Auroville: India’s Famed Utopian Community Struggles With Corruption
Photo and Article by Maddy Crowell
I thought a bottle of red wine would be an appropriate gift to bring to utopia. It was June in Pondicherry, a sleepy beach town off the Bay of Bengal characterized by its post-colonial French influence, and the mid-afternoon heat was oppressive, peaking just above 100 degrees. My clothes were damp by the time I found a liquor store, a grungy hole-in-the-wall shop on the corner of a typically South Indian pastel temple-crammed street.
After a three-hour flight from Delhi to Chennai, and a “three-hour” bus ride from Chennai to Pondicherry that took more than five hours, I’d finally reached the last leg of the journey to the world’s largest existing spiritual utopia, Auroville, aka “the City of Dawn.”
I called Maha Travels, a taxi service provided to me by my host in Auroville, a woman I’ll call Shanta whom I’d found on a website called AuroHost. “I need to go to Auroville,” I said over the phone, giving the name of the nearest landmark I could see from outside the liquor store in Pondicherry—a restaurant with the word Auro in the title. (An obsession, if not borderline fanaticism, with the Indian philosopher and spiritual guru Sri Aurobindo has resulted in Auro being plastered across many of the shops and restaurants in Pondicherry.)
Within the hour, a sleek, air-conditioned car was there to pick me up. The taxi driver, a man originally from Tamil Nadu wearing a freshly pressed collared shirt, eyed the bottle of wine. “Please hide this,” he told me. He put the bottle in his glove compartment and gave a vague answer about police charging fines for liquor.
I asked if alcohol was allowed in Auroville.
“No,” he said. “But no one follows this rule.”
We drove in silence for 20 minutes down East Coast Road, a highway jammed with motorbikes, passing brightly colored tea and samosa stalls. In a sharp, 90-degree turn, the taxi lurched off the highway onto an unmarked dirt road where a wall of leafy trees brought the chaos and the color to a jolting stop. And suddenly… read on…