A conversation exploring Peter’s time in Auroville, his experience writing for Auroville Today, the effects of the current administration, and his ongoing connection.
Interview with Auroville Witness, March 9, 2026
Tell us a little bit about your past experience of Auroville.
I was an Indiaphile from a young age and went to India as a teenager. After I graduated in 1987, I took a one-way ticket to Delhi for two years. Unexpectedly, at the end of that time, I felt inwardly called to the Findhorn community in Scotland. At Findhorn, Auroville was a regular presence; Aurovilians would visit Findhorn, there were ex-Aurovilians living in Findhorn, and Auroville Today would be in the communal dining room. In a loose sense it felt like a sister community; Findhorn is not formally influenced by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, but they’re both manifestations of a kind of evolutionary push to create a new world.
I had a strong connection with Auroville from the 1990s, and in 1999 and in 2006 tried to join, but due to family issues it was delayed. In those years I was importing products from Auroville and I would visit at least every year and also founded the Hong Kong Auroville Liaison Office in 2006. In 2019, when my son was an adult, I finally moved to Auroville.
You were first there in the late ’90s but didn’t become a resident until 2019. During that period of 20 years India and Auroville changed a lot.
My first view of Auroville in 1996, coming from Tindivanum, was seeing from a distance the unfinished concrete shell of the Matrimandir. It now feels significant, something in the process of completion. I found then that Auroville was so diverse, with its patchwork of communities — sometimes compared to a quilt, woven amongst Indian/Tamil villages. It’s more homogenous and contiguous now. It took me quite a few years to understand the aspects of Auroville’s spirit, that its very diversity and anarchy allowed a spiritual freedom and depth to manifest. There was this strong francophone energy, and Westerners mixing with Tamil villagers and northern Indians, which was unlike anything I’d ever experienced.
When I finally got to live in Auroville I was euphoric, and could see so much of the beauty of what Auroville gave birth to.
For my first three years I only had a bicycle, which had become increasingly uncommon. There was something about moving at that pace. I wrote a piece on it 1 for Auroville Today, I felt somehow it was teaching me about the pace of the place, and a way of living too.
India itself has changed a lot in that time. On the ‘hippy trail’ of the 1980s, all journeys were by train; there were hardly any foreign goods, it was another world, older, slower and with a tangible charm and presence.
You were a writer at Auroville Today for a few years. What did that teach you about the community?
I could explore so many projects, interview so many inspiring people, and I was never quite sure what I’d write the following month, but something would grab me. There was a common theme of highlighting stories or people that I felt were making a difference, modelling new ways of being, not just in the community, but for the world. There would be these exceptional experiments and people and one would just grab me; it could be a Genius Brothers production 2 or often portraying cutting edge ecological work. The standard of editing and editorial ethics was exceptionally high. It’s a big loss to the community that it has stopped publishing due to the new controls of the administration.
In a piece for Auroville Today you described it as a place where a person can create new ways of being and explore new worlds. Do you still feel that’s possible today?
I’d say it’s getting harder: one of the sad consequences of the Foundation Office takeover has been a stifling of the genius that is Auroville.
I’m quite influenced and informed by my wife Kathy. I think Auroville gave freedom to be your Svadharmic self. To really find your purpose on Earth, what Jung would call your individuation. I saw that in so many inspiring projects. Kathy’s work with Ecofemme, for instance, was unique, multi-faceted and hard to imagine manifesting elsewhere.
Or I think of Aurelio and Svaram, creating new musical instruments, or Joss and Pitchandikulam, the whole rewilding of the community and bioregion. Those are just a few of the dozens of many experiments, and that doesn’t even account for individual creativity. Auroville has independently published authors and a significant number of artists and poets. It was a place where they could flourish. It’s hard to imagine that possibility in today’s climate of control.
It seems like the arts have been under particular pressure from the administration which claims that the arts are a pastime, that they don’t represent work.
One of the first stories I wrote for Auroville Today was a review of Art for Land in 2020. The opening was heaving with hundreds of attendees, vibrant with creativity, in music and art. It was like a convergence moment of all the best of many quietly creative folk. When a few years later the Secretary came to inaugurate an Art for Land, I counted twenty-six people in Unity Pavilion including the Secretary, her followers and the organizers. She gave a kind of charming talk to a large and empty room, and it was strangely painful. Creative people don’t tend to support authoritarian approaches.
Do you think that the culture as a whole is changing under this administration? If so, in what ways?
