The chronicle of a diverse passage from Australia to the Mother, meeting Aurovilians, building houses, and settling in.
Previously published 2008
A conversation with Johnny
To be perfectly frank, I came here looking for Jan, my wife at that time, and our first child. Our life in Sydney had been pretty turbulent. Although I had been to university and studied architecture, I dropped out of university. I was driving a taxi and we were leading a hand-to-mouth existence, sometimes without food. It was the sixties, a very turbulent society, but in the end Jan decided that I was hopeless and she took Jonas and went to Pondicherry.
She had known about Pondicherry through the Theosophical Society. There was a Hungarian woman, Georgette, from the Ashram, who would come to Sydney for three months every year and work there for the Theosophical Society. She told us about the Ashram.
The Theosophical Society was the only place in Sydney where you could find the writings of Mother and Sri Aurobindo. They weren’t even in the public library then. It was at the same time as the French New Wave cinema, Truffaud and Godard, and you had a small cinema that showed only these films. Everything else showed only American movies. That small cinema showed the New Wave, and underneath was the Theosophical library. There you could get a sniff of incense, and inside there were all the works of Sri Aurobindo. And it was a place where you could take a cushion and sit on the floor and read books. People at the counter would suggest, “You could read this and that”. It was not like a normal bookshop.
When Jan gave up and came to India, she lived in the Ashram, at Parc à Charbon [Guest-House]. Our eldest boy Jonas was in class 3 and he went to the Ashram school. Eventually he went to what they called Equals One (=1), with Medhananda and Yvonne Artaud. 1
So Jan was there and I was in Australia. I was reading spiritual books in those days and I did know who Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were, but when Jan wrote to me she described Auroville as “a tribal music scene”; I think because she thought this would sound attractive to me.
I often think that many of the first Aurovilians that came had a common experience: somewhere in their lives they had a common contact with Mother somehow. I had one interesting experience. I was right up in the north of Australia where you have the deep rain forests, and it was on my birthday, the 2nd of February 1970. I was walking through a forest where there was no path. I got really badly lost. I was so lost that I took the compass and threw it away, so wrong I thought it was. I was climbing a hill to try and see where I was. And really I got to a point where I was in such despair that I sat down with my head in my hands, like this, “What is going on?” And then I got up and when I turned round, there was a gate. A gate! I opened the gate and there was a path. And the path led into a road, which led me down to a river, where I found some Aborigines who picked me up. But this was around 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and that was the time when Jan said she took my photo to the Mother. For me that was a powerful connecting experience. I later saw a painting of the Mother’s called Ascent to the Truth that reminded me of that hill.
When I came here, Jan already had a house on the beach. It was not Auroville land. She was very connected to Austin Delainy, this Irish Canadian psychologist who was working with sand boxes. 2 A very interesting guy. But he was very traumatised, his legs were covered with shrapnel wounds from the second World War. He was working with the people of Equals-1. He had a very big house built on the beach there and he dressed only in white. He would have long depressions for three months, when he would only drink and shout and play wind-up phonograph records. Then he would come out of it and would be quite sociable. He had a very large shed there with sand boxes, and a huge array of little things. He was very good with children, and he had a particular interest in the children in Equals-1, and that included Jonas and Chali and a lot of kids. When he moved to where Quiet is now, Jan built a small house just beside, and Jonas spent a lot of time relating to Austin. That’s how she came to be there.
Then I turned up. I actually had come for a week, just to say hello, and if I am not wanted I go. But I came and everybody seemed glad to see me, so I stayed. Then because I had had some experiences in Australia with building houses like this (and Vijay was building in Udavi) I worked with a small group of villagers, in particular Ramu from Bommayarpalayam. They would come by my house in the morning — I must say that the minute I got to India I felt I had come home. For me right from the start, when I travelled by train, India looked to me much more like home, like a country I knew, than Australia. And Australia is quite similar to India when it is hot and dry. I felt at ease with lungis and a big beard. Ramu and these guys used to come by in the morning, with tundu 3 and tiffin 4 and lungi, 5 and we used to build. If you have studied architecture, you have many ideas but you never get a chance to do anything. But with bamboo and casuarina and keet and ropes, you can do it, it doesn’t matter what mistakes you make, it is not concrete. So it was for me a very joyful expression to be able to do things like that here with these guys. I didn’t even think about leaving.
We weren’t even living in Auroville though.
The Aurovilians used to come to the beach on full moons and play music, that’s why the “tribal music” group. We got to know Aurovilians like that.
In Pondicherry you had what we would call the Entry Group and that included Shyam Sunder, and maybe Navajata 6 (this was the Sri Aurobindo Society, the group we had difficulties with later). We went to this Entry Group, because Jan was very keen that we join. They asked us to write our bio-data. Amongst other things I mentioned that I had studied and practiced architecture in Australia.
