’s south Indian arcadia.
They wrapped their arms around the bulldozer while chanting “Om Namo Bhagavata,” a popular Hindu mantra that roughly translates to “Worship the Supreme.” They stayed until they won at least a temporary victory: an environmental tribunal order to stop the demolition work.
“It was super-instinctive,” Ms Park, 20, said of her drive to take action. “If there is an intruder, you immediately defend and defend.”
The perpetrator in this case was the government of Auroville, an idealistic community founded in 1968 with the goal of realizing human unity by placing the divine at the center of everything.
Recently, however, this unity has been shaken.
A bitter dispute has arisen between the government of Auroville, which has revived a long-delayed plan for a massive expansion of the community, and those residents who want to protect the thriving forest they cultivated from the barren plot of land where their social experiment began more than 50 years ago. many years ago.
The community was founded by the French writer Mirra Alfassa, better known to her followers simply as The Mother. who believed that the change of consciousness and the desire for the divine in Auroville would be reflected in the rest of the world.
Before her death in 1973, the Mother commissioned the French architect Roger Angers to design a city with a population of 50,000, about 15 times the current population. Mr. Wrath conceived a galactic shape: spiraling concentric circles around the Matrimandir – a round golden meditation room – with 12 radial roads.
But without money or manpower, in the decades it took to implement the plan, the people of the community, or Aurovilians, built something else.
They dug wells and built thatched huts. And they planted trees. A lot of them. Civets, jackals, peacocks and other creatures roam under the cool canopy of the forest, while muriel bushes exude a sweet, intoxicating fragrance.
The gap between those Aurovilians who want to follow Mother’s urban plans, known as the Constructivists, and those who want to let the community develop on its own, the Organicists, has been there for a long time.
But last July, the fight gained momentum when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s office appointed new secretary Jayanti Ravi as head of the township board.
Ms Ravi was the Minister of Health in Gujarat, Mr Modi’s home state. She previously served as a district judge under Mr. Modi, then a senior state official, when he faced near universal condemnation for failing to control the two-month-long religious riots in Gujarat in 2002 that killed more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims.
The government’s renewed interest in Mr Anger’s project reflects Mr Modi’s penchant for ambitious building projects to boost tourism around Hindu or nationalist sites. His Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, is the political arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha, a social organization aiming to make India a purely Hindu state.
Although Auroville was founded by a French woman, she was a student of Sri Aurobindo, a spiritual teacher and Indian independence fighter. Auroville’s planned redevelopment is taking place ahead of Sri Aurobindo’s 150th birthday in August, on which Mr. Modi is planning a big celebration.
“Part of Narendra Modi’s agenda is to get all religious and spiritual figures into the ranks of the BJP,” said Navroz Modi, a local resident who petitioned to suspend the development project.
Ms. Ravi pledged to inject millions of dollars from the federal budget into the project. Construction will begin with the laying of a perfectly circular road, which is part of a wider pedestrian ring road that will connect the four separate zones of Auroville. But the Auroville Youth Center, a watershed and hundreds of trees stand in the way.
Sindhuja Jagadish, a spokeswoman for the local government, said it was a “decline” for Auroville’s roughly 3,300 residents – about half Indian and half foreign – to live on 3,000 acres of land in a country as densely populated as India.
“Many people have become attached to their comfort in the green, but we have to experiment and evolve,” said Ms Jagadish, who is also an architect and an Aurovilian.
The position of the opponents of the construction, added Ms. Jagadish, is in sharp contrast to the Mother’s vision of a model city of the future that will be replicated around the world.
“We are here for human unity, but also for city building,” she said.
Proponents of the development plan, which will eventually create a self-sufficient city with a high population density, dynamic economy and experimental architecture, deride today’s Auroville as an eco-village where the visitor can drink a good cappuccino but cannot buy change. the consciousness that its founder hoped for.
“It’s not just a city plan, it’s meant to be an experiment,” said Srimoyi Rosegger, a resident who approves of development and deeply believes in the transformative power of Mother’s plan. “We believe that this is a mind that is above us,” she added, “that if we follow her instructions, something will be revealed to us.”
Leaning on a motorcycle outside a public free clothing store and food co-op, Auroson Bystrom, 51, one of the first children born in Auroville, said he opposes Ms Ravi’s plans but believes the intense debate has galvanized the community.
“Aurobindo is all about evolution,” said Mr. Bystry, referring to Sri Aurobindo. “And in the last 35 years, Auroville hasn’t felt that kind of evolution.”
Some opponents of this plan say that the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother was not so much to build a new city, but to create a new man. And this takes time.
“How we urbanize is more important than how quickly we urbanize,” said Suhasini Iyer, an architect whose mixed-use complex in Auroville recently won a design award at the UN climate conference in Glasgow.
The smallness of the community, opponents of the development say, owes more to unusual living conditions than to the lack of a ring road that the government wants to plow through the trees.
Those who want to live here must pass a year of verification and must invest their own money in houses that will remain the property of the city.
Auroville receives some funding from the government, but generates most of its budget from private enterprises and donations.
Residents themselves purify water, grow grain and make paper. Those who work in Auroville’s public services receive a meager salary known as “service”.
“These people want to be pragmatic,” said Renu Neogi, a lifelong Aurovilian, of Ms. Ravi and her supporters. “But it’s not a pragmatic place, it’s a utopia.”
Some foreign residents feared that Ms. Ravi might deprive them of the sponsorship they need to continue living in India if they did not go along with her plans.
While the two sides seem far apart, some residents believe the solution may lie in the community decision-making approach that has been Auroville’s founding principle: building consensus.
Allan Bennett, Auroville’s urban planner, said a group of local architects were mulling over how to connect the place Mother intended with the place that exists today through a process known as dream weaving.
“Architects are trying to capture the poetry of the galactic vision as well as the reality on the ground,” he said. “These are concepts that they have to weave together.”
Returning to her treehouse, filled with birdsong and sunlight, Ms. Park reflected on what she had saved from the bulldozer.
Growing up in Auroville, Miss Park picked lemons and swayed from the banyan trees. When she briefly went to live in Seoul, she wore a school uniform and followed a strict daily routine.
“Outside, it is inevitable to buy rubbish, to be swept away by consumerism. It’s really frustrating,” she said. It’s easy to be a good person here.