Yes, the culture is changing, the amount of fear has gone up, force has become a norm now. The Residents’ Assembly is ignored (I worked for the Residents’ Assembly Service my last years), as are the pioneers.
Compared to Findhorn, Auroville was far more anarchistic. Proudly so. Part of its specialness was that it attracted individuals who would dedicate their life to Mother’s vision and be free to find their way to do so, and that type of individual would not be drawn to Auroville anymore. Key people have slipped away.
One of the things that I learned in Auroville is that the words used by the Foundation Office are often meaningless — they’re more about power. When the chairman said “Auroville is a failure”, his point was to have a reason to take over. It didn’t account for where Auroville worked incredibly successfully. And when I see the actions of the Foundation Office, for example, they’ll say, “Why are you not growing enough food?” Then they turn Annapurna farm, a huge area of biodynamic land, the one place in Auroville that really is productive, and want it to be turned into a lorry testing center. Mother’s words are used to justify forceful takeovers. So, in that way, their words are meaningless; it’s their actions that speak volumes.
The almost unbearable tragedy of the Foundation Office takeover is that I don’t think anyone would disagree that there weren’t issues in Auroville that needed tackling. I remember early on in a meeting in Kalabumi, a respected pioneer saying that when this is over, we have to make a lot of changes and everybody there agreed.
What is it like to be away from Auroville after having had all that experience? Would you have anything to say to those who have already left, or might be considering leaving?
I probably stayed a little longer than planned because Kathy had a commitment to EcoFemme. That gave me the time to grieve. My last piece in Auroville Today was called “Death of a Dream” 3. The story arose from a literal dream, but it truly came from the heart. I miss Auroville and the culture of Auroville, but I’ve just embraced another chapter of my life that has offered itself.
Do you think it’s possible to carry the experiment outside of Auroville, whether as a couple like you and Kathy, or six or ten living in a center? Can the experience be recreated or transplanted?
From my experience, we all have an individual karma. Moving to Australia was always something I wanted to do someday, and then when Auroville was taken over, it became the next step in my life. The big lesson for me from Auroville, now that I’m back in the capitalist system, is that it was a place where money was “not the sovereign lord”. I loved Auroville’s cash-free ethos and that value is something I miss and try to keep going.
You are a founder of the Auroville Global Fellowship. Can you speak about your aspirations for the Fellowship and what your experience of it has been, and what your hopes still are for the future?
I’m a Findhorn Fellow, and Findhorn often has similar trends as Auroville. They had an existential crisis around the same time as the Foundation Office takeover in 2021 when the Findhorn Foundation collapsed. And I was very struck by the wisdom in the Findhorn Fellowship and the perspectives that the forum produced. At some point Kathy and I both thought Auroville should have a group like the Findhorn Fellows. I made a proposal which was accepted. It’s still starting out, finding its identity, but has produced the Crisis reports and informed a good number of significant people about the realities of what is going on in Auroville.
How is your deeper self, your spirituality, connected with Auroville?
A part of my soul is always linked with Auroville. There were two aspects of the community that particularly spoke to me. One was the environmental work, “rewilding” and the utopian ideals especially, going beyond money. They both felt like manifestations of a higher evolutionary impulse. I take those inspirations with me into my life.
There are some unnamed aspects of the spirit of Auroville. One that has struck me recently from abroad is the simple truth of how it was commonly understood that ego inflation is an obstacle to the path.
I wrote an article “Go with Grace” 4 about death and dying in Auroville. Every morning before I moved to Auroville I would read Mother’s Agenda, one day at a time, slowly, but it imprinted itself on my soul. Her words about death and dying really went in. I volunteered a little with Farewell. Other people did a lot more work — I would just turn up and help with the flowers. There was something about actually witnessing corpses, cremations, and burials. Funerals there had a spirit of their own; there was no funeral script. People would turn up, sometimes they would sing, someone might quote Sri Aurobindo, other times it was silent. It was so organic, so spontaneous, so authentic and mostly in silence.
It was enough to be there, just to be silent, not necessarily anything else, to have a presence. A part of the magic of Auroville.
Interview on March 9, 2026
1 – “The speeds of Auroville” (https://auroville.today/articles/2440/the-speeds-of-auroville/)
2 – “Message in a bottle” (https://auroville.today/articles/1393/message-in-a-bottle/)
3 – “Death of a dream” (https://aurovilleglobalfellowship.org/death-of-a-dream/)
4 – “Go with grace” (https://auroville.today/articles/3800/go-with-grace/)