“Oh! We have a position for you in Roger’s office in Pondicherry” (above the restaurant Toutcqu’il faut 7 ). This was more like the world I was coming from, than the one I wanted to come to. Then they said, “If you are not interested in doing what we are telling you to do, then there is no place for you in Auroville.” I thought: this is OK, I don’t know who these guys are, I can live anywhere. But Jan was quite upset about this. Then it happened that she had signed a lease for the land where we lived and there was a dispute about the ownership of this land, so we had to leave that place. At that time I had already started to work with Boris and Namas who had decided to start here [in Fertile] the first forest camp. Aruna was here also. I helped to build a small hut here. So when this whole thing happened at the beach, they said: “Why don’t you come up and stay with us?”
“But we aren’t officially Aurovilians!”
“You go and ask Shyam Sunder to take a letter to the Mother.”
Shyam Sunder had a small office in Pondicherry, the Beach Office. He had a very official position. We would go down in the morning and sit with him and there would be all these ragged Aurovilians in lungis. In those days we needed so many things; we needed a borewell and a pipe and a bullock-cart, etc., and we would ask him for all that. I went to see him and asked formally to Mother whether myself and Jan and Jonas could join Auroville. We got straight back the same day a little note, saying that it was OK. It was beautifully embossed on hand made paper welcoming us with her personal signature and a small silver amulet with dried petals inside to wear around the neck.I never felt so magically invited. So we bypassed the “Entry Group”. But that “Entry Group” was based very much in Pondicherry and already there was this feeling of two polarities. It was not a very friendly feeling coming from them.
At that time my daughter Jina was born. So Jan took a house in Pondicherry for about three months while Jina got a bit older, because there was nothing here at all really. People find it difficult to remember but you could sit here [Fertile] and you could look straight out there and there was nothing, absolutely complete sand all the way to the horizon. These fishing women used to come up the hill on the hot sand and they had bits of stuff tied to their feet, they didn’t even have chappals. With fish on their heads, they came running across the land, and sat down under this banyan tree here, drank water, and then the next tree was a kilometre away.
The first time I saw the Mother was on my birthday in 1972. You had that incredible scene around the Mother: she was in that little chamber and there was always a queue of people going to see her, all these people sitting on all the steps all the way down to the ground. You were supposed to take a flower in your hand to her. The Ashramites were quite clever because they would take a really nice flower and put it in a plastic bag and put it in the refrigerator for the night — because Mother had said at one point that flowers stay fresh in the hands of spiritually realised people! (laughs) But the poor old Aurovilians came down the hill and, “Oh! I need a flower”, and by the road coming to Pondicherry you would get these datura flowers, quite a beautiful flower, “tapasya”, but when you held it, it just melted around your hand like an ice-cream. (laughs) So I remember the first time I went to see Mother (even after getting yourself washed and getting a reasonably clean lungi and a shirt, and a tundu, you feel so dirty in that world), I got this melted ice-cream in my hand. When your turn comes, you go in and Mother is sitting on a big chair, and standing beside her is Champaklal, her lion, a small but broad man with a huge white beard. Champaklal had the same birthday as me. I had this geometric idea at the time that Sri Aurobindo’s symbol was three-dimensional. I had carved one of these things from wood and I took it to her. You sit there and you slowly raise your eyes and these incredible kohl-black eyes staring down at you and… “Yes, Mother”, and immediately I think, “Oh! I am a bad boy.” I offer her this symbol and she picks it up and she chuckles to herself and then gives it to Champaklal for his birthday, “Bonne fête to Champkalal”. And then she smiles at me…
- Equals One: one of the first experiments in education in Auroville.
- sandboxes: a pedagogical method in which one encourages the child to build a universe of his own in boxes filled with sand, using many objects placed at his disposal.
- tundu: towel worn on the shoulder.
- tiffin: lunch-box.
- lungi: a long piece of cotton cloth worn as a loincloth, or turban by Indian men.
- Shyam Sunder was the Secretary General of the Sri Aurobindo Society and the Mother’s secretary for the affairs of Auroville. Navajata was the Chairman of the Sri Aurobindo Society.
- A restaurant where one could find better and more varied food (including meat) than in the Dining-Hall of the Ashram.
From a conversation with Johnny
Excerpt from Turning Points: An inner story of the beginnings of Auroville (Auroville Press, 2008, pp. 32-37)
Turning Points is one of the best-selling books by Auroville Press, and available locally through these outlets. The book features twenty-one true stories recounting how in the sixties and seventies some men and women’s lives changed radically the moment they entered in contact with the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and they discovered a place called Auroville.